Liontamer

http://snesmusic.org/v2/download.php?spcNow=ct - "Tyran Castle" (ct-3-02.spc) Not a fan of the source tune; only the chorus was solid to me. Anyway, opened with some cheap dinosaur SFX. Moved over into some sequenced strings and vox at :11, all sounding pretty rigidly sequenced, like the others have readily pointed out. Beats from :45-:53 were completely out of place, followed by a complete change in the piece's tone which made 0 sense. Yeah, I'm gonna take the quickest exit out. Everything's really empty, mechanically sequenced and unrealistic sounding, plus the arrangement is on crack. It has no flow to it whatsoever; pretty much every transition was ridiculously jarring, plus the instrumental textures didn't piece together well at all. Ambitious, but ultimately very poorly executed. I'm more disappointed in the lack of musicality with the various instrument choices than the arrangement being so haphazard. NO

http://snesmusic.org/v2/download.php?spcNow=mpnt - "Mario Paint" (mpnt-01a.spc) Yeah, pretty cool choice of theme. Disappointing name for the arrangement though. zircon covered all the cons of the looped drum sample, which I won't repeat (except to say that he's right). Sax introing in at :08 sounds too synthetic and thin, but I appreciate the effort. Wow, that bassline at :40 is definitely distorting a hell of a lot. Piano actually sounds fairly ok; a bit fakey but it's being buried by that clippy bass so it's harder to tell what's up. Sax gets more freestylin' at 1:13, but at the expense of GREATLY exposing the sample. Piano comping at 1:30 was also a great concept that sounded fairly decent for being sequenced but, again, still greatly exposed the realism limitations of the sample. Ha, nice fuckup at 1:40 as the whole performance gradually broke down at 1:47; more people need to be daring like that and throw in an artistically creative flub like banging on the keys for some dissonance. God way to turn a potential negative (messing up the solo) into a positive. I actually feel it worked well, all things considered. Same issues coming back into a last iteration of the arrangement at 1:56; clipping bass, thin-sounding sax. But do try and very up the arrangement there for that last iteration of the arrangement. No good repeating it verbatim when you have a 3-minute mix. Ending merely exposed the sax sample badly again and didn't sound like as much of a happy accident at the piano breaking down earlier. Gotta tighten that up. Great potential, Max. Take zirc's criticisms into account, eliminate the clipping, work on varying the arrangement for that last section with some further interpretation or instrumentation changes, and refine the sample usage to flow more realistically in the performance and sound more realisitc with the tone. NO (rework/resubmit)

http://www.zophar.net/usf/sm64usf.rar - 14 "Cave Dungeon" Hate to glib you when you have an otherwise cool track where you tried to personalize the approach and use some different sounds, but the arrangement is basically the same as the N64 version, like Vigilante said. Creatively, it really doesn't stand apart from the original except for having more driving beatwork. The bassline sounds like an upgrade of the original, as well as the piano at 1:41. The in-game SFX usage at 2:54 was cheesy, and not enough of a factor to merit being used for all of about 3 seconds. You have the potential to really go off into some creative, personalized interpretation of the source here if you can think of further ways to have it not sound so much like the N64 version. Look forward to hearing more from you in the future, Mike; I like your style so far. Stick around here and make use of the ReMixing and Works forums if you aren't doing so already. NO

Cave Story (Game Rip) - 24 "Moonsong" & 28 "Balcony" First few minutes were pretty cover-ish but had a fair amount of interpretation with the supporting work. Good stuff. 1:04-1:16 felt a bit empty in the background though. The tone of the drums was lacking, IMO, though the percussion writing was good. To me, they sounded thin and flat, undermining the energy level. Beautiful stuff at 1:34 with "Balcony", dropping out the percussion and giving a more genteel and organic rendition of "Moonsong" with a very personalized flavor at 1:48. That's awesome. Weakest point in the track was from 2:19-2:49 where the drums really stuck out as thin. Really need to see that improved so there's less of a sound quality disparity. I see where Vig's coming from, but the drums have no meat on 'em and don't quite gel with the rest of the instrumentation to me, leaving the background rather thin and tepid. Once that's improved, then I'd be solid on it. Then all of a sudden a great crescendo at 2:50-3:06; came in a bit too loud, maybe, but the performance was awesome. I wouldn't even touch the volume there; it's like a punch to the face that you find yourself liking. Arrangement was still pretty solid afterward, with lots of great comping and riffing off of the structure of the source from 3:06-3:20, followed by another straightforward iteration of the source with the supporting work carrying the brunt of the interpretation. Drums are still a weak point, sounding well written but too synthetic. Ending at 4:43 was rather abrupt and I-give-up-ish. Also seemed like it came in a few beats too fast almost to be a smooth transition. Play with it a little bit; perhaps allow it to fadeout at a slower pace and a bit more completely before using that last sound at 4:50. Awesome arrangement, but those drums sound thin, generic and bland, and are undermining the listening experience. Tweak 'em for the win. If rejected, use this as an opportunity to also work on the ending. NO (refine/resubmit) I must say though, Doug, I never heard a thing primarily from you before this, but I can't wait to see what's next. Weird to say this, but...get your mom further involved in a future arrangement to snag her some legit co-credit. Just don't saddle her with the handle "MomUltimA". Let's not go too far.

ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOFL at that stinger. R O F L ! [end transmission]

http://www.zophar.net/gbs/tetris.zip - Track 2 Had this mostly done by the time JJT posted, so I might as well post it. I recognized some of the drum style from Ubik's Adventure Island mix, "Tribal Warfare". You did try to adapt the melody to the genre, moreso during the chorus (1:42-2:08) and during 2:14-3:05 where you adapted the source's bassline, but the source usage was that basically that one lead synth and the interpretation factor was low. You really shouldn't have a track that would sound fairly complete without the lead synth; it really did make the Tetris usage feel like an afterthought. Go for something like 3:18 where you did some observable interpretation of the melody and also had some supporting synths also arrange the source while interplaying with the melody; you need to be more in that direction from the get-go. Wish the production was a bit more balanced; zirc covered all the major issues there. NO

Thank God. Not that no one has said they liked it (far from it), but there were enough genre haters in the ReView thread to the point where I'm certainly glad someone really really enjoyed the mix, and that fact that it's here.

No one ever disses Brian for having a hand in this. Just weed.

Yeah, way to look at the date of creation.

I'm sure it takes some effort to make the beats phat. Dunno how short TO was selling it. http://www.tzone.org/~llin/psf/packs2/Chrono_Cross_psf.rar - 216 "People Seized with Life" I just don't get why the mix title is the same as the original. Everything here could be phatter, but the groove seems decent enough. The electrosynths are somewhat generic, so you need to employ the various effects and processing at your disposal in order to create more unique textures. Stuttering melody at 2:19 is pretty standard for the genre. The genre adaptation of the arrangement is ok; It's done reasonaly well, but you're still basically using the melody, nearly untouched, only fitted to the genre. I'd love to hear some original sections or original composition ideas woven into the melody to make things more personalized. The production's not half-bad, but the track is still noticeably empty; like TO said, the beats are trying to overcompensate for the relative emptyness and dryness of the track. You've gotta flesh this out with denser sounds and a more complete soundfield to have a better shot. And give the arrangement its own name, yes? Nonetheless, you're noticeably improving and shouldn't be discouraged at continuing in the community. NO (resubmit)

http://snesmusic.org/v2/download.php?spcNow=ct - "Ruined World" (ct-2-01.spc) & "At the Bottom of Night" (ct-3-03.spc) Not bad for a first sub. Interesting intro. zyko would find it interesting. "Ruined World" arrangement kicks in at :23. Definitely some cool textures; a bit simplistic, but interpretive. That modulated synth DOES tend to get annoying after a while. Would rather hear you vary up the extras to create a nice evolving, morphing arrangement. Vox comes in at 2:03 functioning more like a pad, so it but it strains for credibility with the way the notes are held since it still sounds like voices. 3:30 in, and the arrangement and instrumentation of "Ruined World" hasn't changed a bit since it started at :23, so we're already cruising at a solid NO. Things finally changed at 3:42 with some bubbly synths and swirly pads before, indeed like TO said, lazily pasting "At the Bottom of Night" right on top of the pads with 0 cohesiveness whatsoever. Those two portions of the track didn't fit together in the slightest, plus there was no ending. Started off decent enough before hitting cruise control, while then proceeding to swerve off the road entirely and come to a sudden stop.

