djpretzel

@BONKERS Well, this is a surprise! Sounding promising so far. I love this OST too, but I've always found it challenging to interpret - staying close to the original might be the best option, as you've done w/ "Step-Up" (though I think changing the time signature on that source might be interesting...) It's been almost 3 decades since I played the game, but I might be able to help w/ context. In order to do so more effectively, if you could add links to the source tunes on YouTube to your post, would aid in jogging my (and perhaps others') memory. Also, any interest in this being an OCRI release when finished, as we recently did with @Cyril the Wolf's Mega Man X album?

@HoboKa As long as we keep the richtext portions of the theme white - as in the screenshot - we can reliably maintain the formatting when copying/pasting. So it won't be a "true" dark theme - it'll be much darker, overall, but richtext (forum posts & mix writeups) at least will be dark-on-light. @Sir_NutS This is absolutely the plan, for social links. What would the flair look like?

@captaineegee Thanks - this comes as a reminder that we need to enable tagging for albums, in addition to mixes. Did you do the whole albums, or specific tracks? If the latter, mind sharing? It can be a starting point for tagging posted mixes from both...

Darker, yes - and it'll just be default. Large richtext areas still dark-on-white, as in above screenshot, but some inverted bits, and otherwise darker in general. Sticky navbar & sitewide login status.

Bad person? More like TERRIBLE person. But I kid... at this point I'm 99% sure we'll be adding twitter/youtube/facebook/soundcloud links to profiles and also the profile postbit field next to every post, which should be pretty cool. I'd like to remind everyone that, above perhaps everyone else on this planet Earth, I do want to improve OCR Screenshot of WIP theme attached. It's WIP, but it's already preferable to current theme in some ways. We'll get there.

@The Coop I appreciate what you wrote, because it shows me the diversity of perspectives on the topic; I do happen to disagree, in terms of the timeline, though. Unmod was deleted significantly prior to Balance & Ruin and many other events that to me represent some of the apexes of community activity & engagement. I know Unmod sticks out in some minds as a milestone & harbinger, but my ear is fairly close to the ground on this, and I believe the trend is more recent, and the association is one of conflation. @Ramaniscence As the admin of a site facing similar challenges & the steward of Jake's old site, I feel like we're in this together, no? Door's always open if you want to chat... and/or join forces against.... let's see... the trajectory of the Internet & Capitalism as we know it... and, apparently, removal of forum signatures.

Lots of truth in your post - some of it arguably inevitable & out of our control, some of it a result of our consciously choosing not to pivot to something commercial, some of it related to the core members of the site getting older and having a host of competing priorities. What I'm most concerned about, this year, is the stuff I *can* control, making long overdue changes for the better, and seeing where that gets us. Incidentally, this entire time we've been releasing what I think are some fantastic albums, and regularly posting mixes. It's a dead horse, but I can't over-emphasize how frustrating it is simultaneously trying to improve a ship while also making sure it's afloat. Improvements & evolution have been disappointingly slow, but in the meantime, the actual music we've published has been fantastic, and I'm extremely proud of that. I don't necessarily MIND being compared to Nintendo, but I get that in this sense it's pejorative See above, mostly - enhancement has been the victim of maintenance. I've been involved in every single album release, and when you add that to posting mixes every 2-3 days, there hasn't been the type of time I hoped/anticipated would be available. However, it's a bit weird to me that this is coming out as a result of removing forum signatures - we're not pitching "signature removal!!!" as a huge new feature, it's just communicating the change, which we hope will streamline the forums a bit, which we hope to leverage more... It's hard to know, per se. You're certainly not wrong that some larger forums are still thriving. Many, many more smaller forums are gone. Most of the big & active ones, from what I've seen - incidentally - don't have forum signatures. Not that we expect a small tweak like that to solve everything... This comment makes it harder to take the rest of your criticisms seriously, at least for me. It suggests an animus/grudge; I'll concur that a number of factors have slowed us down, but that's been a considerably more recent development. Having kids & starting families and what not is rather huge. The deletion of the Unmoderated forum was poorly handled, and I've acknowledged that & taken responsibility a couple different times, but I am.... extremely skeptical... that it was a catalyst of any kind for the trends you're talking about. I also believe it was a relatively inevitable change. @Ramaniscence mentioned the decline of forums first, and I do think there's something to it.... I would never claim that it was the sole explanation, nor would I claim that my leadership has been perfect. I'm still here, though, and I'm still working, and I still want to make the site better & continue releasing albums and mixes, as we've been doing for two decades.

