Liontamer

Mastered pretty loud, but definitely digging it. The fading lead abruptly cut off at 1:29 right near the end of winding down. Not a huge deal, but the devil's in the details. Very nice dropoffs and builds. 2:46 felt repetitive going back to the initial melody with the same lead, even though the backing was fuller this time around. By 3:20, I was hoping this section would wrap up and move to something fresher, but at least we got some more alterations of the melody, subtle as they were. The source was in play basically the entire time once it started at :29 and ended at 5:15. I really could have gone for more melodic interpretation and sylistic variation, but what's here was nonetheless substantive and interpretive, with a nice side of groove bias. Reading CHz's vote after writing all this, we're basically seeing it the same way. We're movin'. We're groovin'. YES

Nabeel definitely picked a very strong source tune in the Prelude where he didn't really need to alter the structure, leaving him a lot of room to go for personalization while sparing melodic interpretation. Funny to hear that bread-and-butter FL Studio warble fade in around :25. When things picked up around 1:00, the soundscape definitely sounded too cluttered/compressed, so the dropoff at 1:14 was very welcome. Things picked back up at 1:45 and sounded crowded again. At 2:40, the dance beats added in there sounded rather flimsy, and the countermelodic synth stuff seemed really aimless, capped off by a really awkward clubby lead from 2:54-3:08. It wasn't a dealbreaker, but sounded thematically out of place with the overall major key sound of the arrangement. After 3 minutes, I'm definitely sure of this sounding very lo-fi and distant despite the bitrate; this really needed to sound cleaner and brighter, and I'm not sure why you got so many props for the production, when it could stand another degree of polish. No hate, it's fairly solid and not noob-level, but it's definitely not near A-grade. The changeup at 3:36 was definitely a good move though, and I wasn't bothered by the pause. Not a fan of the awkward clubby stuff AGAIN from 4:50 for the fadeout finish, which abruptly just went to I guess a minor key deal with only a few seconds left, and pretty much no resolution. Just a weird finish. On the arrangement side, this was relatively conservative, but expanded and personalized sufficiently, JUST enough where this was just above the line even factoring in the production choices that bugged me a lot. What's funny is that when I'm just thinking about what I heard, but not listening to it, I'm gravitating towards a borderline NO, but when I actually go through and listen again, it's solid enough and substantive enough where I think it merits a weak pass. It's rough around the edges, and working with this specific source definitely made the melodic component a lot easier, but it gets'r done by hook and crook. YES (borderline)

Interesting intro with some Rayza-style sounds. Pretty solid usage of the fakey guitar with great stylistic articulations and resonance that doesn't make you complain about it being a sample, much the same as with Vurez. I could have gone without the grating synth at 1:33, which was shrill/piercing. One thing that really hit me from 1:33-2:15 was that the overall mixing should have been cleaner. right now, it's too lo-fi and supporting details like the upright bass and acoustic guitar chords are definitely getting trampled to the point of nearly being inaudible. It's not negatively impactful enough to drag this down to NO with so many other things working well here with the instrumentation and arrangement. Very silky switchup at 2:15 to the acoustic guitar. The whistling sound was a nice subtle touch as well. The trumpet sound was noticeably weaker, but it still had reasonably good body and realism. The arrangement was smooth, with generally strong sound choices. I think we should get a 192kbps encoding to heard the details a bit better, and wouldn't mind another pass at the balancing, but other than that, I was really digging this. Solid work, Mansoor! I'm feeling the Konami/Genesis love. YES

Weird balancing. The melody at :28 sounded interesting with the vibes, but was way too quiet, making the guitar seem way too loud by comparison. At 1:08, the programmed drums being so tightly timed made the looseness of the guitar and other parts sound too messy and disjointed. I wasn't majorly bothered by any of the string work until 1:49, because it was too quiet to actually contribute much to the track. The sequencing was pretty unrealistic though. Then at 1:49, I really couldn't stand the mechanically sequenced sound of the sampled strings; way too upfront and exposed. I liked the textures overall, but the balance of the guitar work was off, and the timing among all of the parts never clicked together, making the execution sound too rough. Too bad, because the arrangement itself was solid, IMO. Really gotta tighten the screws on this one, the potential is there, Brandon. NO

