Nabeel Ansari

Well, first of all, if a game announcement is making you "nervous", that's probably a bit of a health concern, but in any case, there's no grounds for the assumption that people in the Milky Way traveled to Andromeda (instead of the game taking place with people already in Andromeda) or that the Reapers are part of the plot. We know nothing of the game's plot, if it takes place before or after Mass Effect, if that even matters, etc. It's sci-fi. You can do everything in sci-fi writing, especially when you have the multiverse theory, the easiest end-all-be-all for retcons. Regardless of how they justify moving to Andromeda, it's not really going to matter, at all. I doubt the story of the new game will try and heavily tie itself to the original trilogy with intergalactic astropolitical theory. It's probably just going to be some dressed up stuff that boils down to "nothing that happened there matters here" and the game story will be self-contained. Or they simply won't address the original trilogy at all, which in my opinion is a far better and smoother option. Easiest way not to have conflicts in your canon is to not have a canon. Since the original trilogy is the only other entry in the franchise, this is still an option for them (it wouldn't be if it there were more games/stories spread across space and time, like in Star Wars Expanded Universe). As the Zelda timeline showed us, trying to connect all your games with whacky theory is a fun exercise for like 5 minutes. If the game doesn't focus on it (i.e. if Andromeda doesn't directly try to tie itself to the trilogy), neither should you, because you're sidestepping the experience the developers wanted to give you.

Looks like my instinct that they weren't just doing a graphical update was spot on.

This is actually a pretty amazing idea. It would be interesting to see how they handle Zack meeting Cloud, though, since Cloud never remembered Zack until much later in FF7.

I don't think they aren't reproducible, but I think what he's getting at is that that kind of comic relief worked better in the old text-based days. If things are fully voiced, animated, etc. things might get really awkward (especially when Cloud's in drag). It was easier to get away with stuff like that because they were just "themes", but now it's going to be actual events displayed on screen. Of course, that would make for a charming, fun game (see: old Final Fantasy games) rather than the new super serious (see: Advent Children). It depends what direction Squeenix wants to take it. It's either going to be serious alternating with goofy (I don't think that's likely, judging the new FF stuff) or super serious, in which case they're gonna have to change sequences like that.

Do you have any examples?

You think people who do that are cool? Shitty role models, man. ... ... ... Jabbing aside, it was sarcasm. Even though the storytelling is carried almost entirely through cheesy one-liners. FF6's dialogue, if they remade the game, would need a complete re-write (so that conversations carry the way real people would talk to each other). FF7 suffers a little less from this issue, since the dialogue consists of more than just exposition interspersed with "I want to help you." "Why?" "I don't know... ... ..." I rest my case.

This may be my personal opinion but I don't think any links you posted are examples of a composer failing to remake his own music, so ??? Squeenix + Uematsu have proved more than competent in arranging FF music (FF7 in particular) with their constant efforts in the FF piano collections, the Black Mages, Earthbound Papas, and the Distant Worlds concerts. It would be a breeze for them to redo the FF7 music, especially with live instruments given their experience and resources. Rarely on OCR do you see someone who just records a full orchestra for their stuff with ease. There's good intentions behind sourcing it to the fans, but I don't think there's anyone better suited to it than professionals. We *do* have many professionals here, so yes, it's possible that OCR could pull it off with really tight quality control, but why do you think Squeenix would bother when they have their proven talent with decades of experience and better resources? That being said, writing for the FF7 remake would be a dream come true for everyone, so dreaming is okay. ;P There's also the issue of implementation. Video game composing isn't just about writing tracks and sending them to the game developers, so I'm sure the devs would appreciate having a music team to communicate with instead of an internet forum community.

If there's any broken boring Final Fantasy game they should fix, it's Final Fantasy 6.

They in fact have not reached their stretch goal, which is 2,000,000 GBP, not 200,000.

It's almost as if I can quote myself saying as a personal rule, you decide how high the number of years has to be for it to be worth it. If that floats your boat, sure, or you can just look at their store, see the prices for their current stuff and read about the libraries they're working on to gauge approximate prices for potential releases you may be interested in. It's not rocket science, it's just smart consumer attitude. No emphasis needed, I used the words "upfront cost" because they specify the exact meaning of what I was saying. The sound, the patch format organization, the PLAY engine. So everything about it.

