Meteo Xavier

It IS pretty shocking because it gloriously overlooks a lot of key points that goes into that for this context. You guys just see it as black and white and call it protecting your work and its value, I call it chasing windmills and confusing a stubborn attitude for a principle. Let's figure out how a completely subjective item should be determined an objective value that also somehow has no limit for how high that value should be: 1. What is the value of a single remix you've done? What is the value of your time spent working on this based on your lifestyle expenses and spending habits? 2. What is the estimated value of the tools you used to work on this? 3. What is the estimated value of its potential of exposure? 4. How many times has your remix been played on Youtube? 5. What is the value per video view? 6. Has it directly contributed to additional album sales or music commissions? 7. Have you signed an appropriate tax form relating to your work on OCR? 8. Are you paying taxes or taking tax incentives from your work on OCR? 9. Have the companies you have re-interpreted IP from commissioned you to do so? 10. If YES to 9, what were the contractually agreed-upon payments you are expecting from them? 11. What was the final rating of quality for your work as agreed by committee of the OCR judges and conglomerated public perception? Now take the sum total of that and apply your state's current income tax percentage. Go ahead and work on the math there - in the meantime you can answer why you seem to think just doing work itself deserves to be rewarded without any additional context to that point and why you deserve to be paid for work you were not commissioned or contracted or to do and did completely on your own compulsion for a website that was well known to not provide financial incentives for doing so in lieu of simply being a popular passion project for celebrating VGM.

Non-profit is not the same thing as a charity. The money being made only goes back to administrative costs and, again, it's really not that much to start with. DJP has paid more out of his own pocket to keep OCR running all this time than anyone else has been owed anything resulting from it, so again I remain unimpressed with the criticism of it.

I'm late to the conversation, but I feel compelled to comment anyway. I'm baffled at the extreme reactions this topic brought out in people, particularly those of you getting panties rocketed up the wazoo over not making money for your fan remixes of music. This line sticks out to me particularly. "Great, instead it goes to the publisher and probably some to YouTube - who can make money off a totally for fun fan arrangement I made. [...] If there is going to be money involved in fan arrangements, I'd just not bother with OCR or YouTube and licence the tracks myself." Good lord, dude. Go check your couch cushion, you'll find your royalties there. These things, from my continued experience and reference, really don't generate people much money. You're not missing hundreds of dollars here, more likely, you're missing hundreds of cents. It's not worth getting upset over. I'm also baffled why so many of you are opposed to Youtube's ads from a financial point of view anyway. Youtube is in the running for the most important, most used and most influential website since time began on planet Earth and has billions upon billions of videos, data exchange and much more that it never asked a penny from you to provide unless you yourself were purchasing advertising on there. Did you really think Google is doing all that for free? If Youtube wasn't doing things like that, there wouldn't be a Youtube where you'd be complaining about your lost royalties in the first place. It's taking a fair amount of restraint for me to remain civil instead of diving into more far biting, sardonic criticism I feel is better owed to this sense of entitlement from grown ***damn adults with college-level educations. I don't get why you did something for free, without the idea it was going to directly make you money, and then suddenly change that mindset when something changes to make you think you could've directly made (not much) money from it or where that chump change is going. Is it the principle of the thing? That's just something people say when they do something knowing it's not really logical or reasonable in the first place and still want to complain. If it's copyright, Nintendo and Square-Enix and CAPCOM and Konami and NAMCO et al all know how to get a hold of us if they want. If you're worried about copyright, you best stop doing fan remixes in the first place - it's potential infringement from the first note on. In short, I feel nothing about this warrants the criticism it's receiving. I feel this has at least some to do with my overarching thesis that composers these days are adopting an irrational, ironclad, black-and-white financial defense mechanism for any audio they do no matter the scale or how trivial it is. Very little has actually changed, so very big critical backlashes for it are unwarranted.

Edit: Nevermind, I missed the part where you requested some details be kept private. I wonder if I see a doctor about this because I keep missing details as I read things.

I sure hope that's the case! My finished mixes on here still sound kinda "dated", but I think they'll work all the same. Even if I knew I had two more years after I George Dubya'd the FINISHED post, I probably wouldn't have had time or energy to keep updating mine (oddly enough, my autism says no to that kind of stuff), but I'm still personally satisfied with them and I think they'll sound even better after mastering. Speaking of which, I'm still discussing mastering with relevant parties and Rozo is talking to our artist right now - just a further reminder that, yes, we are still actively working behind the scenes.

Wait a minute... would it be funnier if I called it "Seiken Densetsu Threever?"

