Ramaniscence

Whew boy it's been awhile. We're back with the first (long overdue) update to the VGMix Archive. For anyone who's not familiar: VGMix Archive is a growing archive of songs that were hosted on VGMix, VGMix 2, and VGMix X. The site first launched on April 1st, 2012, over 6 years after VGMix 2 went down, and is comprised of various music donated by users from throughout the community. The original release of VGMix Archive had around 1,700 songs, but this update brings that number up to over 3,500 songs. Where did all these new songs come from? The community has been remarkably helpful at locating a lot of these songs. Over the past few years, a number of individuals have come forward to help out and make contributions from their own music libraries. These members include @Nario , @F4T4L_3RR0R, and @Txai to name a few. Additionally, one of herograw's long-standing buried VGMix archives was added as well. However, by far the biggest contribution came from a user named Bradless, who worked the original VGMix 3, and contacted me via IRC with a huge library of over 12GBs worth of music. The addition of this library has been phenomenal. How do you know what songs are really from VGMix? How do you know what you're missing? The short answer is: We don't know for sure. There are bound to be some songs that may not have been on VGMix, but we trying to make sure that the site is filled with songs that are relevant to VGMix. The best guide we have right now is the last web archive of the songs page of VGMix 2, which is from February 8th, 2006. The site went down less than a month later. Level99/Stevo helped put together a Google Doc of songs missing from the original release, and we've been using it to check up against libraries we've been receiving. This does not contain every song that was on VGMix 2. VGMix 2 was broken up into several "tiers" of music, based on user reviews. Anything below the "Good Stuff" tier was not displayed by default and, incidentally, doesn't seem to have a good record on the web archive. For this reason, we do not reject songs based on their lack of inclusion in this document. We simply use it as a guide to make sure they're in-line with other content that was on the site. Weren't there any full backups of VGMix? As far as VGMix 1 goes, I'm fairly certain that's a "No". VGMix 1 had tons of songs and was basically just an "upload what you'd like" file host with very little in way of sorting or organizing. I've never heard of any real backup of songs besides individual libraries, and verifying songs from VGMix 1 is extremely difficult outside of good faith on the library owner. For VGMix 2? Maybe. At the time VGMix 2 went down it was said that virt did have a full backup of all the songs (and users, and reviews) that were on the site. These were allegedly copied over to a new server to be implemented into VGMix 3, but VGMix 3 never came. When VGMix X launched, the songs were nowhere to be found. It's been nearly 13 years now, and I've been collecting songs for the archive for nearly 7 years (Yes, the time between VGMix 2 and VGMix Archive 1.0 is less than the time between VGMix Archive 1.0 and 2.0. I'm not happy about that, either). If a full backup of VGMix 2 exists somewhere, I've yet to see it. As for VGMix X backups, the libraries I have received thus far have been very small, but I've received some leads that some users out there may have full, or very large, backups. I'm still working on getting in contact with these individuals (fingers crossed). How do I get all the songs? Songs are available for individual stream and download from the site. Right now the site is pretty barebones so it's basically a huge list of over 3000 songs, but it does load very quickly and have an instant search function if you're looking for a specific song. If you want the entire archive there is a torrent available, but as of right now: there is 1 seed. Furthermore, if you had an older torrent of the archive, it may not work very well because there have been large changes to the entire library since the initial release. If you are interested in helping me seed, please contact me directly, and I can give a small number of users a full dump in RAR form. However, my bandwidth is not infinite, so please serious inquiries only. What's next for VGMix Archive? The absolute #1 priorty right now is completed the list of known missing songs. For the "Stuff of Legends" tier, that means 3 songs and for the "Must-Haves" tier that means about 50. We're very close on those 2 fronts and I'm hopeful we can complete them soon. I've reached out to several individuals that may have the songs I'm missing, but I've yet to hear back from anyone. If you or someone you know has any of the songs missing from those 2 categories please let me know. You can check the above Google Doc for reference, but the 3 Stuff of Legends songs are: Water Music. A Suikoden remix by Michael Dover, aka Israfel on OverClocked ReMix. Brain Hill Zone (piano remix) by A Pansy, aka Eric Barker and Nior on OverClocked ReMix. Thanks @Dhsu !! Keep Going [CandyMix] by JH or Jonas Hellsberg. I have reached out to Eric via email and Jonas via twitter, but I do not have any reliable way to contact Michael. The "Good Stuff" tier is the biggest of the 3, so it's taken the longest to verify against the existing library. Many of the songs in that tier may already be on the site or may be sitting on my hard drive with some missing data waiting to be verified. Beyond the songs currently on the site, I still have over 1000 songs waiting to be processed. Most of these are missing some sort of data and need to be verified individually. This means they have empty tags and are missing either the artist or game name. All I know for sure is that the songs missing from the top 2 tiers are not included in that 1000. Additionally, I'd really like to build up the VGMix X library more. So, again, if you or anyone you know has a large number of verified VGMix X songs, please let me know. Finally, in an ideal world we could hopefully "rebuild" VGMix 2. That is: Rebuild a static mirror of the old site, with comments and descriptions of every song. Many of the songs have this information available on the archive, so the ideal plan would be to start scrubbing that data, adding it to a new database, and building out a mirror based on that. This would not be a fully functional site, however. We're still focusing our efforts on the new VG(Re)Mix project for that. Thanks again to all the people who've helped along the way. I truly couldn't have done this without all of your help. Please let me know if you can help improve the archive in anyway!