Doesn't sound bad. The piano articulations that sounded somewhat mechanical, but were pretty solid to me. The rim hits and light drum worm really didn't work with the piano and choir elements. No synergy with the textures. The structure seemed pretty similar about a minute in. Damn, the same exact issues at :58 with the changeup, i.e. the drumwork doesn't fit the gothy textures of the rest of the instrumentation, so there was a lot of empty space in the soundscape and the textures didn't click. You definitely added some personalization to the source with the instrumentation and additional part-writing, but the structure was still fairly close. Another changeup at 2:04, but this time doing its own thing unrelated to the source for the most part. Everything up to 2:04 really needed more creative interpretation if the last section was basically going to be original material unrelated to the source tune. The organ was too dry/clean and could have used some effects to make it sound deeper. I agreed with the others about the balance issues, but was more concerned about the really bare textures that never fully clicked, no matter what section it was. NO

http://ocremix.org/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=28 - Finally

Well to clarify, the main issues with genre labeling in the past have typically been based on tagging the mixes with specific genres instead of "Game:" * In an MP3, you basically can tag a song as only 1 genre; for a lot of songs, that wouldn't be specific enough * If you list more than 1 genre in the Genre field of an MP3, it's not standardized, and it looks clunky and inconsistent * We have too many mixes with no primary or easy to classify genre, so within a framework designed to only show 1 genre, trying to address that for mixes with multiple genres was not worth the hassle The focus of these suggestions had always been about re-doing the files and dropping Game as a genre, which we're never going to do. But when it dawned on djp that we could use a more robust blog-like tagging system to not have to be limited to only 1 description word/genre, we could use other descriptors that had absolutely nothing to do with genre (e.g. instrumentation, mood), and also NOT tie it to the MP3s themselves (eliminating the need to frequently revise the files), he was on board. And it took some convincing for other judges to be in favor of it, but the consensus was there that a classification system that wasn't limited would end up being beneficial. The tags themselves are nowhere near done. When they are though, djp's plan is to integrate into the actual database so we can search mixes that way as well.

I had a non-final set I was showing off to a few people who were interested, but I keep working on it every day to finish the last piece of the puzzle, which is the URL field now being OCR artist pages.

Never. I've decided not to since people keep asking.

We'll eventually end up better integrating this into our site database (i.e. not just show on the forums), but we've already been working on it for quite a while now. http://ocremix.org/forums/tags.php

Anyone hating on this game is silly. The high-level matches I've seen have been amazing, and I'm still VERY hyped after having played the game for 7 hours last night. AWESOME game, can't wait to see it broken down!

Of course you can.

Interesting. Can anyone else detail that issue? Given what happened, I'm surprised that 1. iTunes did that in the first place (programmed an invalid directory), and 2. No one else has brought that up before. Not implying it's untrue, just surprised this is the first I've heard of it. You don't sound mean. It'll be several months before the torrent's updated, because the plan is to re-release all of the mixes, including the older stuff, with proper tagging (detailed here & here). There's no point in updating a torrent only to replace it relatively soon after (resulting in losing all the seeders). So you can grab the current torrent and single mixes, or just wait it out for the updated versions of everything.

From what I can find, it looks like WMP and many other burners just suck and can't handle some VBR files. You may want to DL MediaCoder or Winamp 2.95, reencode the files as WAVs, then burn with those WAVs.

What program (and what version of said program) are you using?

