Mini-Me
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Posts posted by Mini-Me
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I think getting past the lasers on Quick Man's level pretty much just made you a rock star. If there's any justice in this world, you should start accumulating smokin' hot groupies any day now.
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This is awful. Seriously. It was a joke track on the otherwise awesome FF4 project, and I can't believe it was even taken seriously. I mean... honestly. Even as an OCR, how can anyone take this as anything serious? Team Gato has the same problem, but at least Team Gato has good music underlying the silliness.
Everything about this is bad. The rapping is loose, and lacks intelligence. The music underneath is repetitive and boring. Just... No. Maybe this would make sense as an April Fool's day flood, but yeesh.
Alright, let me qualify this a bit. I love team Gato, but because it has actual game lyrics, and great underlying music. As far as Rap goes, I think you can't get any more controversial or awesome than Niggaz For Life, which was amazing. So the rap thing can be done and done well. As other mixes have proved (Including one very recently posted.) So it's not the style or the decision to have some fun that's the problem here. The fact that it is an obvious joke, like Music of My Groin (which is only "awesome" because it's so retarded) is what kills it.
I get the feeling you'd just love OverLooked ReMiX.
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A... Shinobi game of some sort? The PS2 one?
Correct!
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Thread necromancy time:
I've heard this in a remix here, I am nearly 100% positive, can't remember which one, so I figured I'd throw it out in here while I was searching on my own.
Maybe you're noticing similarities between that and the Requiem theme from Ninja Gaiden? (It's in these two remixes here and others on other sites: http://ocremix.org/remix/OCR00867/, http://ocremix.org/remix/OCR00934/)
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I practically never post here (and I've been listening for nearly a decade), but I decided it would be borderline unconscionable not to write a "thank you" post after listening to Humans + Gears almost exclusively for nearly two weeks straight.
I took a look at the original project thread, and MAN am I glad the noobs in charge marched on despite the initial pessimism. 
From the concept to the artwork to the music itself, this album is simply fantastic. In fact, it's so good that it completely renewed my interest in the Xenogears universe. There are even a few source tracks that I'm just now fully appreciating for the first time after hearing such good remixes on this album. Sure, a couple tracks weren't my favorite, a few others took some getting used to before appreciating their awesomeness, and there's no Small Two of Pieces (so nothing to bump Alexander Prievert's Broken Mirror out of playlist circulation
), but all in all, this just might be my favorite album project so far. To pick just two standouts for me from each disc which didn't hit the main page on OC ReMix, I'd go with Ship of Emotion and Song, Take Flight, October Rain, and Defective. Still, listing all of my favorites from this album would involve copying down almost the entire tracklist, so I'll refrain. This is enough of a gushing fanboy post as it is.Anyway, I just wanted to thank everyone involved with this project for making it happen, and THANK YOU especially to Foxhull and Avaris for being the driving forces behind it!
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UPDATE:
Actually, this isn't too bad. I've read a bit about the Quicktime file format here, and I've been able to remove the Quicktime tags very precisely. The first four bytes of each "atom" give the size in bytes (as a 32-bit big-endian unsigned integer), the next four give the name of the atom, and the remaining ones are the data.
After stripping out the ordinary tags, I noticed all three files were broken into four major atoms:
- Size = variable, name = "moov", data is the tag data (some is human readable, some is not)
- Size = 8, name = "free", no data (because the four bytes for the size and the atom name added up to
- Size = 8, name = "wide", no data
- Size = variable (but the size of all four of these elements adds up exactly to the total filesize in bytes, assuming all other tags have been deleted), name = mdat, data = everything left in the file.
The last atom, mdat, is broken into the following three sections:
- A small atom: Size = 8, name = wide, data no data
- Some kind of prefix to the actual mp3 data: Size = 0 (?), name = mdat
- The actual mp3 data!
So, long story short: After scrubbing the file of all ordinary tags, open the file up with a hex editor and search for "mdat" - there should be two and only two references to this string in the whole file. Delete everything that comes before the final mdat reference (including the mdat string itself), and it seems you're left with the raw mp3 data! I did notice that the first two bytes of the mp3 data were (in hex) "FF FB" for all three files, and the next byte was A0 for two of them. I'm not sure what the significance is there, but...from where I'm standing, the important thing is that Quicktime tags are gone and the files play without any noticeable static at the beginning (or any notes cut off or anything like that).
