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No, I have video players nailed. GOMPlayer is far and away the absolute pinnacle of video players as far as I'm concerned. I have never encountered a file it won't play. It opens FLV, raw AVI, even VOB and AC3 files right off a dvd, and if it ever DOES encounter a file it can't play, it will automatically take you to a page where you can download a codec for it. It has a mind boggling amount of options, and best of all, it's absolutely free. If you want a VIDEO player, GOMPlayer is the way to go.

OK guys, I'm finally doing it. I've been using iTunes for 3 years. It's awesome, and close to perfect, but I'm tired of trying to wrangle smart playlists to do what I want. So I switched to Winamp a month ago. Winamp has its faults, but it also does some things I like. But the point is, in 7 years, I have never found an audio player that does everything I want. So I'm gonna see if you guys know of anything. Here's the crucial things I want it to do. 1. The option to organize your media library using the folder structure of the audio on your hard disc. I have all 4000 something songs meticulously organized and categorized in folders already. Why should I have to do it again in whatever media program I'm using. The other thing is, I have certain soundtracks that are MASSIVE rips from games, organized in fairly deep folder structures, and they need to stay that way to make sense. For example, I have a World of Warcraft soundtrack rip. The files themselves are not very well labeled, but the theme for Darnassus is in "WoW Rip>Old World>Cities>Darnassus>Darn01.mp3." It would just be a hell of a lot easier to maintain folder structure and make that easy to find than trying to manipulate ID3 tags and smart playlists. 2. Watch my media folders and automatically add new files I put in there. Winamp does this, which puts it a step above iTunes. I don't wanna have to go find files in that sea of audio and add them to my library. I wanna drop the file in a folder, and next time I open my media player, it's there. Do that shit for me. 3. Ability to set a DEFAULT for each playlist as to what columns will be shown and in what order. I don't wanna have to set up every damn one separately. It's silly. 4. A respect for the awesome and mind boggling organizational power of an ID3 tag. iTunes has this in spades. Problem with iTunes is you can tag every field in the file, but no matter how hard you try, you can't use the browser to filter files by anything but genre>artist>album. They're shooting themselves in the foot there. I REALLY do not think this is too much to ask from an audio player. Evidently it is though. There's a few plugins for Winamp that will get me really close to this, but they're extremely outdated. Also, keep in mind, I could not give a shit if this player plays videos, makes cookies, or feeds starving chinese children. I want an audio player and media library, and I want a good one. So there it is. This ultimate media player does not necessarily have to be free either. I want to know if it exists. Please tell me it does.

First off, I want to say that I think Child's Play is an absolutely AMAZING charity... for certain people. I think it's wonderful for the terminally ill, for whom nothing can be done. But as a nurse, I fully endorse pushing money towards research and treatment. I would anyways, but since I've started training for pediatrics I say we saves teh childrens. In Norfolk, Virginia, there's a nonprofit children's hospital called Children's Hospital of the King's Daughters. I desperately hope to work there some day soon, but until then, the children there could greatly benefit from their people being able to conduct more research. Now, to business. Because I don't have the time or the money to hunt you down and fucking kill you, I will chock this statement up to an absolutely astonishing amount of ignorance. Medical research costs billions of dollars. BILLIONS. Most of the profit that is ever made is simply in the saving of a person's life. Medical advances are slow in coming because the VAST majority of organizations that are performing the research are nonprofit organizations, dependent on the donations of people who care to continue their research. Provided they get the money they need, which is rare, it's never as simple as finding a cure. You peel away on layer of mystery to find another 20 years of new questions underneath. Furthermore, saying medical research would go out of business completely ignores the fact that, for instance, IF we ever find a cure for breast cancer, we still have brain, chest, lung, bone, and roughly 70 other unique types of CANCER alone to address for the next several hundred years before we move on to anything else. In summation, you have proven yourself to be a complete fucking idiot. Have a nice night. No hospital ever allows outside objects of this type on a unit. Simply put, in hospitals, we have to control as many variables as possible to reduce spread of disease. For example, if someone were to donate a used NES cartridge. What if that person had the flu, coughed on their hand, then picked that cartridge up and handed it to someone in the hospital. That cartridge is carrying a flu virus, intentionally or not. You risk the nurses and doctors being infected, and worse, there are potentially kids on the unit in such an immunosuppressed state that a bout of flu would kill them. It sounds extreme, but that's precisely how most nosocomial infections (infections started in the hospital) get started. I'm not even allowed to bring my own disposable gloves on the unit where I'm training. So it's not a bullshit policy, but it is a regrettable one. Especially with things like stuffed animals this holds true. They hold diseases like you wouldn't believe. Now, I know a new game can get sneezed on as easily as an old one, but once again, it's just controlling as many variables as possible.

