Liontamer

Definitely a weird intro there, panned hard right momentarily. The mixing was a bit odd to start (before the vocals entered), as the lead synth was too dry and upfront compared to the other instrumentation. The vocals are OK; the treatment on them's not bad, though they still sound too dry, which doesn't help when the pitchiness is exposed like this. It's mostly when you're modulating your voice on the last syllables of each line. That said, this was better than a lot of rejections, you just need more control or some pitch correction applied after the fact. The drumwork felt very flimsy during the verses, definitely flat like OA said. The overall mixing sounded unintentionally lo-fi; it's not horrible, but tweak the things OA and DA brought up. Decent start, Jake; polish it up and try again; you have a decent shot at lifting the execution up to where it needs to be. NO

Oof. If the arrangement's basically being true to form for this style by bascially having only one tempo, Christian, then the production really needs to be on point. The rigid piano articulations are definitely the obvious weak spot and affected the dynamics. Yeah, the little pause at 1:55 was kind of sloppy. Palpable also made a great point about the dynamic range of the piano sounding extremely compressed. Everything's basically at the same intensity, which doesn't make sense. I thought the arrangement was on the conservative side, but I can live with it. But the articulations and dynamic range simply need to be improved. Passing this would be pretty lopsided towards the arrangement. This isn't horrible, but the production needs more attention to detail. Use the Workshop forums, tug a few sleeves, and tweak a few details for the win. NO (refine/resubmit)

Wonderful to hear this submission, Paul! It was great meeting you too, and I'm glad you got some inspiration! I agreed with the other Js that something about the mixing was off, so I'll just throw in my 2 cents and hope it helps. I'm not sure why there are complaints that there's not enough bass. The bassline IS there, but the notes are muddy and just not distinct enough. I think Vig's right on how to handle it, because the bassline itself really doesn't need more low-end, it just needs a more solid sound. Emu's right that your leads should cut through more, and IMO they need more high-end clarity. The way the soundscape seems to lack high-end makes the piece sound like it's a much lower bitrate. halc's also right about the overall levels being a bit too soft. Everyone, YESes and NOs, had some worthwhile comments on the production. If the mixing were a little more properly balanced, I could go YES on this even though the mixing wasn't perfect, because everyone agrees the arrangement is hot. However, the mixing is off just enough where I'm not quite there to sign off on it as is. I say, take another pass at this with fresh ears and some help from the Workshop forum to achieve a better balance. The arrangement's definitely where it needs to be, so there's nothing to be discouraged over, you're 90% of the way there. Just tweak it up and this'll defnitely make it. NO (refine/resubmit)

Rock. Thanks, man! HalcyonSpirit and Stevo both had revised editions that weren't what I was looking for, but thanks to them for looking as well. Gotta wonder if Dan ever kept a WAV of the OCR version, but that's pretty unlikely.

Anyone got a higher quality copy of Disco Dan's MM3 mix "Blue Lightning?" I'm not sure if there was ever a revised version, but I'm not looking for that, I'm just looking for the same version as the one on OCR, just the higher bitrate. IIRC, Dan at least released a 128kbps version. Thanks for anyone who can help!

You're not speaking for the staff.

He's gotta be now. He's movin' on up yet again! https://www.facebook.com/TheWingless/posts/10150541019450880 , John! Yet again! Everyone tell him to use Twitter: http://twitter.com/TheWingless

Fixed. Maybe when $100 thumb drives are 5TB.

Nice work, Tony! For anyone who missed it, PRINCE OF DARKNESS won the grand prize and will appear on the Earthbound Papas next album! Announcement: http://www.dogearrecords.com/Earthbound_Papas/arrange_eng.html Winning Response Video:

My stab at Dance Dance Revolution 4th Mix '4F73R M3' http://ocremix.org/remix/OCR01114/ I've got it all, don't stop me now SuperGreenX won't make ya frown Check my sounds, 'cuz you know they can't be dissed There aren't too many that can flow like this It's thumpin', jumpin' at you And the rhythm is gonna get through Do I need to say any more? Tell me what you're feelin', yo, here I go Jump, jump, jump, DDR Yo, everybody feel the beat with DDR Jam, jam, jam, DDR Everybody dance, let's get down S-G-X, X, X MC Everybody feel the beat, feel the beat (Go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go) Every-every-everybody feel the beat (Go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go) Get down! S-G-X, X, X (Everybody feel the beat Get down!) Everybody feel the beat, feel the beat (Go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go) Every-every-everybody feel the beat Could it be that you wanna be more like me No shame, I brought my game, it's just me you please Now I'm gonna punch this bad amount (?) Put your hands in the air, move 'em all around Can you feel the beat down in your soul? Don't fight the feeling, just let it go SGX is bringin' it down Wanna see you move when you hear my sound... Jump, jump, jump, DDR Yo, everybody feel the beat with DDR Jam, jam, jam, DDR Everybody dance, let's get down ...R! Jump, jump, jump, DDR Yo, everybody feel the beat with DDR Jam, jam, jam, DDR Everybody dance, let's get down

