Emunator

Holy sweet lord both of these songs are soooooo good. I think I'll probably be voting at the last possible minute here Great work to both you guys!!

Just throwing this out there, I'm still absolutely on board to assist with this whenever I can. I haven't heard from you in a while, Jade, but if you can make me useful somehow I'm still here

Thanks for the offer, but my computer borked this morning and the hard drive is completely fried. Looks like I'll have to put this one to rest Sorry guys. Thanks for all the really nice feedback though! This won't be my last foray with ethnic music and it won't be my last time touching the DK64 soundtrack, so be prepared!

You guys have any new due dates/deadlines at the moment?

Updated. Not a lot of new official projects to add on, but a LOT got taken off. Shows we're making progress overall Most of these projects don't have more than 1 or 2 open tracks anyway... maybe it's time to get some new projects star-- *shot* EDIT: hahahaha did I just get ninja sniped by halc by ONE MINUTE? Well, my edit supercedes yours, so suck on that!

Wow, this is one strange remix. I'm not sure if my usual approach to evaluating would apply here, I've gotta say I've never listened to anything quite like this. That said, I'm still gonna try and give this an objective production/arrangement evaluation by OCR standards. The writing is unquestionably energetic and fun to listen to, I really like the over-the-top glitches and breakdown sections. They're very engaging, and the synths and sounds are all pretty nicely chosen. The arrangement itself is pretty great and doesn't grow stale at all. Basically, my critiques here will probably just amount to small little instances where I think certain effects don't work as well as they could, or other small fixes, because this seems pretty solid as-is. At :58, I'm not sure how I feel about that plucked bass synth, it gets a little bit crowded in the low end when it's competing with the other bass sound. You might have to make some concessions with one sound or the other. The transition at 1:35 feels noticeably weak, and the drum breakdown section immediately after with a huge hole in the bass frequencies (even after the bass drops in, you've only got it playing in one ear which sounds very weird) is also a bit awkward. I'd suggest focusing your attention most on that section, because I'm also feeling like the drums aren't nearly as cohesive, timing-wise, as they could be there. Basically, look at that entire section and see what you can do to polish it up. Past that? This is surprisingly solid given how many risks you took with the style, and I'm having a hard time pulling up more critiques to lob at you. The transiion at 3:18 could probably serve better right before the most intense section of the song, since I feel like it's your strongest transition and would most naturally lead into something a lot more intense. This was really enjoyable, hit me up when you've got a submission-ready version cause I'll definitely want to keep this Cheers, sorry it took so long to get to you!

Actually, on repeat listens this one should be fine on the panel. I was a little too harsh on it the first time. Go for it