Of course, some files have extraneous data at the very end as well (like back-loaded ID3 or APE tags or a bunch of random references to the LAME encoder), and getting rid of the Quicktime tags won't get rid of all that, but...the Prievert files don't seem to have that problem anyway.
- Size = variable, name = "moov", data is the tag data (some is human readable, some is not)
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Good catch! I removed APE tags from the few mixes with them, and I also caught several with ID3v1 tags as well and removed those. Winamp 5 can remove those types of tags. If you have any other info on 'Broken Mirror Reflection' and what may be the tagging case there, let me know.
Alrighty, here's what I've been able to figure out so far:
Three of Alexander Prievert's ReMixes have these persistent "mystery tags:"
Castlevania II: Simon's Quest 'Bloody Tears Inspired' OC ReMix
Shadow of the Beast 'Journey' OC ReMix
Xenogears 'Broken Mirror Reflection' OC ReMix
It's possible some of his other files have them too, but if so, they haven't shown any symptoms. After using EasyTAG to strip out all "ordinary" tags, the files appear to be clean of all tags in every Linux-based tag editor I've tried. (EasyTAG, MusicBrainz Picard, Audio Tag Tool, Ex Falso, and Kid3...in other words, a bunch). The "mystery tags" are still there, but none of these programs have caught on to them...however, certain music players are somehow able to pick them up.*
Anyway, using a hex editor, I was quickly able to see that the tags are related to Apple, and after searching for some strings, it appears they're old Quicktime tags...as in, the kind of tags that were intended for Quicktime movies. Unfortunately, I have no idea what program to use to gracefully remove them. I mean, I can use the hex editor itself to roughly get rid of them in a quick and dirty way, and it "works," but figuring out where exactly they actually start/end is another matter altogether. I've found a few references, but I haven't had the time to really go through them (http://developer.apple.com/quicktime/qttutorial/qtatoms.html, http://wiki.multimedia.cx/index.php?title=QuickTime_container, http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/TagNames/QuickTime.html, etc.).
In Windows, Quicktime Player will show the offending tags, as long as you wipe away the ID3 tags first, but I can't find a way to edit/delete them using the free version. Maybe the Pro version can do it, but then again, maybe not...so until we find some program that will edit/delete these tags, we're stuck either ignoring them or guesstimating with a hex editor.
*To recap and add a bit more information in case you're interested:
Rhythmbox is the default music player in Ubuntu, and it's based on the GStreamer pipeline. Apparently, it displays whichever tags are last read in by GStreamer...and in certain files, those tags are APE tags or even worse, Quicktime tags. Because of that, some of these superfluous tags appear to override any existing ID3 tags. Regardless of whether the ID3 tags are intact or if I've scrubbed them, Rhythmbox keeps displaying the Quicktime tags for the aforementioned Prievert mixes. (Do we have a "shoot myself in the head smiley here?) I'm not sure just how many other players this problem crops up in though.
Other audio players seem to exhibit a couple other behaviors:
Some are completely oblivious to the Quicktime tags and try to play them as audio data (which results in a short burst of static at the beginning of "Shadow of the Beast 'Journey'" for example). Others seem to realize that the tags exist, but they aren't able to read them, so they presumably just skip over them (resulting in no static). I've noticed that at least one player seems to notice and skip the Quicktime tags if no ID3 tags are present, but if there are any ID3 tags, it will try to play the Quicktime tags as audio data.
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I've just thought of a suggestion...it's kind of the opposite of adding information to unused fields, but this seems like a good chance to bring it up:
Some ReMixes have APE tags embedded in them in addition to ID3 tags, and the title, artist, album, etc. are generally written incorrectly in the APE tags. Unfortunately, certain players (e.g. Rhythmbox under Linux) strangely give priority to these tags at the expense of the ID3 tags. Until I finally realized what was going on, I kept trying to change the ID3 tags to no effect, and the same wrong title/artist/album etc. from the APE tags kept being displayed in Rhythmbox. To give a few examples (by no means an exhaustive list), http://www.ocremix.org/remix/OCR01139/, http://www.ocremix.org/remix/OCR01238/, and http://www.ocremix.org/remix/OCR00191/ exhibit this problem. Actually, the last one has some other kind of superfluous tag (AAC? Some old Quicktime tagging? It's Apple something.) rather than APE, but in any case, it causes the same problem. Whatever it is, it's especially hard to get rid of, too.
