Liontamer

The only overt source usage I'm getting are the sections I acknowledged in my vote. On another listen, I'm hearing the chords being vaguely alluded to and being played over from 1:23-2:05, but that's way too minimalistic of a usage for my bar. For me, the source tune was marginalized to the point of unrecognizability in that section, and I wouldn't count it. After that, the track just seems to break down (in terms of placing any source connection) and I didn't hear anything vaguely "Maridia" until 3:14. I'm glad Vig feels he's hearing the connections distinctly during the soloing, but since I'm definitely not, I'm set with my decision. I'm down with letting the vote ride for more opinions (we certainly could use some), but I'm keeping my vote a NO.

http://www.zophar.net/usf/sm64usf.rar - 09 "Dire, Dire Docks" zircon mentioned Mega Man 3 "Blue Balls" as being an accepted cover-style ReMix in the same vein, but IMO this was more conservative. This is a great solo piano cover with some excellent embellishments and an impeccable performance. I can't wait to hear more material from Johan, I was impressed. But I've gotta agree with the other Js that no matter how solid this performance is, this is not interpretive enough for the arrangement bar here. The structure is just too similar to the original to stand out as a unique enough arrangement. If more creative liberties were taken, I'd pass this in a heartbeat. Don't be discouraged, Johan, I'd love to hear you submit something in the future with a bit more liberty and interpretation applied to the source tune. You're were going in the right direction, but not far enough in that direction. That doesn't say anything negative about your performance skills. NO

http://snesmusic.org/v2/download.php?spcNow=ct - "Memories of Green" (ct-1-05.spc) I loved the overall vibe to start. You could very well be Quinn Fox's bastard cousin, as there was lots from his typical soundset, as well as some of the same compositional sensibilities. But onto the criticism. The drums (not the rest of the percussion) were a little weak; they need a beefier or airier sound to them to fill out the soundfield more. Everything seemed to be pretty solidly put together, though not blowaway for the opening. The electric guitar-like synth at :54 really needed more finesse in the sequencing; sounded way too robotic as is, along with the note intensity always sounding about the same. As SOON as the track went into more freestylish territory around 1:27 though, it started falling apart. The freestylish stuff with the lead sounded terrible, with the sequencing being too robotic sounding, the lead writing being really meandering and unmelodious (mostly 1:27-1:54) and the textures being too thin. Aside from the leads, the sounds chosen for the textures are alright, but the soundscape often sounded too empty. Same from 2:37-2:54, and to a lesser extent with 3:03-3:43; just awkward and unfocused. Definitely agreed with Vigilante on some harmonic clashing due to the notes of the pads. So yeah, nothing new I'm telling you there based on Vigilante's stuff. This would need a lot of work to polish this up and get the writing much more focused. Good concept, but the execution isn't quite there yet. I like the potential here though, so definitely keep working on it, Mike. NO (resubmit)

http://project2612.org/download.php?id=91 - 10 "The Hard Corps" & 19 "GTR Attack!" Decent opening. Percussion sounded weak compared to the harder edged guitar, and the perc wasn't quite filling out the background; could have used some padding. Pretty quick transition into "GTR Attack!" at :48. Lead synth at 1:02 sounded really cheap in tone and sequencing, as well as out of place, not clicking with the other rock instrumentation. Good percussion changeup at 1:48, though I thought the drum tone was not fitting again. I felt the arrangement approach was ok; stuff is still structured a little too closely to the originals, with Palpable making a good point on some of the percussion writing, but this was still going in the right direction on some level. There wasn't enough finesse or polish in the execution. Like zircon mentioned, lots of unnecessary mud with the guitars in the background after 1:02 that just made the background sounded cluttered and undefined. Meanwhile, gotta agree with him on the changes to the source melody are less interesting than the original and undermine the potential of the piece in terms of having a hook, but then again I had no major problem with what was in place. The ending at 2:23 seemed to come out of nowhere and was a weak resolution; just takes all the steam out of the piece without a strong, defined ending. Good base, IMO. Tighten the screws and definitely resubmit. Even if it's not with this piece, I think you're going in the right direction. Keep improving on both the arrangement and production fronts. NO

Seems cool that the thing he created was good enough to merit being a prize, and that he'll have the opportunity to hand it to Nobuo Uematsu. Where's the downside again?

