MindWanderer

Table below, with the bonus points for voting omitted. I received votes from 23 people. urdailywater was winning by a landslide late last week, with all but one voter ranking him first or second, with Tuberz and wildfire neck-and-neck for second. However, over the weekend and yesterday, urdailywater didn't get a single first-place vote, and it was wildfire that almost everyone voted for. Everyone did a great job, though, with at least one first-place vote for everyone. urdailywater, congrats on winning this, and be happy with it since you're not eligible anymore. Lady Wildfire, congrats on being the top-scoring novice who still qualifies as a novice! Thanks again to all the Stars for helping out, and please volunteer again when Season 1 launches! I was originally going to do that after PAX, but that'll be at the height of MMX madness, so probably October to give a couple of rounds of eliminations there first. K u T C w A 3 1 2 1 3 2 3 2 1 1 3 2 2 3 1 1 3 2 2 3 1 2 1 3 1 3 2 2 1 3 3 2 1 3 1 2 1 2 3 1 2 3 3 1 2 2 1 3 1 2 3 3 2 1 3 2 1 1 3 2 1 3 2 3 1 2 1 3 2

Some folks expressed a preference for anonymity, so I'm going to make a table with the names omitted. No 11th-hour votes, so results up in the first post in a minute.

45 minutes to go. Only 2 stars have voted. The voting was pretty one-sided when I last tallied them on Friday, but at the moment it's neck-and-neck. Get your voting in now, if you haven't yet--it could easily make a difference!

24 hours left to vote! I have votes from all the novices but only one star. If you like the work your partner did, make sure you vote!

I thought SuperiorX was saying the exact opposite: that wavs, midis, and maybe VSTs are totally adequate for file exchange.

I've revised the download zip with some more ID3 tags and album art. Great work everyone, I just locked in my own votes, and it wasn't easy. Everyone has at least one vote at this point, so you should all be proud. I'd definitely like to see some of these submitted, perhaps with some cleaning up. I especially enjoyed ScarfFace--always love me some NES Mega Man--though it was definitely still a little rough around the edges, or I would have ranked it higher. Incidentally, how do you all feel about the voting system? Is it better to have a public social group, which is easily audited, or PMs, which are more suspenseful? Should I post a chart of who voted how at the end, or is there value in anonymity?

Hmm... EasyTAG doesn't have Album Artist. Found another one, Ex Falso, which does have Album Artist, but also Performer, and the SZRC files seem to use Performer (according to it). I can definitely tag them differently if there's a preference.And yeah, the PSTs for the art would be good, I can work with that.

Well, here's my thinking/plan.What I'd like to do for the real seasons is to keep as stable a population of remixers as possible, with each Novice cooperating with each Star once, again as much as possible given that it will be drop-in, drop-out. Since the majority of participants are in the US, if I paired Europeans up with each other as much as possible, it would limit the pool of available partners to one or two. I could start folks off with others in their own time zone at first, but that would fall apart pretty quickly. As for DAWs, since there are so many different ones, there's the same problem but moreso. Furthermore, since it's a competition, whoever got lucky enough to share the same DAW would be at a significant advantage. What I'm thinking right now is to limit each team from exchanging project files--they can only send each other midis, wavs, etc, anything software-neutral, and the final submission would have to come from the Novice.

Posting source links in the first post now. I'm using EasyTAG for Linux, so even though I didn't tag them the same way you suggested, they should still show up grouped by album ("ReMixing With the Stars"; OCR is touchy about using their name, and this isn't an official OCR release) and disk (000, for the pilot; season 1, episode 1 will be 011). Are the tags not showing correctly for you? Nice! However, I'd personally rather have one piece of art for the whole RMWtS collection, and I'm not sure if it's OK to use the OCR logo. But the design is very cool.

Voting instructions up in first post. For redundancy: Votes should be based on, in roughly descending order, use of source, arrangement, production, and enjoyability. Interpretation of the theme shouldn't be considered. You'll pick your three favorites, in order. Your first-place vote will get 3 points, your second-place 2 points, and your third-place 1 point. Participants (both Novices and Stars) may not vote for their own mixes, but participants who vote will get a free first-place vote added to their score. I asked DarkeSword for a social group, but he suggested I use PMs instead. So that's the way we're going to do this. Please send me a PM with your votes, like this: 1. First-place ReMix 2. Second-place ReMix 3. Third-place ReMix

The mixes are available in the first post. Voting instructions soon. Participants: I'd like a bit of narrative from each novice, please. What you did, how you did it, how your Star helped you, what you learned, etc. If you want to post a link to your source, that would be a good place for that, too.