We've currently got usage tags for meditation, workout, wedding, Halloween, & winter holiday.... perhaps a "Sleepytime" option would let us offer up a list of mixes (some from Esther's Dreams + many more mixes on the site)... would anyone find this useful?

As @Abadoss proposed, we do have the profile block/column with the avatar image where we can add some (not a ton) of additional info - I'm thinking specifically a star for featured artists, linking to artist profile on OCR, and then also icon links for the more common social media networks, i.e. Twitter, SoundCloud, YouTube, Facebook. Blogs were nixed at the time because Invision's implementation didn't have, of all things, global categories, which were deemed relatively important. They're (finally) adding those in the next major point release, so it's time to reconsider how/whether we'd do that. IPS *does* have a gallery module, as well, which we *could* enable - in addition to giving visual artists a place to show off their stuff, it could be used for WIP artwork for album projects, etc. Interested in your feedback on this @The Coop, mostly in terms of whether it'd be worth it & have some value? To echo what @DarkeSword wrote, we're moving forward as-is, but we're also going to be making a host of other changes. Strong feelings will be had, I'm sure, but to me a lot of this is long overdue and we need to try what we can to leverage the forums & integrate them with the rest of the site, along with a redesign. When the dust settles and we see what's what, anything & everything could be back on the table, but the same design concerns would likely apply.

Yep, you really nailed it there. Way too close to home. When I read your post, I spat out my yerba mate and dropped my artisanal scone on the ground - "They're on to me!!!" I thought, as I frantically started shredding documents & eliminating any hard evidence of my "post-modernist" UX/UI plot to monetize OCR by getting rid of forum signatures. No one can ever know... My entire business model is in shambles because I was banking on getting rid of forum signatures leading directly to the vast, untold riches that have thus far eluded me in twenty years of running this non-profit community. This was it, this was the moment, and now it's been shamefully exposed... Ahem... at any rate, in my experience you get respect when you give respect. Making relatively outlandish, bad faith accusations is not giving respect, nor is calling anyone elitist, nor is assuming that because you're not being agreed with, you're not being heard... As @Ramaniscence alluded to, the paradigm of the online forum itself has eroded a bit, and while I've never felt pressured to follow every last design fad, I also feel like we - along with everyone else - are competing for the time & energy of human beings that are increasingly being bombarded with information. In the context of a thread, the additional secondary/tertiary, unstructured text & visual information provided in signatures is a bit distracting. Since we plan on leaning on the (streamlined) forums more in months to come, this is a preparatory step to make them not just more "modern" or "post-modern" but more focused, plain and simple. The purpose of this post was largely to explain the rationale & get ideas for equivalent functionality, and not to debate the decision, and we appreciated the good faith comments we received and will keep them in mind for profile enhancements or other ways of letting artists & contributors showcase their works, talents, & availability.

@ad.mixx Can you aggregate everything you've got - all MP3s, WAVs, etc. - along with a spreadsheet of track statuses, and send it our way? We want to see if something smaller can be released - an EP, like you mention - before making the final call.

@begoma We're working on it; need to get the last few tracks, do a quick gap analysis, and sort out artwork... Q1 is the target but might slip to Q2!

@Rozovian Thanks for reporting. Should be fixed now.

@GSO Thanks for reporting this; we've switched to a new tags plugin that *should* fix the issue. Please test & let us know!

@Pyros777 Wow, blast from the past, thanks for the feedback on Alex Kidd! Ultimately, while the SSL on images was annoying, this is more about streamlining the overall forum experience - we plan on leaning on the forum software a bit more, and feel that a more streamlined experience is not only cleaner & more usable, but more consistent with most modern forum experiences.

Interesting suggestion... will discuss with staff!

FUN! A half-tempo glitch-laden break would have mixed things up more & the melody/source lends itself, but I get that this was a stylistic thing, going for a purer Moroder vibe and not injecting too much modern EDM into the picture. The sound design on the synths, in particular some of the releases and layering, is slick - the power of Bitwig PLUS Reason is insane, and you're already leveraging it to great effect. On the main melody line, when it dips down, I might have swapped to a different synth, panned further left, for a call-and-answer sorta thing; it was a little odd hearing that particular synth cover that much range. That being said, that could arguably be a Moroder thing as well @prophetik music did have some good pointers; I didn't have issues with clutter, personally, but maybe my threshold is a bit higher - everything was discernible/intelligible, even during more active passages. This is a pretty easy YES for me, and I'm psyched both to have a Shadow of the Beast / Amiga mix to be posted after so long, and also to see what Mike's capable of with the arsenal of his old DAW strapped onto the equally-formidable power of his new one.