Once shirts are available, I'm sure a mass e-mail will be sent in order to let everyone know that they're available. You'll all be made aware as soon as possible.

http://www.zophar.net/usf/lozusf.rar - 26 "Zelda's Theme" Yeah, I was also feeling the pizz strings at the outset here. Things picked up at :12, but the sequencing on a lot of the supporting instrumentation was too rigid/mechanical, the keyboard in the background being the worst offender. Fairly decent string and woodwind sequencing, just not on the piano and especially not the brass. Weird changeup at 1:36; the writing didn't really click either by itself or as part of the bigger picture. The soundfield was rather swamped; a LOT of supporting elements bled together in a pretty thick murk where nothing really stood out. Textures here weren't cohesive as a result, and relied a bit on reverb/effects to fill the track out. Fadeout ending here unfortunately didn't work well here. Good concept, yes, but it needs a lot of work with the details. NO

DDRMAX Dance Dance Revolution 6th Mix Original Soundtrack - (143) "Max 300" Thanks for providing the original. The album has two versions of the track, but Fernando of course provided us the DDRMAX version. Even the original sounded overcompressed; not my style, but a cool original. Pay attention to :13-:26 of the original, as SymBiotiX basically arranges that as his melody and then uses several instrumental variations of it. Pretty liberal arrangement of that portion from the original, IMO. Intro opens up for the first 6 seconds with some direct sampling of the original, before playing some crud at :06 and proceeding to purposefully destroy it with some effects. Picks back up at :25 with a different style of synths, though I didn't like that lead melodic synth, which was very generic. Good changeup in the focus of the track at :54 to a new variation of that source riff, before referring to the arranged melody from 1:12-1:25 and then going to more of an organ/e-piano-ish deal. Following that up with another variation of that liberally arranged source riff at 1:37. Despite not liking some of the sound/production choices, the track developed well indeed. Soundfield was rather gritty, but decently produced; there's not too many things going on at once, but the soundscape seems filled up most of the time. Gonna sound like a jerk, but that dnb percussion sample at 1:01 sounded way too generic, since I've heard it a billion times before. It's also (arguably) too loud at the expense of hearing everything else, which didn't help. To me, it's a negative. Perhaps just for me, the track can either be really gritty and compressed or have a supporting element loudly dominate over the other parts, but I'd honestly prefer only one or the other going on at the same time. I'm not trying to say that you can't send in stuff in this style, I just don't think you pulled it off quite well. The track's a bit too overcompressed-sounding. zircon had some good insights when I ran the track his way, so I hope to hear his full POV. You'll need to correct me if I'm wrong Fernando, and point out the specifics of how you directly arranged the parts of the original; the arrangement seems a bit liberal. As far as I can tell, you're arranging :13-:26 of the original in a very liberal way, doing several (good) instrumental variations of that riff and that's basically it. The arrangement of that riff is good, but I think the connection's a bit too tenuous. You already greatly overhauled that melody to the point where you need some other direct/overt references to the original to reign it back in. Solid dynamics and instrumental variation to keep the track fresh most of the way. Good writing. Perhaps tinker with some of the more generic sounding instruments (lead synth at :25, dnb drums at 1:01). Work on making the arrangement less liberal while also looking at the production and sound balance a bit. You're easily on the right track, and I like seeing how you've improved, Fernando. Keep working on this one and send it back. NO (rework/resubmit)

http://project2612.org/download.php?id=61 - "IceCap Zone 1" He's right the entire way. Go back and read his POV again. Purposeful as it is, the track is too sparse and the sound choices & arrangement ideas are too plain. The instrumentation is very defaulty, and stuff that should have sounded organic like the piano sounded way too synthethic with the tone and performance. The writing of nearly all of the parts was way too simplistic. I liked the writing ideas of the supporting synths/parts, except for the drums/kicks, which were boring, and most of the rhythm changes were generic. The melody's not meaningfully interpreted at at all, and with only 2:27's worth of time to work with, you certainly didn't give yourself enough time to develop the arrangement. If you don't put more substance and uniqueness into these submissions, you're gonna get the same result every time. NO

A few weeks ago Gray took on a new job and moved to his new "Corn Crib", wherever that may be. As a career move, Gray didn't have time to continue evaluating tracks for the site, so he chose to step down a couple of weeks ago. zyko's come in again to help us out ("boom-diggity," he'd say), but my deepest respects go out to Gray for his 2+ years of dedicated work to the panel and OCR as a judge and moderator. I personally learned a lot from Gray about music as well as the community. His ability to interact with everyone and keep drama to a minimum helped us greatly, and I can't honestly think of anyone who hates the guy. I'm sure I speak for everyone on the panel when I wish him the best of luck with his career and hope that we seem him again soon. Thanks for everything you've done here, Gray. You smellzy punk.

