djpretzel

We don't, or at least we try not to, but perhaps I'm confused about precisely what you mean... we may not be the "arbiters" of someone's creative direction, but we're each the owners of our own opinion/experience, which we can bring to bear when evaluating a track. If you're trying to say that only the original artist can evaluate whether a specific instrumentation or mixing/mastering choice makes sense, you seem to be taking issue with the idea of... evaluating ANY music, ever, unless... you yourself made it?
Our judges make every effort to listen on higher-end phones, but to be frank... the issue with muddy, somewhat overblown bass on your OTHERWISE AWESOME recent submission would have been noticeable on $10 airplane earbuds or the DT-880 PROs that I just listened on. I do not believe each of our judges need to list their headphones - when one of them hears something the others don't, that's when they need to get together and figure things out and potentially listen on different phones/speakers to figure out what's going on. In this case that wasn't necessary - we could all hear how awesome your mix was... and we could all hear that the bass was muddy and not sitting right.
This is necessarily going to be different for each judge. The nature of having a panel of different musicians/listeners with different, diverse backgrounds is that, for any given mix, some of them are out of their "preferred" genres or comfort zone, but the goal is to evaluate on some common principles. One of those principles is clarity - are parts discernible, or is there a situation where one instrument's frequency spectrum is cluttering the soundfield? That's a *fairly* genre-agnostic issue that will negatively affect dubstep, classical, jazz, and cha-cha alike, and that's exactly the type of issue we're dealing with in this case...
Yes. We all loved your track, for the tenth time It would have passed easily without the prominent issue with muddy low-end, and will pass easily once this is addressed. I don't know who wanted to hear what, but everyone enjoyed the mix... and everyone hears the issue. Your question is a bad faith attack on the judges panel, essentially accusing them of being biased against metal... and I mean.... we've posted a LOT of metal. And I damn sure hope we can post this particular metal mix, as well. Sometimes panel feedback can be less than ideal because it's contradictory - different judges might hear different issues, or prioritize different concerns. That's one of the worst outcomes from the evaluation process, because it doesn't yield the most actionable feedback. In this case... nah, that wasn't the situation. Everyone digs the mix, everyone hears the issue with the bass.
Thanks, legit appreciated. I assure you, though, we do get tired One of the things that's most tiring is bad faith accusations when someone doesn't take our feedback well on a specific mix, and turns that into a giant referendum on our overall process/staff. It doesn't happen THAT often, but it does happen. If you've listened to the mix in question on a variety of hardware and you don't hear an issue, we're kind of at an impasse - perhaps you could get a second, third, fourth opinion from others that you trust, and see if any of them notice the same issue? The bass is literally the only thing any of us took serious issue with, and all of us noticed it. Either we're all wrong, or bad, or listening on crap headphones, etc., or... perhaps there's ***something*** to our observation?
At any rate, once more for good measure: we all loved the mix, we all heard the bass issue. I don't believe this observation reflects poorly on the judges panel - if anything, it's an instance where there's unanimous agreement about a single, actionable issue... which is actually a pretty good outcome, if music's going to be evaluated at all...

@begoma I've been in contact with Brandon and we hope to put things behind us, make this the best album possible, and release something both OCR & he will be proud of - given that it's the third leg of a trilogy he started, I thought we should at least try to make this happen, and @Rexy has been helping make that possible. Right now mithius is working on some epic material that I know will elevate the final result - I still hope to release this year, and we'll be discussing timeline soon.
So, short version: Not dead, trying to work with Brandon to make something happen, stay tuned.

@begoma I've been in contact with Brandon and we hope to put things behind us, make this the best album possible, and release something both OCR & he will be proud of - given that it's the third leg of a trilogy he started, I thought we should at least try to make this happen, and @Rexy has been helping make that possible. Right now mithius is working on some epic material that I know will elevate the final result - I still hope to release this year, and we'll be discussing timeline soon.
So, short version: Not dead, trying to work with Brandon to make something happen, stay tuned.

@begoma I've been in contact with Brandon and we hope to put things behind us, make this the best album possible, and release something both OCR & he will be proud of - given that it's the third leg of a trilogy he started, I thought we should at least try to make this happen, and @Rexy has been helping make that possible. Right now mithius is working on some epic material that I know will elevate the final result - I still hope to release this year, and we'll be discussing timeline soon.
So, short version: Not dead, trying to work with Brandon to make something happen, stay tuned.