Also worth noting that this exposed a bug: If you edit a compo from the previous year, the system will set it to the current year. The interface right now does not support changing to a year prior to the current year. Use caution when accessing the last compos of the year right now. They will need to be updated directly by me and fusion to fix.

Unfortunately, at the moment I don't feel comfortable adding new admins given the nature of the admin panel. Give me a few days to strip down some of the more...sensitive features and this shouldn't be a problem. This is something I've already implemented on my development branch, so it'll just be a matter of pushing it the live branch. Someone ping me either here, or on the ThaSauce Facebook page probably sometime next weekend (the 12th, I'm still on vacation until the 7th) and we can revisit this. In the meantime, I'm fine with the existing admins assisting with the compo on the site.

This is the song you're looking for. I don't know if I have a full mirror? I may. I have 2 folders for both Unmod and GenDisc. I could clean up the tags/filenames and throw them up somewhere if someone is interested. Edit: Here's the whole thing.

Prophetik is correct in that Miszou changed his name a few times before requesting some songs get removed. As far as 229, I have no idea. RTS songs should have their ID number as the catalog number and I can't figure out what that song was for the life of me. Certainly I have it somewhere, but I don't have a record of what it is. Also in the future I wouldn't bump this thread if you need something. If you have a question about R:TS feel free to just messge the ThaSauce Facebook page. We get back to'em pretty quickly. I visit OCR occasionally but not regularly enough to see this kind of thing without looking for it.

Pretty good idea. Conditionally interested based on final dates.

So, I figured this would come up at some point, and I don't think many people are arguing the profit angle so much, but let me chime in with my experience: First of all, as far as I know, I'm the one of the only people doing this "game arrangement community" type of thing anymore. Jake has his own business going on and doesn't have time to worry about game arrangements too much. Most other people got out, or handed off to me. Arguably I don't even do too much anymore, at least visibly. We're constantly working on things, but 2 things keep anything from moving forward at a decent pace: time and money. Right now, my yearly operating costs, on the low end, are about $1,000. Between servers, web services, domains, etc, I spend about $1,000 per year. Like OCR those go through a sole proprietor LLC which comes out of my taxes. $1,000 a year isn't that much, but that's still a flat screen TV I put into, basically just hosting things, every year. Obviously OCRs operating costs are way more than that, and yes, apparently they're making more money than it costs to run the site, but that, in no way, means they don't need more money. Do you know what I would do if I had more money? I would put it back into the site, which is what Dave does. Advertising, event presence, etc. More importantly than that, I would outsource my job in a second, if I could afford it. Every hour I have to work on any one of the sites, is an hour I can't spend doing something else. Whether it be working on a freelance project, or just actually not working on anything for sanity. If I made a huge surplus I would hire people, paid people, that would work on maintaining sites, updating sites, adding new features to sites, for me, as a job, so I could do my own job which is a thing I get paid to do separate of this that pays my bills. Real scenario if I had to get control of OCR and Patreon and ads weren't a thing? It would close. Simple as that. I wouldn't be able to cover the operating costs, the government would desolve the LLC for not being a profitable company, and I would eventually drain my own bank accounts trying to keep everything afloat. tl;dr: It's very easy as someone on the outside, or someone who hasn't managed a project like this, to say "Well it costs X so you should get paid X to keep it up", and sure that's true...if X is the only cost ever, and if absolutely no work or time goes into growing or maintaining it. At the moment it requirements more time or man power, then you are operating at a loss. That an opportunity cost. I have no comment on the legal issues because I don't know anything about fair use or copyright law.

But what about JetBaby?

