djpretzel

UPDATE: We'll be trying again this afternoon, 4/26/2015, starting at or around 5:00PM EST. UPDATE: Issues w/ server config prevented migration. Going to give LiquidWeb, our hosts, a stern talking to. Will update with new migration date once resolved. Introduction Our community is lucky enough to have active online forums where opinions, feedback, project coordination, discussion, and everything in between occurs. While OCR staff make plenty of decisions on IRC, and while we continue to use Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and SoundCloud to further promote VGM & OCR both, ultimately the forums form the heart & soul of what OCR is. That's only going to become more and more true and evident as this year progresses, as most of our big plans are centered around building on top of our forums, expanding them, & integrating them with the rest of the site. But first, a brief history... Our VERY FIRST forums were a CGI version of wwwthreads, a verrrrrry long time ago... these were the forums we were using back when the vgmix split occurred, and in the VERY early days when OCR was actually a side project to the OverClocked web comic. True story. We eventually moved to PHPBB as it represented the best free & OSS option at the time that benefited from PHP & MySQL. As it became clear that PHPBB development was moving WAY too slow for us to keep waiting on it for certain features, we made the switch to vBulletin 3.X. TL:DR; but vBulletin has majorly screwed the pooch... vBulletin 4.X showed some promise but had major flaws. Instead of fixing those flaws, they decided to go for a cash grab and proceed with vBulletin 5, which is a complete train wreck and one of the worst examples of someone ruining their own product I have ever seen in my life. Yeah. That being said, we like what we're seeing with the next version of Invision Power Board (4.0), so we are migrating to Invision Power Board 3.4.7 in anticipation of then upgrading to 4.X later this year. So why should you care? IPS 4.0 will form the foundation that we will be building the future of OCR on. It's going to open the doors to delivering on the promises we've made both here on the site and on our Patreon, and we are super-psyched for what it will make possible! On 4/19/2015, we will be migrating these forums to Invision Power Board 3.4.7... We have performed internal testing to verify that your profile, threads, private messages, etc. should all be transferred over... We will ALSO be backing up & storing all of the archived vBulletin data, so you won't lose ANYTHING, but we recommend that you take your own screenshots, save web pages, export private messages, etc. just to be sure. The vBulletin social groups will NOT be converted/migrated. IPB 3.4.7 doesn't have a similar system, and while there are mods/addons that offer similar functionality, they don't support conversion of existing data AND we don't want to buy/install any addons until we've upgraded to IPS 4.0 later in the year. So if you participate in any social groups and want your conversations backed up, you may want to take screenshots, etc. We're gonna need your help, in a few different ways: First off, we ask for your patience, both during the actual migration (which will involve several hours of downtime for the forums) AND afterwards, as we ALL adapt to & get used to the new forums. I know a lot of folks aren't always comfortable with change, and we've been on vBulletin 3.8.X for a loooong time, so I feel your pain... but we can't stay here forever. Secondly, once we're migrated, we will need your help testing. We will create a separate thread for reporting issues, and we will want to know ANYTHING & EVERYTHING that seems wrong, off, etc. Finally, last but not least, as we move forward we will need your ideas, suggestions, & energy to build on top of this new foundation and take OCR to the future... and beyond!! We'll be sending out an email to ALL forum users closer to the date of migration to repeat this information & get everyone ready & psyched!! Lastly, we'd like to thank all of our Patreon backers for making this change - and many more to come - possible!!

What did you think? Post your opinion of this ReMix.

What did you think? Post your opinion of this ReMix.

To be clear, we believe that free fan works with non-commercial distribution and an emphasis on homage of & education regarding VGM fall under Fair Use exemptions and are part of what make a free, creative, and prosperous Internet possible. We do however strongly advise licenses for anything that's going to be charged for, whether that money is going to charity or directly into artists' pockets.

