djpretzel

No, I don't want them listed in full on the homepage. It just doesn't scale well, imo. I believe a top-level link will suffice.

Well, common dogma says humans do better with navigation lists that have a max of seven items; anything else and it tends to become less usable, regardless of whether there's space available or not. I'll definitely add it to browse page and drop-down navigation, but arguments that it needs to be VERY prominent are persuasive, seeing as the protocol itself relies on a bunch of users to even make sense. And for the record, I agree with DS that the WIP forum being highlighted more is a good thing!

Well, here's one idea: I could make them a top level link. i.e. about, browse, community, links, mixing, store, TORRENTS, home I do feel like that list would then be getting a little long, however... If I nixed "mixing" (page would still exist, but we'd move it under "about" for navigation), I'd feel comfortable that there's enough space... Thoughts?

Well, this is an interesting discussion. Hands-down, they need to be featured/linked more prominently if they're not going to literally be listed right on the homepage. Honestly, though, wouldn't a link or graphic of some kind to a separate page listing them suffice? There are sites far more dependent on torrents than us that still reserve the homepage for news and stuff... I felt having the entire list was rather clunky, plus it could easily grow, and eventually it'd start to look REAL ridiculous. Thoughts?

Sure: The alternate sort methods are less important for the song listing; sorting by post date, composer, and ReMixer would all lose the grouping on the ReMix list. The grouping has issues - it only groups within each page of 50, creating some potentially confusing situations where things reoccur or break between pages of 50 results. This is less of an issue on the song list, where again the dominant sort order is alphabetical, which doesn't cause too much beef. For each song, all we provide is mixcount, making the sublist nice and manageable, whereas for each mix, we need to provide post date, remixers, songs remixed, and also length at the moment, making it take up far more space, almost making by-game grouping LESS friendly because you'd scroll to a point where you could no longer see what game was being mixed. Pretty much. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's far from straightforward, and might end up with negative effects that outweigh any benefit. I do think these things through, btw

OverClocked ReMix judge and director of the Final Fantasy VII tribute album Voices of the Lifestream (http://ff7.ocremix.org) Andrew "zircon" Aversa was recently voted the winner of SquareSound's (www.squaresound.com) "A Tribute to Nobuo Uematsu" Arrangement Competition. The winning participant out of 53 entries with his Final Fantasy VI medley "Dirt Devil," Aversa earned a combined score of 96.22%. zircon walked away with the grand prize of a limited edition promotional copy of Voices of the Lifestream, and two VIP tickets to the March 1, 2008 performance of Distant Worlds: Music from Final Fantasy (www.ffdistantworlds.com), including the official concert program and limited edition CD, performed by the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra. The tickets to the Chicago concert include entrance to the exclusive meet-and-greet with Final Fantasy series composer Nobuo Uematsu following the performance. Emerging as runner-up was Kenley Kristofferson, who runs the Into the Score podcast (www.intothescore.com) dedicated to the academic study of video game music, with his own Final Fantasy VI medley, "Hundreds of Voices (Swinging in Unison!)." All of the entries are available for download on SquareSound's website, and Aversa's winning piece was recently posted to OverClocked ReMix (www.ocremix.org). Larry "Liontamer" Oji, OC ReMix's head submissions evaluator and among the competition's four judges, noted the prestige of what was at stake: "It was definitely a privilege to judge such an important competition from SquareSound, with a very meaningful first prize on the line. Having the opportunity to meet any composer in person, let alone Nobuo Uematsu, and express one's fandom and thanks is something a lot of musicians in the community don't have the good fortune to experience." zircon will be attending Distant Worlds with girlfriend and fellow OC ReMix judge Jillian "pixietricks" Goldin. Having created Voices of the Lifestream, Aversa hopes to present his awarded copy of the album to Uematsu in person: "Both Jill and myself are really excited to see Distant Worlds and meet Mr. Uematsu, even if only briefly. We're huge fans of his music; between the two of us, we've remixed over a dozen of his compositions. I personally consider him to be my all-time favorite video game music composer. It will be a dream come true if I can personally hand him a copy of Voices of the Lifestream." Links: *SquareSound: Andrew Aversa Wins Our Tribute to Nobuo Uematsu Arrangement Competition! *SquareSound *Distant Worlds: Music from Final Fantasy *Andrew "zircon" Aversa at OverClocked ReMix *Kenley Kristofferson at Into the Score *Larry "Liontamer" Oji at VG Frequency *Jillian "pixietricks" Goldin at OverClocked ReMix *Nobuo Uematsu (植松伸夫) at OverClocked ReMix *Voices of the Lifestream

