Eino Keskitalo

FWIW I'm doing fine on Linux with Renoise. Not sure if I'd really recommend it either though. Also I still have a huge list of things to sort out, such as trying to use Windows plugins with a wrapper, or using any external hardware. But, I didn't want to get Windows just to make music and I'm pretty comfortable with Renoise in Linux as it turns out. Fairly off-topic but there we go. Much more importantly, welcome and good luck, hope you can make a track to submit! It's always great to have new participants. --Eino

Coincidentally, there's a Shadowgate Kickstarter going on. With becket007 scoring it. Nice pick. --Eino

I quite enjoyed Toilet Goat's track, and after listening to the source, I was even more impressed. Nothing wrong with the original, but the new piece had a good drive. Especially the melody was made to work in a really uplifting manner, it felt really exciting in the reworking. --Eino

Holy chrysalid, a UFO: Enemy Unknown mix! *jots this down on the to-listen list* --Eino

Bumping after 2+ years. edit: Links checked and fixed. --Eino

I just finished and submitted a UNATCO mix myself, so I'm looking forward to a chance to take a listen! --Eino

Mmmm, Shining Force.. that's pretty much just ordinary grinding though, isn't it? I do have to agree that Shining Forces are sadly a bit too easy. If the battles had e.g. a turn limit, you would have to fight aggressively. As it is, you can pretty much take your time to cheese the too-passive AI. OTOH, if you lost a fight, the way you keep the exp gained and can just go battle again, gives it a sort of a self-adjusting difficulty level. They're great games, just rather relaxed on the challenge department. SF2 had a difficulty choice in the beginning though, I never tried that. I just recently played through Shining Force Gaidens 2 & 3 - definitely recommended if you haven't played them. Shining Force CD of course is Gaidens 1 & 2 + additional content - haven't played that myself. Anyway, the US version of Gaiden 2 has, for some strange reason, ridiculously powerful Blaze/Freeze L2+ spells. The radius is increased, as is the damage. Your spellcasters can wipe out several enemies on their own. OTOH, that also goes for enemy spellcasters. I think it was actually quite a fun game, increasing the difficulty, and also making the casters more important, real glass cannons for your party. Never got the hang of psychic abilities in X-COM, but you're right about the Ethereals. Especially when played Right (no loading upon failure!), I pretty much left the Ethereals alone (unless I needed to capture their leader) and tried to get the game completed before they completely swarmed the place. Having them attack your base was sUpEr fUn.. (the best game ever, by the way) --Eino

Cool thread! I'm pretty sure there's a kazillion examples. I'm usually disappointed to find overkill techniques, I can't keep myself from using them but they tend to kill the challenge and a lot of the enjoyment from the games. SotN seemed to have a lot of items that break the balance (or just make it a bit too easy): the weapons that let you fire projectiles with the hadoken move, the mana-regenerating (or was it doubling) amulet, the acid mist transformation.. I also remember using the basilard as a weapon for a very long stretch since it was possible to rapid-fire lots of damage with it. No need to use the slower weapons. --Eino

I've submitted my UNATCO mix to the panel. Fingers crossed! I suppose should continue my Death Track and Traffic Department 2192 mixes - it's been a while since I touched either. I guess I should aim to get them to a state where I can post wip threads on the forum. Thanks for the comment on the UNATCO mix WesternZypher! And for the requests/suggestions too. I did play Larry 2 a bit with a friend way back when. Can't say I remember it even having music, probably did have some monophonic beepy stuff to it. Now I'm stuck watching a let's play.. it seems to have the Larry theme at least. --Eino

So I finished minimizing the hum, and adding some slight pan/width stuff to the end part. Then when I listened to the mixdown, I realized that the intro sounded louder than the beginning of the middle part. I turned the leads down especially. Then that made me realize some of the leads were really loud in the middle part. Tuned those down. Then the hihat and snare started sounding like they were too loud.. Fixed that (and turned down the ride down a little too) and I'm done now. Let's see if I manage to write the submission e-mail before falling asleep. Final version Renoise project file if there's anyone with Renoise & interest. Thanks for all the great feedback! --Eino