@begoma I've been in contact with Brandon and we hope to put things behind us, make this the best album possible, and release something both OCR & he will be proud of - given that it's the third leg of a trilogy he started, I thought we should at least try to make this happen, and @Rexy has been helping make that possible. Right now mithius is working on some epic material that I know will elevate the final result - I still hope to release this year, and we'll be discussing timeline soon.
So, short version: Not dead, trying to work with Brandon to make something happen, stay tuned.

some really stellar originals here. also the track clips a bit, a little more than a db, but it's not audible as far as i could see.
there's a ton of great stuff here. there's lots of shifts of style so it doesn't feel the same for six minutes, there's lots of use of acoustic and electric guitar alternately, there's some double time stuff, there's lots of interesting backgrounds in the synths behind the (featured) guitars, and there's no really awkward transitions where something just feels weird. there's scads of arranged melodic content, so nothing to worry about there either.
the drums are a touch loud (which is a stylistic consideration for the DJ set idea, vs a standalone track, so i get that). in the first few minutes i also felt that the lead guitars were a touch loud as well, and the ending's guitar delays sound a bit weird. but the whole thing sounds so clean that i can't really complain - it's all very intentionally handled and it sounds great. easy yes by me.
 
 
YES
 

this is a great original track! i've never even heard of this game. lots of playing with time and downbeats, and a big scalar run which i love in chiptune tracks.
sfx opening into the traditional slammed keys and kit sound of lofi. the melody's obvious right away, and i like the chopping done to it. the full melody comes in at 0:30, and sounds great. i like the addition of strings to the big ascending scalar run. beat and bass are good too and the vocal sample isn't obnoxious (i don't like vocal samples in downtempo and lofi but i get it's part of the style).
there's a break at 1:23, and when the drums come back in they're doing something new, which is nice. at 1:47 we get a new runthrough of the melodic content, and there's some new synths and a countermelody being used, which is great. there's an outro around 2:40.
this sounds great, has a lot of melodic content that's mixed up in different ways, and does a good job adapting the track to the genre. nice work.
 
 
YES

I found this to be comfortably above the bar. The guitar performance is incredibly tight, and Psamathes adds a ton of character to the sound palette. As always, I love your ambition with changing up rhythm at a moment's notice while never feeling like you're just tacking disparate concepts together without any glue between them. The mixing felt serviceable and never obscured my ability to hear anything important, even if the frequency balance felt imperfect. 
YES

My personal limit for copy-pastes is 25%.  1:53-2:32 is the repeated section, so that's 39 seconds out of 194, which is 20%.  It's also not strictly repeated; I hear some extra horns in the first half and jingle bells in the second half.  So that's not a dealbreaker for me.
Otherwise, it's a nicely full, transformative arrangement.  The original is technically orchestrated, in a very simple, shallow way, but this goes well beyond a "sound upgrade."  It's not even really a remaster, more like an orchestral score that would sound appropriate as part of of a movie soundtrack.  Much more cinematic than "Pokemon" in my opinion.  Sure, some of the instrumentation, notably the string ensembles, can't pass for the real thing, but it's in the ballpark.
Overall, it sounds great and I have no substantial complaints.  A fine track indeed.
YES

Hah! That Lost Woods BOTW theme really goes with everything, doesn't it?
Right off the bat, I'm digging the adaptation of these themes into a darker electronic rhythm. You take your time building up to full steam but I appreciated the slow burn. The sound design throughout the first few minutes was perhaps smoother around the edges than I would have liked, but the gritty lead that enters at 2:37 gives this the necessary bite to carry the arrangement home.
I want to echo Brad's critique of the kickdrums that enter at 2:36, which lacked nuance and didn't sound great to my ears. The other judges have correctly identified that this is a very bass-heavy mixdown and the master limiter gets pushed pretty hard during the choruses. It's less than ideal, and unfortunately features some of the same issues I had with your first submission, but like that one, I found that this was carried on the merits of the creative arrangement and sound design. I do hope you can take some of these critiques to heart for future submissions and use that to improve your mixing game even further!
YES