Uhhh, ok. Maybe I oversold it a bit, it's nothing THIS cool. I wish, though

Alright, I promised you guys and update, so an update you shall get. I was hoping to wait until we officially had the album submitted for evaluation, but that's a few days off, I guess. Right now, we're just waiting on AkumajoBelmont's Enchanted remix. Once that's in, we'll have one remix of every single theme on both OSTs. That'll make this the first of the DKC projects that actually fully covers the soundtracks they're remixing (the last two OCR DKC albums omitted the fanfare themes and game over themes.) Aside from Enchanted, all of our final WAVs have been mastered by Flexstyle as necessary, cut as part of a gapless album and encoded in FLAC and MP3 and roughly tagged according to OCR standards. That means that we've got release candidates for... just about everything I can report that the gapless playback sounds gorgeous but tastefully-done; we took a lot of measures to do that process right without shoehorning it in on tracks where it wouldn't sound good. tl;dr: Flex did a fantastic job on working in gapless integration, and it absolutely enhances the album quality. Think Kong in Concert, but without certain tracks being rendered unlistenable outside of the album because of overly-awkward cut-ins and cutoffs. I can't firmly speak to a release date, but I'm hoping to at least be finished with the evaluation phase by the end of the month. I'll be pushing those who're evaluating the project to make that happen and I'll be finishing my own evaluation up shortly to help facilitate. After that, I'm not entirely sure what the OCR schedule looks like, but I'll post updates as I know more about when we're able to release. It all depends on staff availability and the existing project queue. Final artwork/media preparations are underway. Mine and Cody's contribution to that package is finished after hundreds and hundreds of hours of collective work, and The Maverickk is making some last-minute changeups to his album art package that should be finished in the coming weeks. That means we'll have an album cover to share with everybody! As for the video previews, we're a little bit behind schedule on releasing those, I said I wanted to release an extended audiovisual preview ahead of time to tide everybody over while we wait for evaluation, so I'm talking with Drew Gourley to see what we can do to get that to market. It may be a bit of a wait though just to ensure that we have a quality final product. He's also at work on the project website, which will be made from the ground up instead of using a template, so that's definitely worth getting excited about too! Here's some final stats on the album: 64 remixes + 12 bonus mixes = 76 remixes total by 64 unique artists, clocking in at nearly 5 hours and 20 minutes of playtime spread across 4 discs. I'm going to state this here first because I anticipate that I'll be saying it a lot in the future: this album is NOT MEANT TO BE LISTENED TO IN ONE SHOT. We specifically chunked up the album so that it can serve as 2, 3, or even 4 individual listening experiences, depending on how you cut it up. So I don't want to hear anyone complaining about how the album is "too long" The album will be just as good if you treat each disc as an individual project. To all project artists and contributors, another thing you have to look forward to sometime in the next month is our internal listening party, where everyone will get a pre-release copy of the album and we'll have an IRC party over the span of a few days and share our opinions with the rest of the artists. For many of you this'll be the first time you've heard completed songs outside of your own or on the project forums, so hopefully a lot of you will be able to make it! I'll be in touch personally as more details develop. On top of that, we've still got an absolutely mind-blowing secret that we've kept up our sleeves that'll reveal itself when the time is right Not gonna drop hints or anything but keep in mind that the biggest bombshell of the project is still yet to be revealed! I think that pretty much covers everything. The music is sounding absolutely fantastic, so much better than I ever could have imagined when I started the project. Everyone brought their A-game here, that much I can say for certain. The tracklist you see on the first post is final, and looking over that should give you a lot of reasons to be excited. We've got artists like Prophecy, Matt Drouin, and mv who haven't remixed anything in over half a decade returning with some stellar material, some long-await collabs such as halc & anosou finally coming to fruition, musical contributions by Dave Wise himself, and remixes done in genres that have never been heard before on OCR. That's pretty much all I've got to say for now. I'll keep posting as things develop but hopefully this will serve as the obligatory GETHYPE post you've been looking for Cheers!

I thought you were using acoustic drums, I just mean you've got really nice sounds here. The snare is gritty and adds some resonating atmosphere when it hits, all the other drums are appropriately reverbed, not too dry and not too wet. They sound good IMO. Your mileage may vary though

Still hearing a lot of the same issues from earlier here :\ The drums are weak and not carrying the track at all. Some of the synths are pretty generic, although compliments to your lead writing and the piano, which is sounding very Pokemon-esque and interesting to me as a listener. Kudos there There's some low-end frequencies like the low piano notes that are causing a fair bit of mud when they show up, too. Scale back on the reverb or make some EQ cuts to those instruments to make sure your soundscape doesn't get too muddy. Still well below the bar, but I can hear this improving and taking on a more personalized sound compared to older versions. It's up to you how far you want to take this, it's got quite a bit of promise!

The hell happened to my post? I just submitted a full-on mod review and the forums at my response Ugghh, here goes again... You've got some really cool sounds in the intro here, especially those choirs. What sounds are you using? I want 'em The drum writing itself is pretty damn neat, but Rozo's right - your samples are super exposed and the snare particularly could stand to come down a little bit. Once everything kicks in, you've still got a fantastic backing track working in your favor, but everything else is not holding my attention. I don't think you can get by with such sparse instrumentation on the judges panel, this is gonna need more writing and more sounds to fill things out. That also leads into the issue of the arrangement itself being pretty conservative and in need of some personalization. The sounds that you're using are a decent enough expansion, but I don't really hear any original writing or countermelodies whatsoever in here. If you're looking to pass the panel, you're going to have to ramp up the arrangement level and get a little creative with your instrumentation. That said, you've got a fantastic springboard to launch off of here... the skies the limit, you're working with some great sounds and I think you could do a lot with the pallet you've crafted for yourself Good luck dude!

Honestly, I'm not very wowed by the synths in the intro. The very deliberate, blocky bassline is an interesting stylistic choice, but the synth sounds themselves just aren't doing it for me. For that repeating synth riff in the background, I'd like to hear something with a little bit more personality, perhaps some vibrato or portamento to keep that riff alive and engaging. Or hell, throw some automation on there at key transitions. Drums are sounding really good, much improved over your past mixes. As far as the arrangement goes? Damn, damn good. Source link isn't working so I can't say for sure if it has enough source, but if it is, I daresay this would probably be good to go with a little bit of polishing on the synthwork. The guitars are fantastic, very crunchy and atmospheric. The mixing is pretty decent, though I'm hearing a bit of a frequency hole combined with some muddiness around :53 where the song really kicks into gear. It sounds strange on headphones, though I might just be grasping at something that's no big deal. Would love a second opinion on this... *cough* other workshop mods...*cough Really sick arrangement, one of the best I've heard from you. Still not entirely sure on the mixing and whether there's something wrong with it or I'm just hearing things through 5:30 AM ears. Synth work definitely could use some sound changeups though, IMO. This one's real close though, I feel!