I don't have any mixes posted to the site, but for me, I spend months on a mix. I'll spend a few days on the beginning of a mix, just transcribing, modifying, etc. I'll get tired and run out of really good ideas, then set the mix aside, or move over to another mix for awhile. I might come back to it weeks later, make some modifications, realize that something I did before downright sucks and needs to be changed... the point is I never mix until I really really want to. It would be harmful to the mix to do so, to just push on it until it's done. If I'm not on a deadline, I'll be damned if I'm gonna can my creativity to make one. Not only that, it frustrates you. If you're going in circles and out of ideas, STOP. The projact will still be there whenever you come back to it. So, in a year or so, when I have a finished mix that I'm completely satisfied with, I might submit it.

Seriously, if the game was released for any system that people have heard of, you can go for it. By that token, anything for SNES is completely fair game. Hell, if Makke can do a doo-wop mix of an NES game most people don't know exists, a remix of a game based on an awesome cartoon from your childhood will do just fine. I mean, Mazedude did a mix of a 7-up game for Christ's sake. You're fine.

WOW. I happen to have Prayer and the Ocarina of Time OST, so I went back and had a listen. Have to agree with Dhsu on this one. It's the exact original melody with a looping preset over it. On the other hand, I think Jill's vocals stand very well on their own, and I've already stated my stance on vocals in other languages. Had I been judging, which I obviously was not (nor was anyone else) I probably would have sent this one back for a little more imagination with the arrangement. That's a tall order though; the Forest Temple theme is an extremely daunting bit of music to remix, as it's barely music in the first place. I'd call it more of an ambience track, and Jill certainly did a better job than I would have. So in summation NO (resubmit) I've always wanted to do that.

Before going any farther, keep in mind that this is coming from the perspective of a listener who doesn't know much about music. I almost never care for metal in any form, but this is probably my favorite Bloody Tears mix. First off, the repetition you referred to is part and parcel of the metal genre. Metal is about presence, force and power, and not so much development of melodies and the like. So it's not uncommon to hear one kickass melody carried through a whole song from beginning to end. Thats not across the board, but if you listen to Dragonforce, for example, you'll hear the same set of riffs repeated several times, up to 8 and 9 minutes. Second, the arrangement. All of Bloody Tears is featured in this mix, with a different chord progression coming in for the verses. The chorus is, I think, the most amazing mixup of that bit of little bit of music ever. It's raw power and it just kicks ass. But the point is that every bit of Bloody Tears is there, all be it not necessarily in the expected places. Finally, the lyrics. Metal without screaming is not metal. I have never ever heard metal without screaming. I hate screaming. Except in this song, because I read the lyrics and they're intelligent and amazing and perfectly tell the story of Castlevania. I have to give huge props to anyone who can use the line 'frivolous time serene' in a song and have it make sense. Overall, from a listener standpoint, I think this is one of the better Castlevania mixes on the site, and perhaps the best Bloody Tears mix, although Bloody Hell is right up there. It's good metal. It eats your soul and pounds your ears and doesn't apologize. Mikey likes it. I also COMPLETELY agree with harmony. I actually prefer listening to music in other languages. It allows you to hear the voice as part of the music, as an instrument. Listening to English lyrics over music is like listening to 2 conversations at once for me. Your mind is trained so that the left brain, which controls speech, logic, and analysis, almost ALWAYS takes dominance over the right, which controls imagery, melody, and pretty much anything artistic. If there are lyrics in the song in your language, the left brain will automatically dominate the right to understand what those lyrics are saying and interpret meaning. We're hard wired like that. If you listen to vocals in a language you can't understand, or simply listen to instrumental music, your left brain has no idea how to interpret it. So the analytical, coldly logical part of your brain sends the music over to the artistic, emotional side of your brain, and you're now listening to music with the half of your brain that was designed to hear it and enjoy it. So you fall into the music. That's the reason instrumental new age music and chanting is used in certain therapies, because it can turn off the side of your brain causing all the stress for awhile. This is scientific folks. No shit. Note that screaming doesn't do that. It hurts my ears. At some volume level both sides of your brain are going HOLY SHIT TOO MUCH TURN IT DOWN!!! That's what metal does. I was just making a scientific point about the voice as an instrument.

