Olarin

Don't sweat it. Being able to admit there was a misunderstanding probably puts you above over 95% of the internet. To a large extent, you were complaining about how some of the large companies conduct business, and your frustration is understandable. You just have to understand that when you start questioning how people should and shouldn't be able to make money off of music, a lot of small independent artists (which includes many of the people on OCR) are going to be worried about the implications. (And if they seemed a little too quick to jump down your throat, you'll have to cut them some slack; these forums have seen a number of people far more abrasive than you, trying to argue things like 'music piracy never hurts anyone', and far less willing to listen to counter-arguments.)

True. However, sometimes it isn't even the estate or family making money off the music, and it doesn't seem fair. The problem is, if you don't let anyone make money off of an artist's music when they're dead, that limits the potential rights of the artist themselves when they're alive. I have the right to license my own songs and recordings; but if I don't want to mess with that, I also have the right to sell those rights to someone else for a quick buck, and let them try their luck at publicizing and distributing my stuff, and it isn't necessarily fair to them if I die tomorrow and those rights vaporize. This is where a lot of the problem with fighting the 'big evil companies' lies - you can't pick and choose whose rights you protect. Either music is copyrightable, ownable, and licensable, or it isn't. Much of the problem lies with artist education - you have to know enough not to sign a deal that will rip you off in the long run, and that requires a lot of research as well as a certain amount of caution and common sense.

Excellent arrangement ideas, and some very skilled playing. Some criticism, hopefully of the helpful variety: - First and foremost, your swing feel strikes me as awkward (I'm assuming you're the pianist here? If not this is directed towards whoever performed for you). You've clearly got plenty of technique as your fast runs sound very good, but on your basic eighth-note lines, it sounds like you're trying too hard to swing - the swing rhythm is over-pronounced, if that makes any sense, almost like you're trying to play a dotted-eighth-and-sixteenth-note rhythm. Try to relax a bit. If I may make the suggestion, you might want to grab a good jazz album from the library and try to imitate the feel of the phrasing; if you need suggestions, saxophonist Hank Mobley comes to mind as a good place to start for natural-sounding swing; if you'd prefer to listen to a piano player, you might try Red Garland. - The recording is a little echo-ey; I'm certainly not qualified to give serious advice on recording / mixing / mastering, but at a guess it seems like the mic could be a little closer to the piano? Nice sounding piano though, and the room doesn't seem bad either. - You could probably stand to stretch it out a bit more - you wouldn't necessarily need any more big arrangement ideas, you could just let a couple sections stretch out a bit more and take more time to build up, or possibly employ some repetition. But that's really up to you - there's something to be said for short and to the point as well. As I said, very nice sounding arrangement, I really enjoyed it. I hope you'll polish it up a bit and submit it.

The original post is a little confusing to me, because it seems you're almost searching for some arbitrary threshold number of how many good tracks an album or soundtrack has to have for it to be a good collection of songs. However, albums and soundtracks are more than just collections of individual tracks, or at least they can be. A soundtrack, of course, is meant to enhance another form of media, so whether it's a 'good' soundtrack is going to be dependent on how well it serves that other media (as has already been mentioned in this thread). So for instance a soundtrack could be full of excellent tunes and still be a 'bad' soundtrack, because each song was a poor choice for where it was used in the movie or game or whatever it was used for, but you still might be eager to buy the soundtrack CD. As for an album, although some artists just view it as a collection of tunes, many others carefully plan their track lists to be a complete listening experience that is more than the sum of its parts. Sometimes many of the individual tracks on an album won't be that impressive by themselves or may even seem annoying out of context, but listening to the entire album on its own terms will still be a very satisfying experience. Even if you are just looking at an album or soundtrack as a collection of songs and nothing more, there are still a lot of variables to consider, depending on why you're rendering judgement on the collection. For instance, if you're considering whether to buy an album - if it only has four strong tunes out of twelve, but it only costs five dollars, it's not so bad a deal; if on the other hand it's a rare import or out of print item that you'd have to shell out forty or fifty dollars for, you're probably only going to be interested if you know for a fact you want more than half the tunes that are on there.

It's very simple: things that I like are good, and everyone else is wrong. I really don't know how it is that the rest of you continually fail to understand this.

Glad you mentioned this. I'm working towards recording an album with my jazz quartet and was hoping to include a few vgm arrangements, but was dreading dealing with the licensing. I was actually going to ask you for some advice on the subject as I know you've dealt with the licensing stuff before, and that you've also made some vague comments in other forum threads about having largely given up on messing with it. Has Nintendo made a public statement of this anywhere, or is this a message you received from them personally, or was it just strongly implied in the aforementioned reviews? Depending on the situation I might end up writing some letters anyway just to try to keep myself out of any potential trouble.

The title of this thread reminds me of playing Ocarina of Time. I would frequently pick up rocks and wander around carrying them for as long as possible, chanting "i've got a rock... i've got a rock..." My roommate at the time (whose N64 I was using) found this deeply disturbing.