@Master Mi I don't think upgrading will buy you much, to be honest - your existing 24-bit/192Khz UR44 (recording at max settings) is offering plenty of fidelity and headroom. Unless latency is an issue working at those settings, you're good to go... Bit-depth affects noise floor and can be misconstrued as "quality" when in reality there's more going on; you can go nuclear on this topic, but generally speaking: most folks listen at 16-bit, and professionals *tend* to record at 24-bit. 32-bit is considered a bit overkill and also makes file sizes much larger. Your current interface is still relevant. USB improvements have focused primarily on bandwidth, not latency. Basically, any given 3.0 interface might be faster than a cheaper 2.0 interface, but this is more because of the drivers themselves, and how they've been optimized. It is possible to buy a USB 3.0 interface with worse latency than a 2.0 interface, in other words - it depends more on the drivers. See https://support.focusrite.com/hc/en-gb/articles/208095469-USB-2-0-vs-USB-3-0 Loading speed of projects is based more on # of plugins, tracks, and samples being loaded, where the bottleneck is far more about disk I/O - an SSD helps with this, and USB 3.0 would only be relevant if it were the protocol for an external drive.... not for the audio interface. CPU/DSP use would be dictated by the quality of the interface drivers, not by USB 2.0 vs. 3.0. It's possible that you have a motherboard/system where the USB 3.0 bus & its driver are more efficient in general than the 2.0 bus, and its driver. In this case, absolutely, USB 3.0 might provide both stability AND latency improvements. However, you haven't mentioned any real problems with your current UR44 in this regard.... unless it's crashing, losing connectivity, or adding too much latency, or crackling, etc., then upgrading JUST for 32-bit & USB 3.0 doesn't make much sense. Ain't broke, don't fix, etc.

Agree with criticisms, namely: Volume a bit low (though choir at times is overpowering) Choir not always well-integrated with overall palette (see above) Repeats melodically/harmonically/structurally; first half not distinguishable from second half by much other than instrumentation... The most nagging thing, to me, is that every note of the neat, slightly sinister trade-off melodic exchange that you could call the "chorus" remains static, and is quite close to the source. There's a missed opportunity here to establish variation by altering the melodic line, ending an octave up or down, or somewhere in between.... it's a playful, chromatic motif, so modifications should be all the easier to incorporate, but... no. It stays the same. This does eat at me, and rather a lot. Every time I hear the phrase play out the same exact way, I deflate a bit. It's arrangement potential that is repeatedly squandered, in my opinion. Not every source/arrangement calls out for altering the melodic line - it's not a mandatory thing - but I feel that this one really did. However, w/ regards to the judging process, I have to force myself to think of this as a random mix by a random artist. Evaluated next to Rebecca's other work, I think the concerns above would tend to push me to rejection. Anonymously, however, there are a bunch of cool textures going on, the atmosphere is spot-on, and I like the tempo variation as well. In the vacuum in which we aspire to evaluate submissions, I'd this give it a: YES (borderline)

@Jorito Yes please, much appreciated!

We've gotten three WAVs from @Sixto, we've confirmed @OceansAndrew abandoned his track & won't be revisiting, and I'm pestering @Flexstyle about the status on his track. @Rexy has been assisting. For OA's track, the source is (apparently?) relatively popular/critical, so this might be one we want to fill in the gaps for...

@Gario Stop making political tweets for a minute and submit the album for eval

Neat! Was always a huge fan - had the huge gallery/compilation books, way back when, and would pack them on family trips. Hopefully this sees his work preserved online for eternity - although new stuff would also be great.

For EDM, specifically, this is pretty darn good: https://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Dance-Music-Production/dp/0956446035

And... The vision of the site has always been to have a big enough tent for both; we could have fewer headaches, and probably more followers, if we stuck to popular games, or genres, or gave flagrantly disproportionate emphasis to either, but then I'd have to punch myself in the head every day and die w/ regrets, etc.