VII is a lot more popular and what people have been begging Square Enix for (for quite a while).

Meteo sees all Meteo knows all

This is a big misconception plaguing software consumers; there is never a circumstance where you own software. Whether you pay subscription or pay a one-time fee, you merely have a license to use that software which is controlled by the whim of the retailer or manufacturer (this is outlined in the terms of use we usually agree with and simultaneously ignore). You don't ever own software. You may own the DVD's for the software, and you may own the iLok device that you store your license on, but you never own the software. So, using this to try and compare subscriptions to one-time purchases is invalid. There's only really one valid argument against subscription based services, and it's what Timaeus touched on. Add up the prices of the libraries/bundles you want from EastWest, call that your threshold. Find a number n = threshold / ($50 x 12). In other words, find the number of years n where you will start losing money. As a personal rule, you decide how high n has to be for it to be worth it. For me, an n beyond 4 years is plenty worth it. Also consider that over time, the number of products they have in the catalog increases as they make new ones, adding to your threshold over time if you start using them (and thus increasing your n). Also consider that in subscription based model, you can avoid taking a huge bank account hit or having to wait on having the libraries in order to budget and save money. It's instant gratification for minimal upfront cost.

There's already a thread on this, but yeah, I'm using it and loving it. The only thing I don't like is some of the content in the libraries. This has nothing to do with grievances for the service, though, just grievances for specific instrument libraries. Composer Cloud is what they say it is. You pay $50/month (or $30 for existing customers for first year), you get log-in based single computer DRM access for all libraries sold by Soundsonline (with the exception of anything beyond Gold level and some specialty packages like QL Spaces). If it's an EastWest library, they will have it. Everything is presented to you and managed in the EW Installation Manager. Licenses are automatically set up, so all you have to do when you want to use a product is to download it and fire it up. It's actually kind of a greedy instant gratification; if I suddenly decide I want to own Stormdrum 3, I just hit "download". Bam. If you don't mind space usage and download times, you might as well just install everything so you have it all. Keep in mind, though, it is *quite* a lot of products. I opted not to use Hollywood Orchestra because I have personal issues with their library design philosophies, but if for any reason I suddenly needed it, it's right there when I need it.

That's not what I was saying, at all. I even provided an example as to when the last one would apply. It has nothing to do with interpretation, it applies when a mixer is unable to accommodate certain complexities in a source tune and it's audibly apparent (sounds like a wrong note with the chord they wrote). The point is specificity so the reviewer doesn't have to think of the reason himself, he can view that it's an item on the checklist and consider viewing the mix in terms of that. Bad counterpoint is a pretty general issue that hurts a song in the big picture as much as it does the small details. This is because counterpoint is sometimes integral to texture and when counterpoint suffers, texture suffers, which changes the flow and energy of the song (away from what the arranger might have intended). Anyways, I disagree that these aren't common problems, in fact I see passed remixes that still have these issues. I think the judges just don't touch on them because of how difficult they are to objectify. I'm not saying they have to be on the list, I'm just disappointed that it seems we focus on song form/structure and production but then treat discussion of composition/theory like a faux pas because it's "subjective".

I'd like to urge the inclusion of compositional aspects, such as meandering chord movement, bad counterpoint (where counter melodies are present), bad voicing of parts, lack of agreement between parts, improper understanding of source material's harmonic structure (so when people hear poorly/gratingly harmonized source melody notes they can check this box).

We got some progress! When I get a new desk, then I'll have room for dual monitor set-up and some nice studio speakers.

Here's a pretty solid guide on music production basics, tools and techniques. http://downloads.izotope.com/guides/iZotope-Mixing-Guide-Principles-Tips-Techniques.pdf This is stuff that you should learn before you delve deeper into learning your DAW. Knowing your tools doesn't help you if you don't know how to use them.

Shaggy, I'll throw money at you if you throw sounds at me.

I don't think that's how it works; I think you're describing the bigger problem, which is that clicking on a note with the pencil tool (anywhere in its duration) will delete it. The tab you see isn't for deletion, it's actually a visual indicator of the note's velocity value. It has no functional significance. This may be a result of the DSP being done in 64-bit floats, which can increase computation resources. Hard to disspell hearsay.