No. Really, I didn't.

suggestion: if you feel that passionately about putting things into tiny little boxes, nobody's stopping you from making your own website listing the remixes and providing either your own categorizations and/or a user-driven tagging system. obviously it might not get as much traffic as if it were integrated on the ocremix.org site, but it would work just as well in terms of doing what you're envisioning. but you better have quite the supply of patience for the endless stream of irresolvable flamewars about proper use of terminology that would land at your feet.

http://www.ocremix.org/song/id/747/ It got renamed to "At the End of Time", but it still gets listed as "The Brink of Time" in the lists of songs for the remixes that use it. Also, for this particular song, I think it would be a good idea to stick with the title "The Brink of Time", given that it was the title track of an official arranged soundtrack album: http://www.squaresound.com/chrono-trigger-the-brink-of-time-p9.html

I wouldn't ordinarily have bothered with this sort of thing... but it was late, curiosity got the better of me, I clicked zircon's links, and I got a combination that seemed worth posting. The penname of an investigative reporter from the turn of the century for the band name and an Einstein quote for the album title. I think I win. although Yuma International Airport is awfully good too.

A friend of mine has a third party 8-bit nintendo console, and we were surprised to note that the sound was quite off - the pitches were right of course, but the timbres were different; also the noise channel didn't seem as clean, if that makes any sense. I don't remember what my friend's console is called, but I just now did a bit of searching and found a youtube video demonstrating that the FC Twin system is similarly imperfect in its NES sound emulation, and apparently doesn't always get colors exactly right either.

Wow, that Journey to Silius gets a hell of a sound out of the NES system. A quick glance to Wikipedia confirms what my ears tell me - a recorded bass sample to supplement the ol' triangle wave. Pretty impressive.

I'm surprised nobody's mentioned this site yet: http://www.classicdosgames.com/ It's a repository of old freeware games and shareware demos (stuff that was actually legitimately released for free legally, by the author or publisher). It also provides contact information for purchasing anything that's still sold; it's nice to see companies like Apogee providing their old classics for legal sale at reasonable prices. There are also some shareware games that were later released as freeware, either by the distributor, or more often by the individual author if their deal with the distributor wasn't exclusive.

"Now you've really done it! I'm out of orange smoke! You don't expect me to do a decent reincarnation without any orange smoke, do you?"

Your sound card works perfectly. Your sound card works perfectly. Your sound card works perfectly. This is as good as it gets.

"I do not know who `they' are, but that is what they say, is it not?"

I see from your profile that you live in Nasvhille, Tenessee? There should be no shortage of organized jam sessions in that area. Those are your single greatest resource for networking with other musicians. Find a couple good ones and attend regularly, take any opportunity you can get to sit in but don't be pushy, be sure to stick around and listen after you've had a chance to play, pay attention to any advice the experienced players offer, exchange phone numbers with other musicians. Then you can start finding some like-minded people who are good enough to challenge you musically and get some rehearsals of your own together. If you get good enough and are reliable and pleasant to be around, you may also start getting calls from other musicians to jam or play gigs. Us rythm section cats (piano, bass, drums) are almost always in higher demand than the horn players. Also, find musicians you like and make a point of going to their gigs just to sit and listen - not only can you learn a lot by listening, but the more often they see your face the more likely they are to remember you when they're trying to find a sub for the piano player who just pulled out on tomorrow's gig.

blast, beaten to the punch again. i always take too long editing and rereading my post. to be specific, the most common cause of 'garbage' is that a MIDI file intended for playback contains a lot of expressive variation (mostly in timing) that requires some sort of quantization to look good as sheet music. the overriding concept here is that a piece of sheet music does not directly correlate to a sound; it's simply a means of communicating abstract musical ideas.

Your request is unclear. Do you mean a program that can analyze an audio recording of music and generate sheet music to indicate what the musicians played? If so, such technology doesn't exist; the combinations of frequencies from different instruments in an audio file is too complex to split apart into the abstract notions represented in sheet music. (However, note that MIDI files are not recordings, they're just sets of instructions for a synthesizer, and as such can typically be turned into sheet music by any decent notation program)

Okay, just to test, I opened up a file in winamp, set its track number to a five digit number with a leading zero (01752), and brought it back into iTunes. It displayed correctly, although without the leading zero (1752) (but it didn't actually remove the leading zero, it just wouldn't display it). So it can read extra digits, it just won't let you make them. Incredibly stupid, but not an actual problem as far as this goes. Incidentally, as you might guess from the ID #, I was testing with my own ReMix, and I happened to notice that the "Encoded By" field contains the email address from which I submitted the mix. Not a problem for me personally, but is this necessary/desirable? I certainly wasn't aware of this practice when I submitted, and it might be an unpleasant shock to those who prefer to keep their email address a closely guarded secret.

With respect to track numbers being the remix ID number: I've already been doing this manually in iTunes for my own collection, but I ran into a problem - I could only input a maximum of three digits for the track number. Is this a limitation of ID3 tags or merely iTunes being stupid? I worked around this by making remixes below 1000 disc number 1, and remixes above 1000 disc number 2. That's still not a perfect solution though as it leaves the question of what to do with mix #1000 (can't have a track number of 0, as far as I know). With respect to album artist: Isn't the usual practice in a case like this to just make it "Various Artists" or simply "Various"? (That's what I've been using)

Don't OCRemixes automatically come tagged with a genre of "Game" and album "http://ocremix.org"?

See, this just worries me a little bit. You could get into sticky territory here. When you're just releasing something for free, technically you should be paying royalties for every copy produced or downloaded, but you're probably going to fly under the radar (it's not in most game companies' general interest to take legal action against OCR for instance, and some developers and composers have even been involved with or endorsed it). But once you're venturing into *any* sort of profit-inducing territory (even if you're calling it "donation for a free cd" or whatever), you become a much bigger target, and even if you start licensing properly at that point you could potentially get into trouble for the free copies you distributed previously.

I might be interested in laying down some acoustic bass for you. With regards to a potential professional release, though, are you prepared to deal with all the necessary licensing?