That Bioshock review is made of fucking win. Pure awesome.

Yeah, I've definitely noticed that. You're writing for something that sounds kind of like a cello, but it has all its own qualities. (Or disqualities, if you prefer.)

Oooooooooooooh. Gotcha. The soundfont itself had a legato cello, it wasn't anything I manipulated in FL.

Kickass mix, and if the pace of the writeup was any indication, Dave may STILL be making out to it.

That is the SAUCE. I lamented the fact that Okami wasn't gonna be a Wii game from the second I heard of it. I also wondered why Clover (or cloverleaf or whatever the name is) decided to put something that amazing out for a dying system, it didn't get NEAR the attention it deserved.

Goddammit, I was hoping someone finally made a full on Final Fantasy spoof. Fail. Epic fail.

Xenon: Thanks for the clarification. Snapple: ROFL, and I have realized my use of the term was incorrect since I posted it. Incidentally, I'm pretty sure the fart I just blew was a b flat. Or b flatulence. Sorry, I had to.

Hell yeah. You wanna go to Darkesword's webpage and download Yatta Yatta Yoshi. It may be the most ridiculously happy song I've ever heard. Also, Summertime, by Hale-Bopp. It's on the site somewhere.

My Ph.D. in sarcasm is obviously wasted here. I know it's not funny. It became so true that it ceased being funny. What is funny though is that the responses made me think of that episode of Family Guy where Olivia calls Stewie the weakest link. "I love how you took that culturally relevant bit that we all knew... "You ARE the weakest link!" and you changed the context... and you used it to refer to me! Like, what I just did there! You're funny! Do you wanna crack any Titanic jokes while we're talking about recent developments in entertainment? You're funny. Do you write your own stuff? Because you're funny. Ha! Aha ha! Ooooh.... my.

Wait, what? I wasn't joking.

It's about time you all got your fix. I personally can't stand fighting games, so I may be the only person in the whole wide internet that doesn't give a shit. I'd rather they erase Megaman X 4 through 8 and fix that series. Street Fighter Lost me at Street Fighter 2: Ultimate Champion Sparkly Shiny Uber l33t Insane Unbelievable Mega Huge Armageddon Sweet Ass Apocolyptic Regurgitated Edition. There were quite a few more after that as I understand... So thinking technically, this SHOULD be Street Fighter 287.

Correction. Richard Adams wrote the book first. The movie was alright, but compared to the amazing awesomeness of the book, it still falls flat. Strangely, Watership Down was the only book I ever liked from Adams... he's a very strange writer. Plague Dogs was weird, and Shardik was absolutely bizzare.

I didn't really 'figure it out' per se, that's just one of the ways a cello can be played. Legato is very smooth, with a consistent sound, for example. Pizzicato is plucking muted strings. Detache is quickly touching the bow to the strings while it's moving back and forth, which gives a quick, sharp note, but not as quick as pizzicato. Tremolo isn't a bow technique, rather the cellist (or any string musician) wiggles their finger on whatever fret they're playing while they steadily draw the bow back and forth, which gives a trembling quality to the note. So they're all just different ways of manipulating the sound from the same instruments. Now you know.

LOL, office-standard epic paperweight made me think: WTS [Dreamcast] x1 PST One for all the WoW fans out there.

The Sega Dreamcast is famed the world over for it's astonishing success in the role of a paperweight. So are its controllers, incidentally.

I actually have to disagree with Pixie for once on this one... I really like the solo cello in the intro. In light of the rest of the mix, I'm fairly certain it was supposed to sound alone and out in the cold. The patches used for this mix really grabbed me too, they were very realistic, and it added a lot, so props for patch selection and production. Hope to hear from you again!

Holy sweet baby Jesus. A-Ron?!?! Are the glory days returning?

Wall. Of. Sound. There is a LOT of mix here. Somehow you managed to separate channels enough to keep things from muddling into each other. This is an extremely powerful mix, there's a lot going on. I hear at least 4 to 5 different channels at any given time. But the beat is definitely driving, very energetic. I appreciate the breather at 4:05. Oh. EXCELLENT use of sound effects. They somehow fit in with the music. This is a great example of loop layering and variations. Good work all round, and I hope to hear from you both again.