No need for a collaborative album when you've proven that you're obviously destined to tackle this soundtrack yourself. Nah, but seriously, you are SO good at this please keep making remixes from this soundtrack and I'll love you forever <3

Alright! Looks like I'm making a trip to Flexstyle's place yet again to finish off the mastering and everything one last time If you have any last fixes you want to send me, they need to really, really be in my inbox in the next 3 or 4 hours. Otherwise, that's it. We won't be accepting any new versions of old songs past today. Will be posting a substantial update tonight about the status of the project and what the next few months will look like as far as Double the Trouble is concerned. Be prepared!

You really need to remix the entire Diddy Kong Racing soundtrack by yourself. I would be able to die happy if that wish came true. That's all I've got to say here

Right on man, I'll keep that in mind but you're still definitely at least getting credits in the Comments section on the Mp3s and in the writeup on the website at the very least

You bastards lucked out, I'm exhausted and I'm going to bed now. That buys you some extra time, but if the songs/updates aren't in my inbox in about 8 hours when I wake up, Imma bust some heads up in this joint! Word to ya momma

What is a bouzouki?

That's because everything is always Larry's fault. Mystery solved.

Fantastic performance! You don't see these kind of piano arrangements come around here often. Just as a side note, though it doesn't affect my enjoyment of the mix overall, I hear the same hi-frequency noise as OA did. Not crazy, bro

Awww, sorry I was asleep. I heard your version and it's actually sounding really awesome. Hit me up when you wake up and we'll discuss wrapping this up properly. It's deadline day, so as far as I've concerned there's about 23 hours left before I have to put down my angry foot and cap some mofos. Dig it.

I can chime in on this one, it's actually a TON of work. Hope I'm not stepping on any judge's toes here, but since I'm staff and a project director/coordinator/assistant multiple times over, I think I can speak to this a bit. Once all of the music for a project is completed, the whole album needs to go through the whole evaluation phase first, where it's basically looked at by a panel of staff to see if it's up to the OCR quality bar. Nothing really can move forward officially without passing eval. Also, staff needs to ensure that every artist on the album contributes a content policy agreement or else their songs can't be released on the album. Once it's approved, some things involved in the release process include creating a fully-functional website with mirrors and a torrent for all artwork and music. The music all needs to be tagged and properly encoded to Larry's stringent standards in FLAC and MP3 formats. This is super in-depth. Someone also needs to create an associated Facebook page for everybody to like. There's also the trailer and, eventually, uploading all of the individual tracks to Youtube and sometimes other sites like last.fm. Somebody's also got to draft up a press release as well as arranging any promotional pimpage to other websites as far as interviews or pre-release reviews go. Also, prepping any mixflood posts to accompany the album launch must be done, which entails a writeup by djp and separate OCR-format tagging for each song. All of this needs to be pretty tightly coordinated on release day to make sure everything goes smoothly, i.e. the torrent is properly seeded, there's no typos on any of the release materials, tags, or the website, and that all of the songs are properly encoded and ready to be unleashed on the world. There's probably more that I'm forgetting but that's just a sampling of all the stuff that needs to happen for an album to release. It's a huge amount of effort; I think a lot of folks start up projects assuming that it's just a matter of finding some quality remixers and getting a tracklist down, but it goes beyond that. Bottom line is, if you're not willing to be an integral part in making a lot of this happen, don't start a project in the first place. Getting claims and nice-sounding songs is often the easy part, but all of the non-music stuff really piles up. Staff will usually do as much as possible to help facilitate this but it requires commitment and effort from the director first and foremost to get there. This goes especially for big projects, as I'm finding out myself while tackling administrative/last-leg work for DKC3 and Maverick Rising at the same time It's totally doable and actually quite a bit of fun at times, but I don't think a lot of people are really aware of the time investment and effort required to do it right. Hope that answers your question to some extent!

Wow, did I never comment on this? My bad, I really like this one, it's funny hearing you tackle the same source over and over in different styles, each one being very enjoyable in its own right. Dig it!

Flagging for later listening, this looks promising Thanks for sharing!