YouTube has a 10-minute limit, so I'm not sure why you can't upload it there. For a non-streaming option, you can host it on Megaupload or Filefront. I would use the email information located in the profiles of Gaffeizil and Jarred Hudson to contact them directly, because they don't regularly browse the forums here.

I definitely agree on the WIP and Compo areas getting the additional attention they need. As for the torrents, I wouldn't die with a top-level link on the tabs or whatever, but I've just gotta keep saying that even if deemed clunky (I disagreed), those torrent downloads will suffer if the list isn't given, in full, on the main page. And it'll be a permanent effect. While I understand general ebb and flow, VotL is now down to 47 leechers. And again, that's down from a very steady mid-to-high 70s right up to the day the torrent listings were taken down. I don't know the exact dropoff for the OCR00001-1000 torrent, but that's the 2nd most popular one, and it's definitely down as well. In the long run, no front page torrent listings just needlessly hurts our reach. If you're starting to lean that way, Dave, toward putting them back up, I'm definitely with that. I don't mind that they got pulled down in the first place. At the very least, it was educational to see the effect this had on the most popular torrents.

Back when the torrents were on the front page, the amount of leechers for Voices of the Lifestream was always in the middle-to-high 70s. For months since the release, that number has been very steady including the day of the removals of the torrents from the front page. If aubrey has those kind of stats available to him, I'm sure he'd verify that. Days later, now the amount of leechers is at 51. And I think it'll keep going down at least a bit more. Let that play out over time, and the amount of people that would have been downloading the album via the torrents but now won't will get bigger. Potentially losing 20 album downloads every few days is just a bad tradeoff. I'm of the conviction that once something is not directly available on a website's main page the relative visibility markedly decreases. No matter what is it, if it's not directly accessible from the main page, it will be more difficult for the average user to discover. Even a big link to the torrents page is markedly less effective than putting the full list right there in plain sight. I thought the torrent listing looked impressive rather than clunky, as it pretty much encapsulates all of OCR's music in one comparatively small block, and also broke up the relative monotony of orange links. It's tough. I understand we want to give more visibility to the Compo and WIP threads, and it's difficult to not feel like there's too much going on with what's being displayed. I'm not even saying let's get rid of those additions to the front page. But we've got a lot of content delivered with those torrents at a lower cost with better ease of use, and I think it would be unfortunate to inadvertently diminish their positive impact.

What's so criminal about a fadeout? You've all graduated from the Protricity school of music!

Front page or die.

If I had 20 minutes left before the submission deadline, I'd fade out too. Like a good UnModder.

OH SHOOT, Audix got Treasure Master! Dear God, Greg, please lock that one in, I know you'd do a good job.

I've done the best I can with some games, extrapolating quasi-official titles based on stage names, thanks to game manuals and speedruns. Almost anything that's not filled in is because the game had no official soundtrack release, and thus no official names for the songs in the soundtrack. We'll do something with unofficial titles in the future to fill in the gaps, and also designate between official and unofficial titles, even if it's only something I can see.

I approve this message.

It was for reason of I had jazzed it up, hardman style.

Aye. Yeah, when I noticed they were gone, I was decidedly against it. To me, those are our bread and butter. If torrent DLs drop off, it certainly hurts the spread of the music. To be fair, so far torrent DLs don't seem to have slowed down, but I'm a big proponent of people being able to find the torrents with minimal effort. djp'll give his point of view, I'm sure.

Pretty often. Then again, most of them aren't OC ReMixes until they're posted, so I'll change my answer to almost never.

