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djpretzel

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Posts posted by djpretzel

    Chiptunes ...?

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    See what I did there? This is fun.

    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.

    Chiptunes ...?

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    I think more clarity would be great, whichever way is decided.

    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.

    1. We like VGM, dude. We're ALL second-class citizens. That's the main battle we're fighting, at least here at OCR.
    2. 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.

    Facebook likes issues (i.e. "Asking for likes is against the law of the internet! How dare you!")

    in Site Issues & Feedback

    Posted

    I don't and never have appreciated "like" campaigns of any sort. But while I don't appreciate or agree with it, I can't deny that more likes means more people getting more music posted to their news feed.

    At the end of the day, you can dislike the method all you want but from there you have two options. Be bitter about it and whine and complain, essentially accomplishing nothing, or get a couple of your friends to like the page and contribute to getting the album released.

    That said, even though I dislike liking campaigns, I got 4 of my friends to like the page and I'll continue trying to get more to like it as well.

    Can we just clone you? Somehow?

    Thanks :nicework:

    Facebook likes issues (i.e. "Asking for likes is against the law of the internet! How dare you!")

    in Site Issues & Feedback

    Posted

    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.

    Chiptunes ...?

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    For the record, I feel I've learned a lot about chiptunes and chiptune technique to the point where I'd be slightly embarrassed if that song were ever posted... however, I'd love to give it another shot with perhaps a VRC6 arrangement using far greater detail and variety of sound than I was capable of with espergirl

    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.

    Chiptunes ...?

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    Then why not pass Espergirl *_*. It's about one of the best straight chiptune arrangements you're going to get, as an example of a chip arrangement. Whether or not the chiptune is half-assed hasn't come into play yet in the criteria, because it's NO'd by default.

    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?

    Chiptunes ...?

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    maybe it's time to stop using the "it's the same as .mid" justification.

    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.

    Chiptunes ...?

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    Absolutely agreed, but that kind of thing can't be 'half-assed', can it? I love it when people do that: it clearly shows they care, which goes back to my point that if you're gonna 'chip' us, absent certain production elements, that level of craftsmanship would probably be a minimum requirement.

    That's why you let them submit, and you judge it. If it's half assed, you don't pass it :P

    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.

    Interestingly enough Doug.. we kind of spent several pages explaining why chiptune doesn't actually LIMIT production values by any objective measuring stick. They are just as complex in many ways from a production perspective as recording a solo instrument. From timbral shifts combined with all kinds of volume macros, echo techniques a miriad of arpeggiation methods that create entirely new timbres, not to mention how these things are used in conjunction across multiple channels to create unique sounds through combinations etc... I could go on at length.. people have, entire message boards with thousands of users are devoted to nothing other than aspects of chiptunes which have NOTHING to do with composition.

    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?

    Submission Standards Changes & New Encodings!

    in Announcements

    Posted

    As highlighted in the writeup for http://ocremix.org/remix/OCR02388/, we have revised our Submission Standards, effective immediately.

    1. You can compare the Wiki versions to see exactly what changed.
    2. We are still working on making the above changes to the translated versions of the standards.
    3. We have added an information page on Encoding Guidance if you need help/advice on encoding your music.
    4. 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.

    5. 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

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