djpretzel

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Okay, let's see what's wrong with that: Awful example, because that shit WORKS. Case in point, you're alluding to it knowingly. From a purely promotional perspective, you've just made our point for us. Tits sell things. Almost anything, really... tits sell pork futures, white-out, automobiles, office furniture, and garden gnomes. The fact that we are NOT employing tits should in this light be held AGAINST us, but Larry is shy. The responses on this thread - bitching about free music on the Internet - seem far more like a cry for attention, in that regard. Furthermore, we're not crying for attention, we're politely and explicitly asking for it. Not demanding, not insisting, just experimenting with a promotional idea we had. The tits girls' actions are only desperate if you agree that she does not deserve the attention and does not need the attention. Well, excuse us, but we think artists that contribute to OCR are amazing. We love the exposure we've been able to get them so far, and we want to expand that. Done. There've been some legitimately decent ideas on the thread; that wasn't one of them.

Yes - you equated news (media) with music (art). Which is actually kind of cosmically offensive on an ideological level, with the sweetened bonus of being misguided. But yeah, what Sam said... impatience can be a great motivator, and OCR should be progressive, not conservative, generally speaking.

I love clarity, I'm a huge fan of clarity, and I do want us to be as clear as humanly possible. It's just that sometimes there's an inverse relationship between clarity and flexibility - hopefully we can enhance the former while maintaining the latter, and a resub/revision from Sam can kick off that process. I kinda thought we had achieved touchy-feely closure at that point, but as for danimal's subsequent comment about second-class citizens, digital piano, etc. We like VGM, dude. We're ALL second-class citizens. That's the main battle we're fighting, at least here at OCR. Using some of the same logic already employed to make a case for chiptunes based on popularity, you COULD argue the following and not be completely moronic: Piano has been around for centuries; ditto that for guitar. Our generation is often accused of wanting instant gratification, without earning it over time. Attempting to "play the victim" and argue that chiptunes don't get the same exact respect suggests that as a medium, they've accomplished in mere decades what those instruments have built up over centuries. Mad love for the chips from ME, personally, but I wouldn't expect instant parity with those two particular instruments, which represent the heavyweights of solo instrumentation. I'm not saying OCR specifically should treat the two differently, I'm saying I wouldn't be representing chiptunes in this fashion, personally, since it seems a little... impatient? I don't know the best word, but hopefully you get me. Based on Sam's multiple citations, it seems like things are going the right way, regardless... hopefully it's about the music and not about proving something.

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Can we just clone you? Somehow? Thanks

Sigma has taken this thread hostage. He is demanding at least 30 more nonsensical posts that take a fun, promotional move WAY too seriously, or he is going to punch his own face into a bloody, unrecognizable pulp, then start charging for pieces of his own skull fragments - because the only way you can apparently get people to tolerate promotion, or anything less than a perfect, idealized version of what they expect, is to paradoxically charge them $$$ for it.

I'd say go for it - at worst, it'll maybe create some temporary drama or hurt feelings, but at best, it'll help clarify our policy, set a precedent, and result in a great track that peeps will enjoy, no matter where it gets posted.

This may have been a mistake, or may have pre-dated the standards revision. I leave it up to the judges whether a re-evaluation makes sense; maybe it does?

It's not that it's the same, it's that it CAN be, and I do want to make that distinction. My personal intention was to discourage mixes that simply employed what I would refer to as "chiptune defaults" - is there a better term for that? Also, if everyone else jumped off a bridge, would you? You don't need to tell us chiptunes are huge... we know that. It's obviously in anyone's best interests, including our own, to be more inclusive and embrace something popular. That, in and of itself, is not a fantastic argument though, because popularity is a shitty metric of quality, and popular music is not a meritocracy.

That's why you let them submit, and you judge it. If it's half assed, you don't pass it This is pretty much all that needed, or needs, to be said... BUT since we're talking... I think part of the problem is the "purist" version of chiptunes, which adhere religiously to the limitations of X or Y original chip or system. This DOES remove a lot of decisions w/ regards to DSP, EQ, etc., assuming you're doing ZERO external processing. Remember the site's origins... at the time, MP3 was actually kinda-sorta new, and part of the point was to move away/beyond the standard sound palette & production afforded by General MIDI i.e. vgmusic.com. To the chagrin of semanticists who insist correctly that MIDI is a protocol/data format, people will STILL say that a given track "sounds too MIDI" - it might be wrong technically, but we know what they mean. There's absolutely no reason to give chiptunes any more leeway than mixes that "sound too MIDI", and that's EXACTLY what the standards, as written, are trying to convey. If you want to argue that we should accept purist chiptunes, I have no idea why you wouldn't ALSO argue that we should accept MIDIs - either type of arrangement can be captured in more concise file formats and does not require MP3 (or WAV, FLAC, whatever). So it's not really a question that's limited to chiptunes at all... it's more about what you do with whatever tools you choose to use, how the arrangement makes the best of those tools, what you're trying to say, etc. There are subjective AND objective factors to this equation, but it's mostly subjective, hence we don't want standards that outlaw anything directly, but we DO want to express that if you throw a chiptune arrangement that employs 100% standard NES defaults our way, it's going to be judged similarly to if you had recorded the MIDI output from the default Windows MIDI player. Who am I to debate the great Sam Ascher-Weiss on the subject of chiptunes? I get the point you're making, and thanks for educating us - both through your words and through your music. Yet I think you'll agree, pure chiptunes DO limit production OPTIONS by a pretty objective measuring stick. Production "values" is more debatable, but I don't know how you could argue that pure chiptunes as compared to pure chiptunes + DSP, or chiptunes mixed w/ non-chiptunes, was somehow a more expansive category. It's not - you've eliminated possibilities, intentionally. The point I think you're making is less about limitation and more that there's a LOT of room within a pure chiptune approach to do some amazing things, which fall under the general umbrella of production, and it's a point well made, again by your own music as much as your words. But almost ever since people began recording music, they've been applying EQ and reverb to it, for some pretty good reasons. What's the argument against employing those for chiptunes, other than self-imposed (hence artificial) adherence to the exact same restrictions VGM composers legitimately dealt with at the time?

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http://ocremix.org/remix/OCR01383/ Love what Akumajo did on this one; very space-travelly in a romanticized, 1970's sort of way, totally dig it.

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.

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.

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

No, we're not accepting 320CBR, and correct, we're not accepting VBR0 either. The only two accepted encodings are 192kbs and VBR1.

As highlighted in the writeup for http://ocremix.org/remix/OCR02388/, we have revised our Submission Standards, effective immediately. You can compare the Wiki versions to see exactly what changed. We are still working on making the above changes to the translated versions of the standards. We have added an information page on Encoding Guidance if you need help/advice on encoding your music. We will be contacting artists in the future about getting improved encodings of mixes already on the site, especially for tracks that suffered in quality due to length in order to meet size restrictions. Quick highlights: 192kbps was previously the maximum bitrate; it is now the minimum, of two options. In addition to 192kbps (CBR/ABR), the only other option is VBR1, which is higher quality. We have eliminated the file size limit; we strongly recommend submissions between 2 and 7 minutes in length. Let us know what you think, but do read the mixpost in addition to this announcement for the full description of this revision & our thought process behind it! Thanks, djpretzel