Good presets are meant to be used, and can often be used verbatim. No need to feel dirty or wrong. No preset-shaming! They can also serve as a jumping off point for JUST the right sound, with varying degrees of tweaking, or to illustrate the capabilities of the synth/library in question. It really only gets squishy for me when you start talking about individual patches that have melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic components, each with substantial structure/complexity, where you can press a key or two, hold them down, and you then use that as the guts of your track. Ahem, Nexus. My objection to doing that echoes my objection to the extensive sampling we sometimes see in ReMix submissions, where an entire melodic part AND accompaniment have been sampled at length, and form the bones of the track, with the artist's own contributions layered on top. In essence, I feel strongly that you should own the bones of your music, but that borrowing some fleshy bits here and there is acceptable and often inevitable. Pretty much.

So, if anyone was wondering about the "coding" behind this wonderful feature: We've got an existing set of tags in our database that were imported from the forum thread tags If a mix was tagged "EDM" - that was techno If a mix was tagged "synth" - that was possibly techno If neither tag was present, that was probably not techno (maybe) Our tags are FAR less complete on older mixes, so as you went back in time, fewer mixes were labeled techno or possibly techno This was written in XSLT, so something like: <xsl:choose> <xsl:when test="/list/terms[./@name = 'EDM']">Techno</xsl:when> <xsl:when test="/list/terms[./@name = 'synth']">Possibly Techno</xsl:when> <xsl:otherwise>Probably Not Techno (Maybe)</xsl:otherwise> </xsl:choose>

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Agreed on all points I'm just bummed it's been so long and no one else has submitted anything from the Bonk series... don't let this be the only one!

You've asked for it... Repeatedly... And we've waited until the time was right and until we had the technology & taxonomy to do things PROPERLY... OC ReMix is proud to announce that all ReMixes will now be classified by genre according to an innovative & intuitive three-value classification system! No more frustrating searches for VGM arrangements that fit your mood, poking around aimlessly in the absence of a comprehensive label that sums up anything & everything one could possibly say about a given song... those days are over. Likewise, we don't want to overburden you with tons of genres like "acid psy-trance happy two-step trap drumstep" that don't mean anything to you. . No, we've distilled our entire genre classification system into three values that we think will cater to almost all of your needs. As Lincoln famously said, you can make some of the people happy all of the time, or all of the people happy some of the time, but you can't make all of the people like dubstep. He was way ahead of his time.But we digress; after a series of intensive focus groups, many internal discussions, and extensive field testing, we will be labeling ALL mixes according to the following three genre values: Techno Possibly Techno Probably Not Techno (Maybe) We feel that this trio of options succinctly captures, with minimal loss of fidelity, the breadth & depth of music on OCR. With 3,000 mixes in genres that might otherwise be described as rock, metal, jazz, classical, hip-hop, funk, ambient, and of course EDM, the variety can get overwhelming. Therefore, using advanced algorithms and pseudo-neuroanalysis, we were able to get to the bottom line and eliminate the vast majority of confusing, extraneous options. Here's an example - you can now find this information on EVERY SINGLE MIX: NOTE: We've included red arrows in this screenshot to help highlight the new genre feature, in addition to yellow highlighting, to help enhance the focus & draw the eye. These arrows won't appear on the actual HTML web pages, but the yellow highlighting will. For more detail, we are providing the following definitions to guide you in the utilization of this exciting new feature: "Techno" - A ReMix that is techno. May or may not also be manga. "Possibly Techno" - A ReMix that is possibly techno, but also might not be. "Probably Not Techno (Maybe)" - A ReMix that is probably not techno, but we can't rule it out entirely. Please remember that this feature is in BETA; we anticipate feedback and are seeking any input you can provide as to how we might further refine this list into only two options or, ideally, a single value. Please use this thread for feedback, suggestions, etc.

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I wouldn't be upset posting this, but I think we should ask Thomas if he can specifically address the panning.