I absolutely love it. It's everything I wanted in a new Dragon Ball series. It's MOST of what was good about Dragon Ball, and drops everything that was bad about Dragon Ball Z. 3 seasons, each resolved in under 20 episodes. No ridiculous charging up. No 30 minuting sequences of the same punch loop used over and over. A damn good amount of humor, and a quick, definitive resolution. I could not have asked for more. Is it a ground breaking anime experience? Of course not. Is it super fun an satisfying? Absolutely.

I've been waking up early and keeping myself online to avoid Illidan cues. So far I've been pretty lucky, but I can't say the same for a lot of other people in the guild. 100 tongiht, doe!...then I wait for everyone else >_<

My work schedule put me working all day Saturday, but I realized this afternoon that I can get it off. I was reallyy upset there for a moment. Definitely be there Saturday afternoon. MAYBE Friday night.

Vilecat let me know earlier today. We are aware of the issue and looking into what the problem might be. Edit: This should be resolved. The IP of the MP3 host had changed. In the future if there's an issue please let us know via our Facebook page or PMing starla, fusion2004, Suzumebachi, or myself or in #thasauce on irc.esper.net Thank you for your feedback.

I'm not sure I have a local copy of the dark theme anymore. If you could throw it up on PasteBin and link it to me I could fix it no probs.

I just wanted to say, I've been subscribed to myself and other friends on MusicBrainz for years now, and I've always been a fan of your work.

IFTTT was just released for Android and I'm loving it. I use it, along with Trigger to automate a lot of small tasks in my life. There's also a good thread of popular recipes for it on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/24mtpc/so_now_that_ifttt_is_available_for_android_what/

Looking into it.

In WoW they track EVERYONE's damage. If they added addon support to Diablo they could, theoretically, set up the API to only return data about your own character, but that's not how it is in WoW.

The reason damage meters are terrible is because once they're introduced, everything is about damage meters. Playing Diablo with some friends and you're doing a quarter of their damage and they give you nothing but shit about it. Joining a group of randoms and getting kicked for not doing enough damage. Playing with someone who always just talks about how much damage he's doing, etc. If you don't have meters, there's less emphasis on damage and more emphasis on like...the game. The end game of Diablo is to get better gear. Basically not much else. So if weren't into that, you won't be into this. There's some harder difficulties. There's some bigger bosses, but it's all about gear. They made gear drops less terrible. They made the gear grind more bearable. They took a lot of the annoyances about trying to get gear less terrible, but it's still about gear.

The song is called A Mortal Heart, and again just seems to be a variation on the Leroic diablo theme.

I have no qualms with the overall gameplay. Bosses have a TON of health but I was able to 2 man the whole thing on torment 1 (after a very long time and a lot of potions) but I'll be GD'd if Blizzard didn't phone in that story. D3 as a whole has been some of their weakest story telling ever and that makes me sad ;-; Dat soundtrack, doe. Had the " " that I was missing from D3.

It's a pretty nice venue, too. I'm not sure if you went to any of the previous Nerdapaloozas, but 2012 and 2011 were both at the Airport Marriott. Also... If they still have it, they have the BEST elevator. Inverse Phase made a song sampling it:

They've said specific influences for making them game were Earthbound, Paper Mario, and Zelda. I feel like that's pretty accurate.

I've been playing it the past few days. I was really surprised at how good the soundtrack was. Love the Warcraft, Skyrim, etc references. RPG tropes galore. Just a really great RPG overall.

Just because people only remember a select few games doesn't mean there's not a ton of great soundtracks now. At this point, he's just stating his opinion and, however biased or unpopular, is perfectly valid as an opinion.

I'm confused. The video called out large, big budget, modern game themes, and you said they didn't exist anymore. I linked examples of just that and you said they don't count? Again, market saturation. There's alot more games with a lot more music. Are you saying "of all games released, most don't have good soundtracks?" because that's a huge generalization. Are you saying "Of all big budget games most don't have good soundtracks?" because even that is a huge generalization. Here is a list of games released in 2013: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_in_video_gaming I'm sure there's a good variety of styles in soundtracks, and a good variety of styles of songs on said soundtracks. Are there more unappealing soundtracks now than there were in the past? Absolutely not. Do you know how I know? Because most remixes on OCR come from Final Fantasy or Chrono Trigger. Because most people who give examples of good game music point out major franchises. There is a huge catalog of games from SNES, Genesis, and NES, but people only remember a handful of songs/soundtracks. People only remember a handful of songs/soundtracks from modern games too. Super Mario Bros also has a huge audience. Tons of people have played it. Halo has a huge audience, but less than SMB. Payday has a huge audience, but less than both. Nier. Dual Destines. Etc . As more games come out, regardless of soundtrack quality, less people are familiar with all of them, but games that have been around forever many many people have encountered.