I'm not sure what MP3 tagging program you're using to do your editing, but certain ones (like Mp3tag in Windows) have options to strip out APE tags, etc....it would probably be helpful to some Linux users if you enabled those options. It won't fix every file (like in the Broken Mirror Reflections file), but it'll help.
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Thanks, guys. I was going to upload the file to a hosting site and post a link as HalcyonSpirit suggested, but I guess that's not necessary, since Liontamer and zircon seem to know which mix I'm talking about. I wonder where I actually came across it? I don't think I even knew at the time that people linked to their WIP's on the forum...weird. Hopefully mutagene won't come knocking on my door asking for his WIP back. It's really pretty enjoyable (even if there were probably good reasons it wasn't posted on the site).
Anyway, it's good to know that a whole bunch of real OC Remixes haven't fallen into a black hole, though. 
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Hi! I just registered tonight after about a decade of casually leeching remixes. Since this is my first post, I should probably mention up front that I'm an entirely talentless noob, and I'll probably never have the ability to contribute anything of value to this site. So, ummm...sorry.
Anyway, I'm going through my old music and cleaning up the ID3 tags and such, and I came across something that interested me:
I have a file named "Seiken_Densetsu_3_Meridian_Afternoon_Tea_OC_Remix.mp3." It's an old mix that mutagene made sometime prior to September 22, 2001 at 4:18:12 AM (the modification date
), and it still has the old http://www.remix.overclocked.org comment in its metadata. The interesting part is:- It's no longer on OC Remix.
- It's not mentioned at all in the remix changelog, and it's not at the OC Removed site, either.
- In fact, my nearly omniscient friend Google doesn't even know any remix of the sort ever existed.
This mix seems to have vanished from the entire Internet - except for my own computer - without a trace, and I'm halfway wondering if I'm breaking some kind of taboo by mentioning it.
Does anyone have any idea why this mix in particular fell into a black hole?My best guess is that this was an especially short-lived remix, and back in the old days (sometime before the OCR01000 lockdown), maybe nobody really bothered keeping track of which remixes were removed from the site or why. Of course, I guess it's possible that it was just mislabelled as an OC Remix, too (although the filename naming convention, URL in the ID3 comment, and the author's name all indicate it was probably on the site at one point). Am I off the mark here? The thing is, I'm now wondering just how many other mixes might have fallen through the cracks.
Anyone have some insight? Thanks!
- It's no longer on OC Remix.
Modified MP3 Tagging & Official OCR Album Art!
in Announcements
Posted
Not that my opinion carries any weight, but I think the list of tagging decisions includes all the right calls. One of the best decisions IMO was to reinstate* the single quotes around the song title, e.g.:
The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening 'House of Frogs' OC ReMix
This is helpful for aesthetics, clarity (especially for lesser known games with obscure titles and few ReMixes), and for separating the three components of the title via script. I used to add the quotes manually so I could run my files through a script and easily find/replace inconsistent game titles. That said, it looks like I won't even have to do that anymore, for great justice!
Until now, I was actually a bit nervous about this retagging project. I was excited about more consistent official tagging, but I was nervous that I'd have to manually separate game titles and song titles all over again. Thankfully, it looks like that won't be the case. Plus, since I won't need to change anything myself anymore, I can help seed the torrent(s) too.
*I say "reinstate," but was this ever actually the official convention until now, or did it come from the way titles are displayed on the site, or what? I just remember that older ReMixes included it, but ones from recent years made the title look like a single monolithic phrase. Musicbrainz was convinced that including single-quote separators was the right way to do things even before this new move [back?] to it, and I always figured it had to have been an official convention from the past given its relative eccentricity. After all, if it came from P2P users spontaneously adding separation before sharing, they probably would have used hyphens instead, with spaces at both sides.