Rozovian

Not much to say. It's nice. It's a style we don't hear a lot of. I don't like the snare, the repetition, or the noisy long notes in the background (but fortunately they're just in the background). The lead guitar performance is dynamic, but it doesn't feel entirely deliberate. Some parts stand out as loud, some soft, without much thought to where and why they're loud. Getting that under control and using soft sections and louder sections more deliberately will give you more dynamic structure to the track, which would give it some direction and make it feel less repetitive. The track seems to be missing cymbals; I hear occasional crashes but they're mixed so soft that they might as well not be there at all. Bring them out a little more. Sounds like you put a low pass filter on the whole drum kit. I filter my drums too in a lot of my tracks, but not like this. It takes away the highs, without really making the snare and kick any softer. I would suggest you split the drum kit into different tracks, and filter them separately. Alternatively, you can just find a different way to process them. For a one night thing, it's pretty good.

I'm not a big fan of sound effects in music, but as long as they can be used subtly or musically, I'm okay with them. Here a few of them are too loud, but that's their only problem. Speaking of too loud, that's a recurring problem with elements in this mix. What I do when trying to figure out how loud something needs to be is to drop the channel fader to nothing and slowly raise it to hear when the track is as loud as it needs to be to work in that mix. 0:23, the bass is too loud. Those complimentary melody things are a bit too loud. I'd also experiment with note length in the lead; the lead can take pauses too. 0:51 super strings, yeah, I can tell it's not quite right. I would suggest EQing away the frequencies that are dominant in the lead and other foreground elements. Keeping it at a low level in the background also prevents it from becoming too huge. The timbre makes it want to jump into the foreground rather than stay behind the other things. When EQ-ing it: cut, don't boost. 1:33, a good hit comes not from layering similar sounds, but different ones, sounds that do different things. Instead of layering three cymbals, I would look for a noise or shaker I can use for length, a cymbal for timbre, and possibly a tom or something I can use for a bit more body if necessary (though that would take a bit of fiddling with to make sure it doesn't stand out too much). Layering isn't easy, but the idea is to combine the good parts of sounds, not to mask the bad parts. Keep at it. It's one of few sound effect-heavy tracks I don't mind the sound effects in, so you're doing something right. The overall sound design, the synths at least, work well. It's mostly mixing that's the problem here. And arrangement things, if you're aiming to get it on ocr. Regardless, it's a good track to work on.

Cool. I think the biggest complaint I have about this cover is that it sounds like midi. I mean in the sense that the instruments are fairly simple, don't have a lot of articulations or much of a sense of performance to them, and don't take advantage of more advanced mixing techniques. It sounds raw and unrefined. I wonder to what extent that's the instruments and to what extent it's the mixing, and I think you should find out.

I would try some subtle multiband compression to up the levels without disrupting the dynamics much. After that, a limiter cutting the transients should be all you need to keep the track in line. Just be careful with the compression settings, try to maintain the same frequency balance, and don't overdo it. I don't think you need to fret the reverb thing much. It's much easier to mess up the track with too much reverb than to find the perfect reverb to mask the articulation issues with. I'd be subtle with this too. Focus on the articulations of the strings and brass. I'm not an orchestral remixer, so I can't say much to help you there. With that issue dealt with, the question of reverb becomes moot.

I suggest you focus on just one of these tracks for now: put it up as a work in progress and see what people say about it. I'm a Metroid fan, I had a quick listen to your tracks, and I'd be happy to give one of them a more thorough listen and critique.

Uploaded in November 2011. He may have submitted it, had it rejected, resubbed it, had it rejected, and given up, several times by now. He could have given up trying to get something that meets ocr's requirements. Or he could have given up on the track, yet be posted here under another name. I don't know.

Website. We need one. Anyone wanna do one? PM me for details. edit: I'm talking website stuff with Dj Mokram currently. Further interest appreciated, although it dawned on me that it's better for anyone interested to post here instead.

We've got a big album project and we need a website. Anyone here doing web design and interested in doing it for us, drop your portfolios in this thread. If you don't have a portfolio, drop some links to sites you've designed, or upload some designs you've done. Then I'll pick someone I think will fit the project, and we'll talk details. Depending on the design, we might need some cool icons for things too. Icons, simple pictures we can use for navigation. Again, portfolios or examples wanted. And it's always good to drop your portfolio in places where people can find it. We're not the only project that might be looking for web design. PS. there is no money to be had. We can only offer a small amount of nerd points. But those are pretty cool.