Just received this info about a new charity album project involving a ton of VGM composers. Looks like names will be out later, and so many games there that had multiple composers, so you can't infer everything. But with the game credits listed, it looks like some big names are involved! Video pimpage thing: ---------------------------------------------------------- February 17th, 2011: The Game Music Initiative, in collaboration with OneBigGame, Inc., today announce its exciting new charity project dubbed OneBigAlbum. This project, one of the biggest game musician collaborations in history, involves the pending digital release of a unique music album created by many contributing game music composers. OneBigAlbum will have over a dozen never before heard tracks especially created for this album by a range of talented and well known composers. Currently the OneBigAlbum project will feature music written by composers that worked on titles such as Dead Space 2, Alien Breed, Deus Ex, Command & Conquer: Red Alert, God of War, Brütal Legend, and Fairytale Fights. A list of contributing composers will be announced at a later date. The Game Music Initiative will act as the overseeing and coordinating body for the project, whereas OneBigGame, Inc. will act as publisher and distributor of the album. OneBigGame, Inc. will donate 80% of all proceeds made from sales of this unique fan-service album to two charity foundations: The Starlight Children's Foundation and Save the Children. A release date for the album has not yet been determined and is likely to be announced in the near future. Ruud van de Moosdijk, founder and project coordinator of the Game Music Initiative explains: “I always felt that game music composers often do not get the appreciation that they deserve. I wanted to do something to increase the general awareness for the talent of these composers and put them in the spotlight more. When I talked about my ideas with Martin de Ronde from OneBigGame, Inc., one thing led to another and the OneBigAlbum project was born. The opportunity to realize some of my ideas and support charity at the same time is amazing and the support from the composers has been incredible.” For more information: The Game Music Initiative: Ruud van de Moosdijk Project Coordinator ruud@engine-software.com OneBigGame, Inc.: Martin de Ronde Managing Director martin.de.ronde@onebiggame.org The Game Music Initiative - www.GameMusicInitiative.com / Facebook / LinkedIn

My guess is the currently-hosted files lacked the proper VBRI header information. Try the two fixed copies in this ZIP I've hosted for you and lemme know if those work.

Hahaha! Your setup is messed up, don't go blaming it on us. Hopefully zirc or someone else can help you figure out what's wrong on your side, because, as they say when you're getting dumped and they're being honest, "It's not me, it's you."

Nah, np. Both the Content Group and Original Album fields will have the full game names there, so even if you change the title tags, you'll still have the ability to sort by game in iTunes.

Months, but working on it. I'm in the D's as far as my last artist URL updates. The issue of artist link 404s came up, and linking to the OCR artist page was the best way to avoid 404s, as well as provide a link that could then fans to see all the social pages an artist has. The point of the quotes is to more clearly separate the game title from the remix name. Not sure how it does anything BUT make it clearer. The Title field will always use the style of Game Name 'ReMix Title' OC ReMix. Everything will also use the Subtitle field to house just the plain title of the ReMix w/o the game name or OC ReMix. That field can be made visible through MP3tag, though, in iTunes, Subtitle is mapped to the video Description field.

MP3tag isn't a player, but can read "date created" properties IIRC. Dunno if it can write to them (if that was something people even did). But it also can be set not to modify the "date modified" data if you edit tags. Not sure if any music player does this, but brought up MP3tag in case it was something you'd be interested in.

I POO on your rap-hate!

There's no "backlash." Some people are noobs and can't work with IT files, so they'd rather have MIDIs. Guys, you get what you get. And you better enter if you can!

There's one more change I'd like to do with artist URLs that's taking me some time, plus Dave and I need to work out the logistics of the change.

I definitely could have gone for more interpretation, but this got it done in '04. LOL at every 2004 hater on this track, swarming in quickly just to crap on it. Can't believe how closed-minded those reviews are. Let them get the wax out of their ears. This was a great listen, forget what those idiots said. Especially KogeJoe, one of the dumbest dumbshits that ever posted on OC ReMix. (Good riddance ) The mood was excellent, and the tuning was nothing but a benefit to that dark mood. It's Kraid, you idiots; it fits like a glove.