http://www.zophar.net/nsf/pictionary.zip - Track 3 ("Let's Draw a Picture") So we were hanging in #judges, when I brought up the Tim Follin project I'm co-running. Now that TO got his setup working again, I asked Lee if he had the availability to see if he wanted to contribute. I showed him Follin's discography and asked him to check it out. "Got anything with a good bassline?" he says. Then he went "Pictionary?" sounding surprised that there had been a Nintendo game for it. He checked out the NSF and immediately found what he was looking for. For about a day's work, this was pretty awesome, and a great upgrade to the original. Once JJT had a chance to give the track some criticisms and I agreed, TO went back and touched things up for what we've got here. And now for something completely different with another 1/3rd of the "Dirge for the Follin" team: Poor Follin, frequently scoring games destined to have shitty gameplay.Crowd ambiance and some beats opened things up. The bassline at :10 sounded too synthetic & rigid and should be tweaked to sound more realistic. After what I felt sounded like a rather limp intro, he built things up nicely with the Rhodes at :30 (forcing that fakey bassline to the back where it wasn't exposed) as well as some particularly strong and creative drumwork. The familiar melody (hey, it's instantly catchy to me) came in at :51 on piano sounding pretty nice; very flowy, genteel and all that good stuff. The atmosphere also became nice and full and stayed like that the whole way through. How can you not love that piano run from 1:21-1:32? More iterations of the melody at 1:52 and 2:12, only this time around Lee went for more interpretation of the source to really personalize the track. Nice piano run from 2:26 until the end for more of that relaxing vibe; good use of panning and velocity variation to make sure the part didn't sound pasted on top. Beginners just tend not to think about those details. And of course, I'm always glad to hear a track where a fadeout is utilized properly. I know JiggyJon had some minor issues with the realism of the piano performance, but I hope I'm not stretching credibility when I say I believe he doesn't have a problem with it passing the bar. When Lee says "it's meant to be more of a platform-game piano that just sounds bright and happy, rather than realistic", he completely read my mind. IMO, I think the velocity work was excellent so that the performance didn't sound mechanical in a negatively impactful way. Rather, it reminded me a lot of the later soundtracks in the SimCity series. Just take out the crowd ambiance SFX, and this would be perfect Maxis-style music to build stuff to. Solid textures, great development, creative interpretation; the recipe for a YES. Thanks a lot for whipping this up and contributing it to Dirge for the Follin. Let's hope we continue to get more stuff this good.

We simply didn't have a standard for how Album Projects were laid out, including the torrent titling. I believe we're not changing anything because stats would be reset and links floating out in the wild encourage sharing of the torrents would 404. I believe we'll be going for something more uniform in the future though. Before Project Chaos and Summoning of Spirits come out, we'll try to have something more concrete figured out. Project writeups would take quite a while. I'd rather the project coordinators provided something like that. Very aware of it (it's really annoying). When we eventually switch to vBulletin, keycode image will indeed be a part of the signup process to eliminate bots. If I have the time, I'll be looking through the forum records trying to delete old spam accounts for a couple of days before the switchover.

Wait does that mean that those songs are technically not originally made for the game so they shouldn't be on OCR? I sure hope not, and I would think that this has been addressed long before I started coming here, so don't mind this noob comment then. http://www.ocremix.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=2556890#2556890

http://www.tzone.org/~llin/psf/packs2/FFX_psf2.rar - 301 "Thunder Plains" Much love to the original track, a favorite of mine for years. Weird intro, as I dunno if it's supposed to sound like static or sea waves. I sincerely hope it wasn't meant to sound like water. Anyway, theme comes in right at :08, pretty similar to the original but with more gentile sounds. Some light percussion and a decent glassy synth entered at :23. Beats coming in at :39 were pretty tame and their dryness didn't quite gel with the rest of the instrumentation. The water SFX faded too quickly out of the background at :40, sounding rather cheap. Track just kind of chugs along politely with a very conservative take on the source, plus all these added pad/synth/beat embellishments. 1:42 adds even more ideas into the background with a new bassline, but the source theme isn't being interpreted at all. Same tempo, fairly similar instrumentation ideas. The strings from 2:24-2:31 were pretty fake and exposed. The section at 2:32 was a little less troublesome with the strings, as you did some decent layering, but they still sounded robotic and dry. Started playing some scales at 2:48, but you probably should have stopped after 8 bars at 3:04, as the idea isn't interesting enough to carry the track for another 16 seconds. Decent more breakbeatish section from 3:20 playing with the beats and bassline more, only to completely move onto something else at 3:35; too bad, there was at least more potential there than I observed in other parts. Yeah, get things more interpretive where it counts with reinterpreting the actual stuff cribbed from "Thunder Plains", then post the in-progress stuff to the Works forum to obtain feedback before trying to submit it again. It also wouldn't hurt to consult our ReMixing forum and seek out how to give more depth and realism to your sounds.