I currently work at a bookstore, but I'm trying to move into radio, music production or any other sort of audio development role due to my love of music and knowing so many artists. Nothing would be better to me than being in a position where I could lift up great musicians in the game arrangement community. For me, OCR is a hobby, but that's only because it doesn't pay anything. Besides djpretzel, I likely spend the most time working on the site. It's Protricity's fault. Dunno how he feels about it nowadays, but he quickly regretted it. Well, Israfel (lack of interest) and Harmony (lack of time) already explained their situations. Shnabubula's removal from the panel, I don't mind talking about at all, but it would take way too long to explain. That's a good idea for an extremely lengthy blog post though. His theory-centric judgments were a very small part of it. In short though, there's definitely no hard feelings though; Sam and I definitely get along great now, and it was great meeting him at MAGFest and shooting the shit, including his take on what went wrong with his time on the panel, which was all very interesting. Anyway, I'll blog about it someday. If a vote is not unanimous, the vote is extended. Not that it's written down as a law, but generally any disputed vote with a gap of 3 if favor of one side is resolved (e.g. NO will result from 1Y/4N, 2Y/5N, 3Y/6N; YES from 4Y/1N, 5Y/2N, 6Y/3N). The Judges Decisions forum shows the decisions publicly. We have a private Queue forum where we vote and discuss the tracks in their respective thread. Anything resolved is later moved to Judges Decisions. DragonAvenger is not a judge, so clearly she doesn't get it. But nah, she's got the gist of it, and BGC explained it as well. If something is ever placed on the judges panel and it turns out to be a clear submissions standards violation (e.g. MIDI ripped), then a judge can give a NO Override. That ends the vote without requiring every judge to weigh in, which would be redundant. If you're scoping out this personal as a potential significant other, then ask them out on a date. Dates are the proper way of getting to know someone better; anyone who says otherwise doesn't know what they're talking about. Propose a date (tips and rationale on getting a date are here). Then let the person dominate the conversation. That's how you learn more about someone; give them the floor and let them talk about themself. I don't recall trying to BS that I quit. I just liked the comic, so I added it to the Judging Process updates thread. If the site's still around and I still have the energy and interest in judging, I'll be around. Even if I was no longer a judge or staff member, I'd still check out the music. I'd be different in that any music career wouldn't be as a musician, but I'd try to make time for the site; it's been lots of fun, so I'd rather not give it up. That being said, getting a solid career-oriented job in the games/music industry is tough to balance with OC ReMix. The Wingless was always kind of low in terms of voting frequency, but when he joined Midway, he definitely didn't have time any longer to do the job even if he wanted to. For ReMixers, I usually know their names and faces and a little bit of background on them already. So for me I can meet someone in person for the first time at MAGFest like OA and just naturally have conversation. For me, it's slightly more difficult to meet people who aren't ReMixers, and learn about some of them from scratch. But meetups make it so easy to get to know non-ReMixers in the community on a more personal level than the internet, so I always like meeting people like Jiggles McPuff (Don), Moguta (Chris), q-pa (Jon), Arrowned (Jarel), Vilecat (Val), etc. For me, any internet drama at the forums is basically non sequitur to a meetup. People tend not to act the same way in person. So, no, encountering the best/worst of some people beforehand doesn't affect wanting to meet someone for a meetup. I always love the meetups. Being on staff doesn't change how I feel about attending. I'm always just glad to shoot the shit with people who love game music. No worries, you definitely listed everything I remember, and I also forgot that Noir got a guest vote. That mix by Rexy that was definitely another track where I didn't understand why it wasn't resubbed, because it was definitely near the line. We should definitely bring the guest judging thing back every once in a while. I always enjoyed the opinions brought out by those. Being technical, the number of subs isn't steadily increasing. It was about 1.5 subs per day, but as of 2008, it, for whatever reason, jumped to about 3 subs per day. So far, the overall proportion of at least decent material has also increased, so the panel is getting more work. To answer the questions: 1. The panel simply needs to get back in the groove of voting. 2. No. 3. No. There's no reason to limit submissions. Though it might sound like I want fewer subs due to the workload, I would always be happy if we got more. That's always a cool thing for OCR. 4. zircon had a great WIP critique checklist of sorts that he drafted for the Works board, but we haven't put that out yet. I'm not sure why we didn't; I thought it was great, personally. It was for reason of I had jazzed it up, hardman style.

Just my opinion, but... If Ben Croshaw made the game, he's notable enough to me, thereby it's notable enough to me. That it was released a couple of months ago is fine. The music being arranged HAS to be music originally created for the game. If it's not, then it's not a viable source tune for an OC ReMix.

If you ever need some interviews regarding OC ReMix, lemme know. I lovez me some radio.

Nobuo Uematsu's gonna get Andy's copy. Naturally.

I really thought the 3rd place finisher, "Lost Odyssey Medley - 1000 Years" by Ting Si Hao was gonna take it. Congrats to Andy and Kenley on their strong finishes! Andy, you better figure out a way to get to Chicago, foo! Beg for $.

Chiming in that I like the 4 image limit.

It's been at http://duck.thasauce.net/ for a while.

Wow, I never commented on this? Shit, I really thought I did. This was such a big favorite of mine in my olden days in '02. monkofevil's comment that this arrangement actually works better in a C&C environment than the original was something I realized as soon as I first listened to it. Really solid, chill material from Scott, it's a classic.