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In this instance the songs come back as 50 separate nodes (per page) in a big XML document, and XSLT is used to group them by game using the muenchian method, which generates a unique key based on an attribute, in this case the id of the game. There are of course a hundred different ways to skin a cat, but one of my design goals for OCR is to avoid using anything I feel is too language-specific. I prefer XSLT to smarty templates for this reason; though many are unfamiliar with XSLT, it overpowers most templating solutions by a significant margin and allows for modularity, language agnosticism, etc., and is also a W3C recommendation, for whatever that's worth. It'd be the same basic SQL query either way, to answer your question, it'd just be rather uglier, imo, to have to handle grouping of that nature in smarty or with custom PHP. This is one of the few instances where I do any grouping or sorting in XSLT, however, because MySQL (and RDBMSs in general) is considerably faster at that sort of thing, especially on larger result sets.

To help highlight the work Larry's done in associating mixes with specific songs from games, and to make this information easier to navigate, we've recently improved our song listing. You can view it at: http://www.ocremix.org/songs/ With the power of muenchian grouping, I managed to get songs aggregated per-game. It results in some funny groupings when sorting by song title or mix count, but for the more useful view of sorting by game name, it's rather helpful. Thanks, -djp

Oh... no no no... this is wrong. If you've got 42" or above that supports 1080p or even 1080i, and you can't tell the difference between upconverted DVD and even 720p content, much less 1080, something's wrong. Honestly. I'm not a hi-fi snob that will tell you that the difference between, say, 16-bit 44.1khz audio and 24-bit 192khz will "blow your mind" or anything like that, but I can plainly tell the difference between interpolated definition and native definition HD content. Upconverting DOES make things look better, but you can't get blood from a stone - the detail's just not there to begin with, and no amount of interpolation is going to bring it back. 720p and 1080p movies, of which I have a fair number, look ridiculously better than upconverted DVDs on both my 50" and 64" HDTVs. Anything sub-42" and you MIGHT have an argument. As a side note, perhaps the end of the format war will bring more attention to one of Blu-ray's more interesting features/specifications: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BD-J

Had the 360 featured HD-DVD by default, the fight would likely have gone the other way. At any rate, this definitely makes my PS3 more valuable. I can't WAIT until blu-ray recorders/media get down to sane prices.... the prospect of being able to back up that much data to optical is really appealing... BTW, for those who own blu-ray players - HIGHLY recommended: http://www.ocremix.org/amazon/?id=/detail/B000MRAAJM/

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GrayLightning is a lie.

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I concur. I'd also like to add that the clean instruments run through Guitar Rig DO sound pretty awesome, however...

I'm working on plenty of stuff that should trump this handily, but thanks I've been breaking my back lately trying to improve the site while still posting mixes AND working on a State of the ReMix AND trying to give my girlfriend the anniversary/valentine's she deserves. It's rough.

As a side note, while GVI can coexist nicely with other software, Gigastudio is one of the pickiest, most-likely-to-blue-screen-your-pc pieces of software in existence, hence most of its serious users place it on dedicated boxes.

Should be fixed. Layout is now more fluid and will wrap at higher resolutions, although sometimes this can result in unpredictable results. Competitions forum added. In general, homepage is in flux. Things might be added, taken away, or whatever based on feedback, new features, etc.

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happy b to the c

I've got about 30 I need to do myself, then Larry suggested we start a thread. Last.fm CAN be a good source, but sometimes - especially when an image hasn't received a lot of votes - it's very uncertain as to whether it's accurate. We don't want pictures of the wrong people ... I'll update this thread when I've processed the 30 queued icons, at which point the fun can commence

Look for something similar here, soon.

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Making composer icons available as avatars would be confusing and ambiguous; the whole reason I added them was to increase recognizability of composers, and pairing them up with one or more forum accounts in my opinion would be more likely to jeopardize that and dilute the benefit. In other news: http://www.ocremix.org/organization/id/123/ I've integrated the icons into system and organization detail pages as well.

I've added small (PNG, 2kb or less) cropped mugshots of VGM composers, where available, to all lists of composers (main list plus filtered lists). http://www.ocremix.org/composers/ http://www.ocremix.org/system/c64/composers/ http://www.ocremix.org/organization/id/1/composers/ I also intend to integrate them into detail pages later today, if there's time. This seems like a small thing, but pictures can say a thousand words... my hope is that these icons will help people more readily identify a given composer with his or her works through visual association. We'll be working on tracking down missing images where possible. Thanks, -djp