But you still seem to be asserting respective staff for this project have just been lazy and letting remixers wait, and I'm still telling you this has not been the case. While I do have an obligation to you and the other artists on here to answer for the "comical" delay and perform humility for it, I also have an obligation to stick up for the project staff who have continued, at their availability, to provide for this project pro-bono in an entertainment era where no one in game audio takes a shit without getting paid $300 a minute for it. You don't need to tell me it's comical, I know it's comical. That's just how it goes sometimes. Dwelling on its difficulty is not constructive, so all I can do is accept it, crack some "Seiken Densetsu Forever" jokes in self-detriment and keep moving forward as availability allows. Even now I'm typing this response as I talk to our mastering engineer about the appropriate loudness for audiophile qualities and retaining dynamics. Our mastering engineer will have a two week vacation coming up soon, but since we're asking him to master 4 CDs worth of music for free (some of it not even .WAV files) and he agreed, no one's in any position to complain on that. We thank you for the "tough love" to help provide some extra motivation and remind us how people still care for this project even after its "comical" production length, but we're already on it, dude. I don't know if we can live up to the time-designated hype for it by now, but I'm still very confident you'll like the release. Stay positive - it's worth it.

Sorry you feel that way, but that's just how it worked out, dude. Some of it has to do with human error and a majority of it has to do with life simply getting in the way for a lot of people in involved. Sure, we could've looked at the incredibly slow progress and said, "well, we're not getting this done as quickly as other people who made multi-artist, multi-disc projects on OCR are doing it so, fuck it, let's just quit." - but we didn't. We could've just cut out a lot of material other artists worked hard for to get it done already, but we didn't. Neither Rozovian or myself could've foreseen it taking this long and it wouldn't have mattered if we could - life would've still gotten in the way. That's just how it happens sometimes. I myself would rather not dwell on things we could've done better or how it SHOULD have gone - I'd prefer to keep going ahead even if its at a snail's pace. This is a passion project and we aren't asking any more of you than just some patience as we keep going forward (except maybe to virtua-sign some red tape, need to confirm with DJP on that). I can't tell you the exact month it's coming out, but it is - we got the music all in and there's just no point in reminding you over and over again that we're working on the administration behind it if we weren't still moving forward to some degree. If it's any consolation of any kind, I'm almost done digging myself out of the personal hell this whole year has given me and I expect to have some better time and availability to get back on things that have slipped down my priority totem pole like getting shit back together behind the scenes for SD3. I could give you a lot of specific details as to what those obstacles were for me and Rozovian, but that would be very impolite on a number of levels as well as not being constructive. Please just be patient with us - this isn't like a bad installer that creeks by at the 97% mark and then just freezes up, we will get to the finish line!

How do you demake an NES song? What else can you strip out from there? Or maybe I'm mixing up the syntax again...

Why does it have to recommended or explained why it's a good deal, though? Usually when people take the time to post a deal on somewhere like here, it's a recommendation by definition. 70% off a VST or that Xpand!2 that's only $1 for a short period of time are also self-explanatory why they're good deals. Not trying to be difficult, I just don't understand that guideline/requirement. Some clarification would be good should I feel moved to share noteworthy and obscure deals that I find around.

Is this a remix project or literal remakes (taking a MIDI and redoing it with different samples)? If it's the latter, I'd probably be interested if time allows.

Thank you Ocremix for posting another of my remixes! Took more of a blow in the judges crits than I expected, but it's all good, constructive stuff to remember for my next ones. I actually had to pull back the leads and bass when I was doing it because I thought they were too STRONG, I would not have guessed they were still thin and basic. The glitching was deliberate, I don't remember doing any randomness there, but that just tells me I need to work on it more. Next time I'll have to put some more reverb or whatever gives it wetness and turn down the accompaniment. I personally like louder accompaniment, but if that's an improvement overall, I need to work at it too. Thanks again!

You can't make a dev pay $100/minute for music anymore than Samsung can make you buy a $15,000 HDTV. There's no magic trick to landing paying jobs in music - you have to be at the right place at the right time, the right man for the job working for the right people who just happen to have thousands of bucks to spend on a new guy. Why would they not want to spend thousands of bucks on a new guy for music? Because from a musician's point of view, the music is the most important part of the game, but from a developer's POV, it's one of the least essential components to making a game that might be quality or successful. The fact that most games allow you to turn down or even OFF the music without objectively hampering the gameplay pretty much tells you everything you need to know there. As far as I know, a game has never failed or succeeded from the soundtrack alone. If it does happen, it's very rare. They have to think about more important things like programming, gameplay and, yes, graphics are more important. I recommend you not think about getting $100/minute without even starting to make money doing music yet and focus more on the art. Don't be "confident" in your ability, keep going and improving, because THAT is the only thing that will help guarantee you make any money at this all (notice I said HELP guarantee). You have to earn that position. You have to start at the bottom doing it for free and peanuts just like the rest of us and earn your equity as an artist. Being hardline about money and payment just for noodling around like all the composers tell you to do is going to stall or even counter your progress.

Yeah, there appears to be a communication barrier here and it's become confusing to me why it's going in circles or why I need to see another topic for this one. I see your specific complaints and again I say it's natural that it has a different feel to the soundtrack because the whole game is extremely different and it uses a very different and limited sound chip. To the producers, the new soundtrack worked for the project they did it for and for what it was, it worked well enough for most of the players. Short of that and being redundant on it, I'm not sure what else to tell ya.