Then don't refer to it as an S1-3 video

Like I said, watching someone struggle with their DAW on a crappy screen recorder does not give you grounds to evaluate said DAW. Both actions you described are identically equivalent in FL and S1, "all without switching from the pencil tool". By the way, that's an S1-2 video, not 3.

I find the note entry inconvenience insignificant compared to the other MIDI editing features that S1 has. It's one tiny thing you have to get used to (only once) as a price to pay for all the really nice things FL can never do because of its pattern system (which is starting to show its age). Patterns just downright aggravate me, especially because I've been trained to use it for so many years and find myself struggling to write basic linear music because I'm so accustomed to writing one clip and then just painting it across the timeline for repeats, which stifled my ability to learn how to write music for... 8 or 9 years since I started learning what notes and beats were? You can get the same repeat change-persist (change it once, changes everywhere) behavior in S1 as patterns but without the restrictions, and without it being forced onto you. Ghost notes are more important to me than any other MIDI Editing feature, so I deal with the pencil/erase tools (and like I said earlier, you have to cram a bunch of instruments into one pattern for ghost notes in FL).

Routing in a standard DAW mixer amounts to creating busses and submixes. Routing in FL Studio is much less formalized and simpler to engineer routing solutions because any track can be sent to any other track. There's no business with sends or busses or what have you. Anything you can do in FL routing, you can do equivalently in a standard DAW routing if you work it out. The functionality is not different; it's the form that's what is important in this kind of thing. The point is that it's just slightly more fluid in FL, because instead of creating sends and going through dropdowns to pick outputs, all you have to do is select, say your kick track, move your mouse to the bottom of the, say, pad track, and click the little routing arrow and adjust the tiny send level that pops up. Voila; the kick will be sent post-fader to however many tracks I click like this. It's not really different from sends in function, but if you do a *lot* of stuff like this, the time difference between doing it in Studio One and doing it in FL can start to become very significant. It's not about "can do", it's "how easy". You are correct, though, that the multi-instruments and the Extended FX Chains and such are creating better ways to help complicated FX routing, so I would just instead revoke my statement about "standard DAW mixer", because it isn't really anymore. From a UI perspective, though, I don't like how you need to click on a small arrow on a mixer track to bring up its effects; in FL, when you select a track, the effects will just be brought up on the side. I think there's room for improvement in being able to view mixer effects without so much clicking. I am aware you can stretch upward to place the tiny list of effects on top of the mixer tracks, but at least in V2, it was still kinda pathetic.

I should add that unlike FL, S1 freely allows copying, pasting, cloning, selective deleting, etc. for all automation. It's amazing, I can make an CC1 automation curve for my violins then just highlight and copy and paste them to my other string lanes (same piano roll because of that awesome ghost note track selector), edit them individually or edit them all as the same curve, etc. So flexible. Instrument/MIDI tracks also natively supports MIDI (unlike FL), so if you're into recording automation as well, you can just highlight whatever tracks you want and it'll write the data for all of them simultaneously as you record. Doing MIDI learns and stuff actually works in plug-ins, and mapped CC values on your MIDI controller will just be passed to plugins without extra generic links or stuff like that. Using all those features, I'll record automate all my string sections the same way (in one recording pass) and then make individualized tweaks after, and it'll just let me! With FL it requires tons of "Make Uniques" and "Link to Controllers" with manually writing automation clips or deal with having "edit events" stuff be tied to one pattern, never again to leave it because there's no copy paste support for that data. It might seem like nitpicking until you start to waste literally hours of your time trying to route controllers and cloning/slicing automation clips, compounding more and more hacks onto your project to try and get an end result that could have easily been done in one simple lane. The strength of Studio One's MIDI editing can be summed up as: you can edit everything as together or separately, as patterned or unpatterned, as you want, and whatever method you choose does not destroy and mess up the visual organization of the song arrangement; this is opposed to FL, where your preferred workflow will directly impact the visual organization and in many cases render it cryptic and chaotic. In my latest FL mix, I had to orchestrate in one pattern to get all the ghost notes; however, since it's all one pattern, it's just a garbled mess of singular clip MIDI data in the arrangement timeline. Not great for organization. I also had lots of conflicting CC data between overlapping automation clips and edit events, and it's impossible to see what's going wrong unless I dug in to looking at my automation clip controller assignments. Not fun, not organized. I ended up leaving a lot of those CC tweaks unfinished because I didn't want to deal with weird automation hacks.