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Well, what made me think about music from an arrangement perspective in the first place was high school band - hearing the individual part & section writing for a composition, working it over ad infinitum in class, etc. really gives you an appreciation for the nuts and bolts, and (in my case at least) makes you wanna tinker with them. That being said, the title theme to Phantasy Star III will always be one of my favorites, and it stuck with me from the day I beat the game to the day I started OCR.

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We're cool with it... if you intend for others to use it, however, it might be better hosting it with source intact on github or something with more transparency - I can't speak for many, but downloading Java apps from random sources (mediafire links, etc.) isn't something I'd consider safe. As a side note, SOME DAY we'll have an official API, at which point we would prefer (and eventually even insist) that it be used instead of any scraping methods. In general, we don't want folks scraping the site, for any reason whatsoever. However, in this case the application in question has a specific focus & limited scope, and protections in place to prevent server load, etc., so we're cool with it!

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What did you think? Post your opinion of this ReMix.

What did you think? Post your opinion of this ReMix.

What did you think? Post your opinion of this ReMix.

What did you think? Post your opinion of this ReMix.

Huge Trekkie, here... knew this day would come, but yeah, the feels. Awesome life.

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A couple reasons: Direct sampling of audio carries with it different copyright implications re: derivative works... It speaks to the amount of effort involved - even if recreating a passage verbatim results in material that is unacceptable by our standards, we do know that effort went into AVOIDING direct sampling of audio... this doesn't necessarily hold a huge sway over the judgment, but it's akin to using extensive presets and loops that end up comprising a major percentage of the arrangement. Here are the results of our analysis, with A/B comparisons: http://ocr.blueblue.fr/files/etc/proof/POKEMOTION_AB1.mp3 http://ocr.blueblue.fr/files/etc/proof/POKEMOTION_AB2.mp3 http://ocr.blueblue.fr/files/etc/proof/POKEMOTION_Analysis1.mp3 http://ocr.blueblue.fr/files/etc/proof/POKEMOTION_Analysis2.mp3 http://ocr.blueblue.fr/files/etc/proof/POKEMOTION_Layer.mp3 The first two examples are A/Bing between the submission and the original (beat-matched), and it's downright seamless. UPDATE 2015-03-25: While unwilling to send us his project file, which would have provided a more conclusive look at the piano part in question, Chris did send us a short video displaying a quantized piano part, running through Kontakt, in the context of the larger Ableton Live project. Kris and I believe we can hear, at the VERY end of this mix, some doubled-up notes, where the original piano part and potentially a quantized part coincide and there's a kind of phase cancellation effect. It's extremely subtle, but that's what it sounds like it could be... None of this changes the fact that, in the above A/B comparisons, you can clearly hear how the piano line is essentially verbatim from the original. The part that Chris illustrated in his video was quantized, but the attacks of each chord in the original are not. Had the quantized part that Chris added been loud enough to actually hear, the phase cancellation effect observable at the end of the piece would have been more noticeable throughout. In other words, if there's indeed a programmed Kontakt piano part being layered in this mix, it is mixed VERY low and is essentially obscured past recognition or substantial effect. If it were prominent enough to actually hear, then the A/B comparisons linked above wouldn't be seamless at all - there'd be a noticeable change in piano timbre when switching between the mix and the beat-matched source. This is what alerted us to a potential concern regarding the artist's claims about the mix, and it remains true. Nevertheless, I had written some words here that were too aggressive in construing this situation as involving intentional deception. For this I apologize. It remains unclear to me why we would have been expected to hear the effect of such a piano part, which is essentially completely obscured by the sample of the original recording, but it is entirely possible and even probable that this was simply a miscommunication and not any sort of misdirection. I alone made a bad faith assumption that was ultimately unnecessary & counterproductive, and again I express my regret for this assertion. The mix still fails to pass OC ReMix standards, primarily due to the extensive reliance on sampled material that well exceeds our threshold for how much of arrangement we want to be coming directly from the submitting artist.

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