One hour left, still hoping to get something from you. If you think you need a short extension (< 1 hour), let me know. I think for season 1 I'll just make the choices myself, for the sake of 1) expediency and 2) not to give an advantage to the one who chooses it (e.g. they've already been working on something that fits the theme). PRC avoids that by not letting someone enter on their own choice, but I want to let folks participate every month for the whole season, if possible.

12 hours remain, most of which are generally used for sleep here in the States. I have 1 submission.

@urdailywater: Got it. @Kuolema: No, it doesn't disqualify you. You have almost 24 hours left, just make the most of them!

One week in! I guess wildfire is doing well. How about everyone else? Any comments on how the whole collaboration thing is going, and perhaps what this compo format might do in the future to facilitate learning and mastery?

Sure, why not? Not a stage select, though (since you can reach it mid-game).

This is only a pilot test, so no promises the format will even be similar. I'll probably loosen up the "Star" criteria--even though the "interest" thread had roughly the same number of Stars and Novices, this time it was about a 1:2 ratio. More info later. Sure, as long as the result is a coherent piece of music.

Pairings and theme are up in the first post! For the lazy: Participants Rozovian with AlmightyArceus DusK with Cash and Change Flexstyle with urdailywater Sir_NutS with Kuolema Prophecy with Tuberz McGee TheGuitahHeroe with wildfire Theme This pilot episode's theme is "Beginnings"! Your remix should either: Be based on a source that's used for a title screen, into/opening sequence, or starting stage/area, or Evoke the feeling of being used for such a thing (regardless of the source). This is a judgment call, but in my opinion Who's That Child is a good example--I could easily see it being used for the epic opening of a Castlevania HD remake. If you and your partner don't use the same DAW, do your best--exchange MIDIs, WAVs, whatever. Remember this is a pilot test and not to be taken too seriously. We'll standardize this process for next time. If any other challenges come up, please discuss them here so we can streamline the process for the future. Mixes are due in 2 weeks from today, at noon PDT. Novices should send me a PM with a link and post in this thread to confirm they sent it.

Not to derail this conversation too much, but they marvellous things with medications these days, and don't give up if you don't like the first one (or two or three) you try.

Yeah... I can think of formats that make sense (e.g. round-robin), but without elimination it would take forever even if no one took breaks in between mixes.I suppose you could do a last-man-standing model: After each round of eliminations, randomly pair the survivors, and if one side or the other is doing better, the extra participants would just sit out a round. It could be pretty hard for a team to catch up, though, since the winners risk fewer casualties. Could do it in waves (reinforcements) instead of brackets, that might help.

One of my early ideas for Remixing With the Stars was for each participant to pick a source, and in each round they'd have to mash up the sources of the Novice and the Star. Would have been an interesting chance to mix up totally different sources, e.g. if the theme was 8-bit vs. 16-bit, the Novices could pick any 8-bit source and the Stars could pick any 16-bit source. Perhaps if after 2 years of Robot Masters and Mavericks we still haven't had enough Mega Man, there could be a Mega Man vs. Mega Man X compo with a similar format. That could be pretty awesome.

That pretty much sums it up for me as well. I keep waffling between them. Amphibious's is clean and precise, very well done. Gario's is... interesting. I can't decide whether it's interesting in a good or bad way. It's funny, but the parts that are funny aren't always the best musically. I'm not a big fan of rap, and it repeats a lot (can't blame whoever wrote it though, given the time crunch). I'll certainly remember it for a long time, and you could call that a win regardless of how the voting goes.

Update: I have a whole bunch of signups for Novices already. If you didn't indicate interest in [thread=40410]the original thread[/thread], there's no more room. If you did get your name on there, you might still be able to bump someone. If this pattern is any indication of how things will go in the future, I definitely want to loosen the criteria for being a Star next time. I'll toss ideas around at the end.

Yes... in fact, double-checking now, I realize that yours is technically only one that counts, since all others were sent in before noon PDT. However, since I didn't absolutely, unequivocally, no-room-for-misinterpretation, state in every place possible that signups began at noon, and no Stars signed up since Sunday, I'll accept the signups that came in earlier today.

Star signups are closed. The participants are Rozovian, DusK, Flexstyle, Sir_NutS, Prophecy, and TheGuitahHeroe. That's six slots for novices. Novice signups are now open. Even if you already sent me a PM before today or posted in this thread, send me a PM now with your preferences of Star and samples of your previous work. I have a few signups already, so get yours in soon before all slots are taken!