Gotta vote as is then. Conditionals, re-evaluate where you stand. I disagreed with making this a conditional YES because of the positioning of the leads. The soundscape's murky, but I didn't feel it was over the top or a dealbreaker. Jamison's stance on this did not affect my vote, as I only read it after I'd laid out my vote. I don't agree with the stronger production crits at all. None of the mixing bothered me personally, and (much more importantly) I made out the themes just fine. That's the case, because they sit far enough upfront to be made out. If the soundscape were so washed out that the themes were being obscured, then there would have been a problem. Let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater on this, when the production's perfectly fine in the big picture. You count your seconds strangely, Jamison. Every part of your breakdown added 1 second to the measurement for some reason. Basically, you treated :00-:02 as meaning :00.00-:02.99, and thus 3 seconds. That kind of fuzzy math isn't how I'd count anything. That said, I appreciated your breakdown and did my own. Everything Jamison said was right, except 2 things: 1) The Plug Man, Section A arpeggios, which he (thankfully) didn't give himself any credit for, as they were too liberal. 2) Plug Man, Section B didn't come in at 3:39 as you stated, it came in at 3:49, so you inadvertently gave yourself 10 seconds. The piece was 4:57.25-long, so I needed more than 148.625 seconds of overt source usage for the pass on arrangement, with the source tunes truly being dominant in the piece. Normally, I don't count this closely, but you were cutting it close and I took your breakdown as a fun challenge. "Trust, yet verify." While you lost the phantom 10 seconds you credited yourself with (the result of a typo?), you didn't give yourself quite enough credit for some things, such as notes trailing off, and the way several of the theme transitions blended. Let's take a closer look: Bubble Man, Section A [:00-:04] - :46-:51.25, :52.75-:58.75, 3:02.25-3:09 Bubble Man, Section B [:11-:21] - 1:09-1:14.5, 1:15.5-1:22.5 Bubble Man, Section C [:22-:32] - 1:26.5-1:36, 1:39.75-1:49.5, 2:20-2:28, 2:33-2:48 Bubble Man, Section D [:33-:37] - 3:19-3:23, 3:56-4:07 Plug Man, Section B [:14-:26] - 1:53-2:00, 2:06-2:13, 3:09-3:18, 3:49.5-3:56, 4:07-4:12 Plug Man, Section C [:27-:39] - 2:00-2:06, 2:13-2:20, 3:18-3:25.75 Plug Man, Section D [:40-:53] - 2:27-2:39, 4:26.75-4:33.75 When you stitch everything back together and time out when either Bubble Man or Plug Man was in play: :46-:51.25, :52.5-:58.75, 1:09-1:14.5, 1:15.5-1:22.5, 1:26.5-1:36, 1:39.75-1:49.5, 1:53-2:48, 3:02.25-3:25.75, 3:49.5-4:12, 4:26.75-4:33.75 = 151 seconds or 50.799% source usage The source usage just barely came up as dominant, but it's over the line, so count it! The arrangement was definitely very creative and well-handled overall. It could have went either way on the arrangement, which I would have had no problem unmercifully rejecting if there was 1 second less of source use, but I enjoyed the piece in a vacuum nonetheless. The arrangement won't be something people who can't stand liberal arrangement can wrap there heads around, as the 7/4 time signature, murky soundscape, Plug Man's theme being more obscure, and the two themes constantly weaving in and out is a lot to make sense of. Those with a smart ear and an open mind, however, should love it. This, I love. Nice work here, Jamison, this is good to go! YES