Not necessary, the point I'm making is that atmosphere is a lot more than the audio and that the GBA was going to be inferior to even Super Metroid no matter what. Could it have been better? Of course. I myself can only really remember one original track from it, but it's a moot point, all things considered.

MZM is almost a completely different gaming experience. You have to remember that "atmosphere" in a game doesn't just come from the audio, it comes from the combination of graphic style, audio, controls, level design, game mechanics, what you're playing it on, where you're playing it, what time you're playing it, the temperature of the room, etc. It's the grand total gaming immersion experience at the time you're playing it and it's a very unique, very difficult to replicate thing for a lot of people. You won't even get the same gaming atmosphere from playing the same game unless you meet the full list of requirements for how you enjoyed the atmosphere to start with. That MZM doesn't have that same atmosphere is just nature at work.

The Gameboy Advance had a pretty inferior sound chip for ambient-type sounds, and many types of songs in general. Not incredibly fair to compare it to Metroid Prime and even Super Metroid is a stretch as, IIRC, the GBA sound chip was inferior even to the SNES. They did the best with what they had.

I am indeed. The Wii I was able to mod to my satisfaction but it required days' worth of work for. The Original Xbox? Forget about it. For whatever reason, my Charter internet absolutely, positively will not let me FTP into it. It would sooner completely rewrite my internet configuration than allow me to FTP in. Oh, and it's one of those Halo Xboxes that only has a >50% of being modded anyway (which mine thankfully succeeded), and you have to get a certain game to do it. I have to get my brother to help me do anything on there when I need it and a bunch of the emulators on there don't work as they should. My issues there basically killed my want to keep pursuing modding and emulating with other systems. The basic point I'm getting at is emulation and all that really doesn't work as easily for some as it does others for a multitude of reasons, and that by itself justifies having things like the Mini-NES in the world.

I'm waiting for... whoever owns Turbografx now to wise up and make their own remodernized PC-Engines or whatev... ...hey, does the Japanese version of the Mini-NES get a different game set? I should look that up...

Umm... thanks... Back to MindWanderer, what you're forgetting is that it's oftentimes not just "a little effort", it can become a pretty big effort to emulate depending on how closely you're trying to recreate the experience. As someone who's spent the last 2.5 years getting mod-happy with consoles as a bizarre side effect from depression medication, I can tell you straight up that "get X hardware unit, get Y accessory and then Z software, BOOM. Done." is far from accurate. At least 50% of the time there's always something missing, something wrong and trying to get help for it on Google or a forum is a crapshoot with great emphasis on crap. The software and tutorials become out of date, key component software breaks down because the dev group split up, or there's a problem with the OS software or the SD card or thumbdrive or FTP, and even after you spend several days trying to fix it, you get it working and discover the emulation/emulator wasn't nearly as well developed or functional as you hoped. Now I've yet to try a Raspberry PI or the emulators on it, but having spent considerable trouble trying to emulate on a Wii and Original Xbox alone, I can safely assume that would be the same problem for one reason or another. Emulation's simply a lot more complex and difficult than it used to be IMO - you pay the price for gaming one way or another. If gamers want "get X hardware unit, get Y accessory and then Z software, BOOM. Done." then the mini-NES is that right there. That's literally what it does and I don't have to mess with drivers or anything. It comes from the real source, so it feels a lot more like the legitimate gaming experience than it would through a third-party emulator.

For the love of God, man, it's a miniature NES with a healthy-ass supply of NES classics right from the get go, accepts Wii Classic controllers, has an HDMI output AND is an official Nintendo product that you have to do nothing but plug it in, and you shit on it? Such distasteful elitism. The closest thing wrong here is that it's oddly missing some other games on it, but at $60.00 it's such a good deal all the way around that it's a ultimately a moot point.

Metro? Been a while since someone called me that, but it still confuses me... unless it's a typo, I guess.

First off, chill out, this is not a life and death problem. I respect your exuberance, but you're focusing too highly on it and I'll tell you why. Second off, yes, it could have something to do with the limitation of emulation and just the basic simple problem of recreation from synth alone. Emulated synthesizers often only sound like the real thing at the forefront - most of us who aren't pros are satisfied with it, but people with great listening talent find they don't compare up. I'm not personally familiar with FM Drive or Genny (I do have YM2612 though), but even hardcore professional synth emulations like Arturia don't always match up to the real things they are emulating. Third off, FM synthesis is famously hard to program and it doesn't surprise me at all that you're having trouble recreating it. I'm not an FM synth guru so I don't know if YM2612 programming is as hard as that holds up to, but I think that's the summary and the real cause of your problem here. I don't have a very helpful solution for you, I'm just reassuring you that you are not really the problem there and that much of it really is just the limitations of what you're working with. Keep practicing, keep looking for tutorials and asking around synth forums and you will get closer to your goal there.

Wait, we could've submitted baby pictures to this? I mean, I don't think you'd want to use mine anyway, but I didn't know that.

A little bit of a perpendicular suggestion, but you could ask David Wise himself on Facebook. He's pretty good and open to talking to fans on there and that could be a decent way to get a solution there.