EVE Online - Ambient015 Thanks for providing the source. When I feel the compulsion to steal, I do it from the best, i.e. I quoted TO, because you should read what he said more than once. TO's right on point with the lack of energy and complexity. You've gotta flesh this one out substantially and also achieve a more realistic feel to the performance, which is very rigid right now. You've got a decent WIP/base, but that's all this is. NO

Hello OC ReMix lads and ladetts! I had a listen to the Immortal 2 Amiga-remix-album the other week, and the James Pond 2 remake on it (despite being made by Richard Joseph himself) left me pretty unimpressed. My "vision" was of a more ska oriented nature, with a touch of 1960's surf rock (I blame an excess Robert Johnson and Punchdrunks consumption for that). Anyway, "själv är bäste dräng" as the Swedish saying goes! I had to put my own mind to it, and here's the result: It's pretty short, I know, but surf rock should be short and intense. Plus, the original doesn't give you much more to work with. So instead of making my own stuff up (this is pretty much a 1:1 cover/remix) to make it longer, and wanting to avoid it getting repetitive, I decided against any further adding to the tune. I hope you enjoy it, and find it to be OC ReMix-worthy! Regards, Makke ----------------------------------------------------- http://www.exotica.org.uk/tunes/archive/Authors/Game/Joseph_Richard/James_Pond_2.lha - Title (cust.title) Yeah, this is a great upgrade, and you certainly weren't a slouch in trying to personalize the cover approach and flesh out the instrumentation. I dunno about Joseph's version (I'd love to hear it to compare), but this WOULD be great on an arrange album, As far as it goes for the standards, however, the structure is indeed basically 1:1 with the original. The interpretation factor is just too low here. I know you're a guy who sees things as "what's done is done", but I would have loved to have heard this with other ideas added to the picture. Looking forward to whatever you have in store next, Marcus, even though this one is a NO-go.

Cribbed from djp's redesign on May 23, 2004, only with my handle added in, welcome to OC ReMix v4.2 (so-to-speak). This design questions and issues thread continues where the old one left off. Please direct any and all questions and issues regarding OCR's current site design and interface here for djp to eventually attend to. Thanks for your help, and we all hope you enjoy the continuing development of OCR. ---------------------------------------------------------------- To Do: Add Folding@Home group to sidebar Implementation of new avatars & mascots Revision of torrent listings (sent to aubrey) Expanded Site History Add publishers for Guild Wars (NCsoft), Max Payne (Gathering of Developers) and Pictionary (LJN) Fixes: Groups only appears in sidebar when viewing Main Page Fix tab clicks from resetting vertical page position Fix of special characters displaying as code on front page and preview text DKC SPC/RSN link fixes Word "songs" needs to be capitalized in the window title; already properly capitalized everywhere else Clicking 50 or 100 on pagination for Songs does not change # of listings; works everywhere else Extend GameURLs of Final Fantasy X-2, Final Fantasy II, Final Fantasy Adventure, Final Fantasy Legend II, Final Fantasy Legend III, Final Fantasy Mystic Quest & Final Fantasy Tactics Suggestions: Chipamp extension support suggestion by OverCoat Highlighting for "Download" tab? More content on "Review" tab? Judges decision tabs? vBulletin: (possibly unable to be changed) Newly-read topics/posts sometimes not registering as read upon refresh (was problem in phpBB, possibly browser issue instead) (possibly unable to be changed) URL quirkiness in WYSIWYG Changes to 10-character/5,000-character/4-image limit in posts? Increase size of text for post previewing? Ability to (again) access mix writeups from top of Review threads? Implementation of auto-double post merge? More avatars shown per page in avatar selection? Colors/bolding of members in groups? Add redirect to homepage in vB forums "default" style Special character password issue? (could be old/fixed)

Couple o' months. Honestly, it's a lower priority vs. all the other stuff currently going on.

Agreed. Yeah, I goofed on this one for some reason. Sorry 'bout that. I have no idea why I made the mistake. Simfiles probably aren't sorted properly. No worries. We fixed it. Mouse has a co-credit now as well.