Not a close one for me. Great variations throughout. prophetik laid out a lot of the interpretive aspects of the piece that really shouldn't be undersold; this is a different genre, lots of additive writing including original countermelodies. I'd even argue that the areas referencing the "on Yoshi" drums aspect of the source aren't even copying those patterns, so it's like getting wholly original writing inspired by the Yoshi drums. Gario had a valid point on the repetition of the melody from 1:54-2:39, sure, but it wasn't long overall and that part was really a brand new rhythmic idea after everything prior to it; really, the offending repetition was only from 2:16-2:39; some doubling/chorusing of the lead there and/or varying the beats more from 1:30-on would have been a subtle way to differentiate from the first iteration at 1:54, but it was brief, the repetitive section was already meaningfully interpretive, and it's a nitpick.
Sure, more could be done with this, but nitpicks aplenty aside, when you look at the big picture at how interpretive this is of a 16-bit theme vis-a-vis rhythm, tempo, instrumentation, additive writing, and dynamic shifts, and how full the production sounds, I don't know how this is a close call. If this gets rejected, I'd argue the bar's just too high.
YES

I don't feel like there's a source disconnect here at all.  The connections from 1:38 and 2:56 of the remix to 1:09 of the source leaped right out at me.  More importantly, the whole thing feels like a cohesive whole that's clearly derived from the source material.  It's not like there are huge chunks of original writing here.
This is indeed some nice, mellow, rich synthwave.  No glaring production issues that I can pick out, and the arrangement is solid.  I have no concerns putting this on the front page.
YES

32-bit float?! they called him a madman...
the intro is really nice. the filter on it is enough to catch it but not enough to stomp out the character. the bass swell is also well-handled and comes from absolutely nothing. the presentation of everything at 0:39 is really great - i particularly like your unfiltered bass synth. gario's right that there's a backing pitch that's not fitting everything else (seems like a minor sixth right at 0:54). the melody when it comes in is quite loud as well, at least when it's higher in the register. once it drops lower it's more balanced. the drum entrance is great, the soundscape is just very idiomatic. 
2:56-3:06 (arguably 3:12) feel like 1:44-1:53ish of the original, and while they don't follow the chord structure they do follow the shape of the line (in arguably a more listenable fashion). the earlier section is also similar in its exploration of a line's shape vs. its specific melodic content. i feel this is relevant because the original's melody noodles so much that it's almost unsingable - it just keeps wandering, and the artist here did a nice job making something that is more cohesive without losing the songlike feel that made the original interesting. this is also separate from how the artist continues to use the adapted arpeggio from the original throughout the entire track as another tool to relate back to the original. the addition of even just the initial descending parts of the three passages that gario calls out make it to 50%, so i'm good there.
looking at it as a whole, there's a clear and consistent relation to the original, and the soundscape like i said is great. even with that one note at 0:54 (which isn't really wrong as much as it is a dissonance that wasn't set up) this is definitely good enough to post.
 
 
YES

I'm in the "not enough" camp, too.  It's a nice, chill groove, and it's certainly transformative in terms of style.  But it's basically minor variations of a loop of the first 30 seconds of the source.  It's very repetitive.  By the end of the first minute you've heard everything the remix has to offer.  I wouldn't call it a cover, but it's short on content.
Edit: Allow me to tone-police myself, as I realized I came across as excessively negative: I do really enjoy the groove here, and while the lo-fi tone is a matter of taste, it's executed well.  It's good "loading screen" or "elevator" music, for a minute or so.  I have nothing but praise for the foundation created here.  It just needs to go further.
NO
 

Nice job mixing this one. Lotta resonances/verbs/delays/shakuhachi breaths in here but they all have their space. 

Invision added new "ranks" based on forum participation. There's some gamification like achievements. It was all added by default as a part of a recent forum upgrade. We haven't done any customization of it. Might explore these systems once we do more robust workshop implementation. For now, it's not really relevant.

So I found an example of this, and man is it a particularly nasty issue. It even does it using an in-line style so yea it's going to have to be some kind of JavaScript fix. I'm gonna do some research.

First post has been updated with the newest iteration of the style. It's based on Material Dark. It has many issues but is mostly usable for now.
Since I'm overriding the Invision CSS variables, userstyles.org doesn't like the formatting. For now I've posted the CSS directly to the first post, but I'll be putting it up on GitHub when I get on a computer with Git installed ?
Yes, I recognize the irony that the code block is yet unstyled.
 