Thanks for the encouragement! I'm in the middle of final tweaks: I tried to do something about the distortion problems timaeus mentioned, but I can't really hear them (especially the snare), so I can't really fix them either. :/ I did adjust the organ/pad/thing in the beginning's sample loop points, to make the snap/pop associated with it a little less loud, maybe. It's still audibly there. Let's say it's part of the texture. I won't try the compression idea for the drums for this piece, though it sounds like a good idea. For one, I want to finish this and move on, and another, the samples are so low-fidelity, I think that might present a problem with trying to squish them. But I'll keep all the feedback I won't be applying to this one in mind for future pieces, so it's far from wasted! I also adjusted the panning overall a little, and am working on the panning from 2:30 as per Magellanic's suggestion. Won't do anything radical, but will adjust it a little. In the middle of that, I realized there's a really annoying hum in the downsampled timpani, so I'm applying an automated bandstop filter on it. Need to stop working now, but hopefully I'll finish it later today. --Eino

Took a listen trough. An albumful of fairly enjoyable electronica. I haven't tried the game yet but judging by the trailer (to see what kind of a game it is), I would guess it works well for the game and enhances the experience quite a bit. Seems like a solid (partial) soundtrack throughout. Good work! Cool remixes as well. I always enjoy seeing original soundtrack releases, and I'm glad to see OCR also takes on freeware OSTs. It's also very cool to do the OST release + ReMix post thing. --Eino

Ah, no wonder this has been a good day! Happy birthday mr. Ascher-Weiss! That message from Soshiro Hokkai is quite awesome indeed. It's one hell of a great track too, one of the tracks from OCR I've played the most. --Eino

Haha, damn you guys for making good suggestions I'm seriously itching to look into, while I would on the other hand badly like to just let go of the thing already! Been quite ill these few days though, so I haven't been able to even write a submit e-mail (let alone work on the track more). I guess I'm not so pressed for time since I missed that funny three week "deadline". Thanks Gario for that evaluation. I'll see if I'll tweak it some more or just send it forwards when I get better. About the bitcrushing, there's a lot of samples that are already lo-fi, 8-bit, so the distortion might indeed come from there. I think I fixed a pop/snap from the very beginning but that's probably not what you (timaeus) meant. The very first crescendo is a bit.. grainy. I'll give it a more critical listen, the "loud snare" section too. I already used parametric EQ to try to peel some nasty frequencies from a couple of other instruments. (ah ha hah, it's starting to sound like I'll dive back into this one for a bit more..) --Eino

That's a pretty cool prize, I must say! --Eino

Tracer really is an amazing package of music. The subPixel album is also quite cool, the context (both "live" and "chip" versions of the music) is lots of fun, and the music itself, energetic quirky happy warm progressive stuff (I thought) is just what I needed. Reminding me of Gentle Giant among other things. --Eino

Well, I did a quick fix that I'll review later. There's a slight bass freq boost to bassdrum, lofi timpani and bass. For the overcrowded part, the following kept the lead sound ok: I panned the leads a bit more & differently, and layered one of the leads with the same notes, octave down (and tweaked levels). I think that's a quick fix that helps. Final candidate 3: https://www.dropbox.com/s/b7iim851vfrjpa5/eino_keskitalo-sadevakio-fc3-20121003.mp3 --Eino

Did a quick vote! --Eino

Great to see an update on this. I kind of liked the more sombre, sparser sound in the compo submission, but the increased (obvious) source bits are quite welcome in the OCR context. --Eino

I'm getting an error trying to dl the newest version. --Eino

Many thanks for the supportive feedback & comments Gario! I'll probably have to work hard to check the bass levels with my monitoring options (decent cheap headphones and awful band PA monitors), comparing with other (similar) tracks but I'll do that. It'll be easier to tweak the "overcrowded" section, I agree about that and it's bugged me a bit. I'm not sure my samples have the fidelity in them to make them go up an octave, but if not, I'll figure something out. (edit: ah, you also suggest down. I'll see what works) I was kind of hoping to submit today (so I could've submitted two tracks with just the three week wait between them), but that's unlikely. No matter, I'll get to those (hopefully last) tweaks as soon as I can. --Eino

Looks like Almost Frozen finally passed the panel. One of my faeeevorites from this solid, solid album. --Eino

Again, a quick listen - the second version has very cool source usage. The time signature change, you've made it work quite well. Also nice work taking the source apart and managing to stretch it over the arrangement and make it build. Got to agree about the sounds with Rozo, but that's just something to work on. I've started the conversion over to Renoise on the first version, but I haven't worked on it in a while. Since it's been months, I'll soon work on it some more.. sorry about taking so long! --Eino

Took a quick listen to the remix and source - interesting (and quite natural!) genre change! Sounded quite promising. I'll try to take a more close listen soon. --Eino