Something you can do is to become more involved in the community. Remixers really like to find out what people think of their work. If any remixes inspire you to do art (draw or whatever you do), feel free to share that in that track's review thread. I still get a kick out of having made a track that inspired someone to create jewelry. If you're looking to do promo art for people here, you should put a link to your work, eg your dA gallery or your portfolio, in your signature. That way, people who might be looking for art or artists see it, and if they like your work, they'll remember it when they have a need for your style. For example, the sd3 project can't use any of the official art for the game, nor any game assets (eg sprites). So we had to find artists. Other Square-Enix games getting an album suffers the same problem, so if your style suits a project, the project folks might invite you to the project. You can also just ask project leaders if they think your style would fit their project, though many will say no, and that can upset you. But make your art more visible. You can make a discrete banner to have in your profile that shows some of what you can do. Just don't make it too big. You can, if you aren't already already, get involved in the art contests on the site. That's a good way to meet other art people in the community. Basically, just do stuff around here. There's a lot of community stuff going on off the forum too, eg in the irc channels, gaming, social media/networking sites, and irl. See where you like to hang out. There's a thread somewhere with a map of where in the world you can find ocr folks. Maybe there are a few near where you live. I met most of my ocr friends on the feedback board and the #ocrwip channel, and from talking on IM. That's how it started for me.

Soon! The eval package is about ready. All the music is. Just gotta write a nice little note to staff detailing the current state of things, and then find a convenient time to upload it when nobody is going to complain about in-game lag or anything. Uncompressed, it's about 3 gigs, which on my country connection will take a while. But hey, progress!

Almost missed an updated track. it was updated a while back, but buried somewhere in my downloads. I hope it's the only one I've missed. Next project I'm in charge of is going to be so much better organized. And faster. Dug up that one, got a recent update for another track, everything should be ready to convert file names to the final tracklist and send in for evals. "Early January". Hah!

Safari and Firefox are Chrome now.

OSX 10.9.5, tested with both Safari and Firefox. I've got adblock and some other plugins but I don't think there's a lot of overlap between the plugin sets besides adblock.

Cmd-clicking on remix titles, artist names, dates or sources in the music database, or anything in the latest remixes box, which normally opens the link in a new tab behind the current one, now _also_ opens it in the current tab. I get two tabs with the same page. It makes it difficult to open a bunch of links from one page in separate tabs. This doesn't happen with all links on the site, or even in the music database when clicking on game names. I haven't noticed the site doing that before.

faith quote bj

My tomorrow tends to be a few days later than most people's. I went over the tracklist for some final checks for quality and order. Got me all teary-eyed and goosebump-y over some of the tracks. We (and I'm a very small part of that) have accomplished something amazing, and I really hate being this slow and holding the whole thing back. Next tomorrow: renaming, zipping, uploading.

If only I would practice what I preach, too.

It starts with mixing. You can only do so much with the output (the "mastering", as people like to call it despite actual mastering not being that at all). You have to mix it loud. That means you cant just clip the output for a loud overall sound, because that'll sound terribad. Instead, you should seek to remove superfluous elements of the mix. Frequencies that overlap and that listeners don't need for every track. An example of this would be start the track with a low pad, but high-passing the pad channel one the bass and drums kick in. For the rest of the track, the pad doesn't have those same lows it had in the beginning, but if you time the filter/eq automation right with the kick and bass, the listener won't actually notice. Actually, it starts with sound design. You can have a synth with all kinds of spiky little things messing with the compressors, unnecessary lows pushing the headroom and not really doing anything useful, frequency overlap with other instruments... Lots of stuff like that. The solution you'd likely want to go for is to add effects to mitigate these problems, but finding their source in the synths themselves would be much better. The same goes for samples. You can layer them in good way and bad ways, process them in good ways and bad ways, have them interact in good ways and bad ways. The same goes for recorded audio, where a good recording will need less effects than a bad one. The goes for just about anything. Solve the problem as early as possible instead of trying to mitigate it later on. If not earlier in the process, then earlier in the effects chain. Actually, it starts with arrangement. Your arrangement itself can have a lot of overlap and clutter. You might not need six different pads playing at the same time. You might not need such an intricate hihat pattern. You might not need hihat, shaker, ride, noise percussion, filtered drum loops all at the same time (even though this describes some of my tracks rather well). You might not need more than two hardpanned rhythm guitars. You might not need four melodies playing on top of each other, and you probably shouldn't write them all in the same octave. There are, throughout the process, lots of small (and big) things you can do to make stuff louder.

I was hoping to have been more productive than this, but preparations are almost done now. Just gotta rename them/create a playlist for the album track order and I'm ready to upload. Tomorrow, hopefully. Last chance to get an updated track in before evals.

Unless I'm missing something somewhere, or something's been counted twice, we're looking at 65 tracks. There _are_ multiple remixes of a couple of tracks... each for a different reason, too. Gotta sort out which version of a track is the correct one. Also, seeing the tracks sorted by date tells me how slow things have really been moving.

Abadoss finished his track during my time. I wasn't with the project from the start. This thing is oooooold. Track count coming later.

All right, let's do this. My files are a mess. Time to find _every_ sd3 track I've ever received and sort by creation date.

I'm bumping this because it still has no mod review. Can't do it myself right now, just want to make sure it's not forgotten.

Actually no. Rebirth is pretty good. Fav track right now is probably Garpcalypse's track tho. Beautiful source, nice arrangement.