Would always be interesting to have more PC98 representation!
Catchy source. I get that you're keeping the vibe, but have you perhaps sped it up a bit? I'd consider dropping 2-3 BPM down, I feel like it's running a bit fast.
I've got individual observations & you can pick/choose which if any you agree with
Drums end up having almost a hybrid EDM vibe because the dynamics are static across large patterns - I like that there are fills/breaks, I could even stand for some more of them - but I'm talking mainly about the melodic parts where you've got the downbeat going; because they're sampled & not explicitly electronic drums, and because the fills/breaks are more humanized, these stand out due to the velocity of the kick/snare hits being maxed out, basically all the time. I think humanizing these would give a bit more organic vibe & more contrast... either the chorus or the verse could be significantly quieter, for example.... hopefully the drum samples you are working with are multi-sampled and respond differently at lower velocities - if not, I think there are some free options out there that do, but I'd have to check. In short: humanize the drum line a bit to prevent listening fatigue. RE: listening fatigue in general, I think a breakdown might help... something to reduce overall intensity, noticeably. Not that waveform is everything, but right now you can tell just by looking at the Soundcloud visualization that it's basically a non-stop proposition... something to cut that up a bit would help. Drum dropout, then fill to back-in, etc. I like the organ solo, but I do like it better for a dirty B3 than the churchier option employed here... if you can get something with more grit, maybe Leslie... You're asking a lot of the sampled guitar, on lead, and I'm wondering if a straight up synth lead might work better.... perhaps for just one of the variations? Right now it's being a bit overused, as a lead, with nothing sonically to distinguish it from section to section. One way of addressing this would be via creative FX application, where it's widened/delayed/modulated in some manner in one section, but not the next. Another is to simply swap the lead out to a different sound, and I think synth could work. If you wanted to get a little cheekier, instead of just making the third variation more elaborate on a single lead (whether you keep the guitar or roll with something else), you could do a call-and-answer style duet between the previously-introduced organ and the main lead, introducing some harmonic combinations, having a couple notes in unison, that sorta thing. Just a notion; could be fun. In terms of is-it-ready-to-submit, I don't speak for the judges panel, but I imagine they'd pick up on some of the same things, all of which I think would improve the track. Hope that helps!

Clearly the best album was ReCapitated

You can do that for yourself, for your personal collection - absolutely, no one's stopping you, and why would they...
The key word here is "redistributed" - if you're hosting/mirroring portions of the collection for *others*, yeah, we want the files to be official & unmodified. If you're remixing them, that's no longer redistribution of the original audio, it's a different ballgame entirely. Conversion to OGG wouldn't make much sense (lossy to lossy?) - @Liontamerhas done work on silence trimming so if you find mixes w/ 10+ seconds of true silence (no signal), let us know here. The bigger no-no that we're especially concerned with would be modifying tagging/attribution, FYI.

I agree that it's close to the ol' "Love Hurts" as far as overall musicianship. Took me awhile to realize until the next day, since I was fatigued listening to so much other music the night before. The lead synth is more pleasing than the one in "Make Me Dance", and the overall mixing of sound is better.
I think for the offbeat claps, it's better to treat the whole track as if those are always there, and then be pleasantly surprised that the constant groove is present for the rest of the piece, rather than being disappointed via the other way around! Perspective! That section is always going to be confusing to anyone who is first listening to it or hasn't listened in a long time.
It's got more enjoyable sections than The Sveldt, too. Overall, it's worth your time! Especially if you love the imagery of that disastrous level of Star Fox being turned into a funk land. (Actually I beat that level first try the other year, but maybe it was dumb luck, or it could've been that it's easy. I seem to remember some bird randomness bringing quite some chaos when younger.)

Sunshine Coastline is one of my favourites on the OST and this does a damn good job of adapting and extending it.  Naturally I am biased to prefer the section which is least original however the intro does make for a nice build-up compared to the original.
 
I think we need more Falcom remixes here.  Look how few there are: https://ocremix.org/org/92/falcom/remixes

I don't hear a lot of Big Band around here, but this is really jammin'!

Hey everyone!
Director of Arcadia Legends and the soon-to-be-released album for Jet Force Gemini: Mizar Attacks here!
 
I've been approached to potentially take over direction of this album, possibly co-directed with another. However, nothing is set in stone at all and I'm looking to see what all has been done, what is left to go, what the full scope of the project is and most importantly: Is there still interest for all involved currently and in the past to continue with this album to completion? I'm proceeding forward with Mizar Attacks album release and potential physical edition negotiations, but after that, I can turn my attention to this album - but I'm sending out feelers, if you will, to see if this is feasible to pick up and finish. Let me know!