Ribbit! Guifrog here! GAME ARRANGED: Super Mario Bros. SOURCE: The classic one. Or -> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiAxiGZKpGQ REMIX NAME: Super Mario Nightclub REMIX LINK: a) (secret url) if one doesn't work, the other will I think breakdown won't be necessary this time, rite? >P So, let's keep our trip around the world. When I initially thought of having my own take on Mario's so well known (and overremixed, if that's even a word) tune, Italy came to mind. But. Mario's tunes have such a latin vibe, and I wanted to create a mix that loyally had Mario in its core. Which means, classic square waves getting along with steel drums, a few simple and generic instrumentation choices, plus my own world-electronic touch. The idea came out as a latin house of some sort, and it's exactly how I imagine a nightclub in Mario's world. We're in the BAHAMAS, baby! P.s.: Thanks to mods Flexstyle and Gario for their excellent advice on the WIP forums! *untz untz untz* ---------------------------------------------------------- The brass was still pretty weak, something that always negatively stands out in Guilherme's stuff. The piano and disco strings also sounded super fake. The extreme simplicity of the core UNT-TSS beat also dragged this down. There were pretty bland, default-sounding lead synths at 1:32 as well. Too many of these sounds really need some polish. The organic-sounding percussion at 2:18 was super sweet and spicy, very well done, but then the bridge section from 2:25 came off VERY boring in contrast, just note-for-note like the original with no real uniqueness or interpretation. The same is true for the source tune chorus first used at 1:01; just a pretty straightforward cover of the theme that didn't really stand apart in a meaningful enough way from the original. Usually, I'll bring something up as a quality disparity, but this was a case of a creativity disparity. This is going in the right direction, clearly, this just needs more creativity in the treatment of the theme to match the creativity of the other instrumentation surrounding it. Stepping up the sample quality or learning to better mask the limitations of the exposed brass, piano and strings would also help a great deal as well, and it's about time you reach for some improvement there also. NO (resubmit)

Your poop is ugly.

There was no mistake on our side, so we can forget that "everyone's kind of at fault" nonsense.

Or yellow light reflecting on the monitor that makes the gray look like it has a pink tint. We've never needed any.

Correctz! I love the concept. Just polish up the instrumental part. Probably the singing too, but definitely the instrumentation. And that's all she wrote. NO (resub)

Not 1% under. .000000000000000000000000000001% under.

OOOOLD reminder for me to check on this.

Definitely an awesome album, no doubt.

Nah, the point of torrents is to seed big groups of files in perpetuity; there's no practical reason to do small, monthly batches as torrents. We've held off on torrent updates because of my massive project, but when we're back in the swing of things, we'd be updating once per 100 mixes. At some point, I may use RapidShare or some other Megaupload-ish service to do what you're asking, only with no torrent, just a direct, but straightforward batch download. Or someone else with more time can take up the cause!

We were thinking of dropping the restriction to VGM arrangements only so we could post analoq's extended Thundercats remix, but that would have been too epic to process.

Thanks for checking in. This has clearly been a long-tail type of project. We've recently updated the standards by 1) removing the filesize limit, and 2) asking for all encodings from now on to either be 192kbps or VBR1 quality. Because of this change in the standards, we're going to make a final push for upgraded encodings from the ReMixers for whatever older material we can get, then it's working out the logistics with djp on how to properly replace every file in the database, which is tougher than it looks. Just FYI, periodically I'm privately backing up my work in 2 places (external drive and online), so if my comp fried tomorrow, we wouldn't lose all of this progress. Sorry for the wait, though I promise it'll be worth it for this set of music.

Ditto #2. Next-to-no polish, which definitely hurt this one. Vig's high for saying the sound design was good. :-/ Pretty vanilla synths starting at :43, with the textures feeling pretty flimsy. There were some delay effects at 1:10 that at least thickened up the drums a little, but the drum sample was skimpy and extremely fake sounding, and the overall textures were pretty flimsy. There's a ton of empty space in this soundscape, and the basic/beginner-level effects employed don't do nearly enough to produce a cohesive full sound. The arrangement seemed disjointed, but I felt the lack of balance with the sounds created that perception more than the actual composition. Not enough care or expertise put into this one on the production side. NO

The drums were definitely a weak link here as well and sounded pretty flimsy. I thought the arrangement was solid, but agreed with the production criticisms. During the build, for example, the bassline was playing lines from the source, but the bass level were so low and overly subdued that it's easy to completely miss it. That said, I'm in Palp and Nutritious's camp that I could live with this as is, though I'd also prefer another pass at the balance and production if Jani's up for it. YES

Wow. This is a pretty damn good arrangement. The weak tone and exposed fakeness of the piano sample at 5:50 was unfortunate, but not a big deal given all the strengths here. That said, I'm scratching my head at these NOs. Y'all are all making the perfect the enemy of the good. On the seesaw that is "good enough" vs. "needs a resub," this sounded absolutely fine, and I'm just surprised this is splitting the panel, when the sample articulations and overall production are more than capable, the balance is reasonable though not perfect, and the arrangement is absolutely strong. The arrangement can seem too long, but I didn't think it truly meandered, and the "Zelda's Theme" treatment had nothing but subtle yet constant variations. Bobby nailed it here, this is generally top notch and completely what we're looking for. We need to not miss the big picture on this. Solidly above the bar, and great work from Bobby. YES EDIT (11/7): Yeaaaah... I copy DarkeSword re: Fishy's NO.