MindWanderer

Hard week to compare, the styles were so radically different. Some thoughts: Awakes a Hero: These sources combine together really naturally, and djg really capitalizes on that. Very much in the original style of both sources, and well done for that. The flip side of that is originality, though; I personally don't feel like this deviates far enough from the sources to be interesting. No More Chips: Heh, these sources don't combine together naturally at all, and Ethan capitalizes on that fact really well! Really original and interesting, but clearly uses both sources--although a little light on Frog, it uses the main motif from it extensively, not to mention the energy level. The highs get a little muddy in places, but otherwise it's good, clean production. It does get just a little repetitive by the end. Solo riff is nice but disappointingly short. Fleshed out and cleaned up a bit more, and this is a solid start at front-page material IMHO. Until The Very End: Again, two sources that blend together almost effortlessly. Vocals are just a tad off-key and could stand some better enunciation. The problem with a traditional vocal piece is that the verse-chorus-bridge structure relies heavily on the vocal performance to carry it, because by itself it isn't an interesting arrangement approach. Stranger in a Strange Land: Mixed a bit quiet. Enviro-trance like this also generally needs to be pretty long to get up to speed, and I feel like this never quite makes it, and stays feeling thin throughout. The motifs of the sources are definitely there, but I feel like the very style causes them to be under-utilized.

One caveat there: you can write an awesome bass part that sounds great by itself, and then find that it clashes with the melody at a note or two. You have three choices: play an octave of the melody, skip the note, or play a note that sounds awful by itself but does harmonize. Bassist hate that last option, but it can sound great in the mix.

IIRC, you get the points when you register the Wii U through its own interface.

Final Fantasy 5 almost made my list. I dragged myself through the final dungeon by the skin of my teeth, skipping all the optional bosses and blowing a mess of elixirs on Exdeath. I did finish Wild Arms 2, and I remember enjoying it at the time... but now I remember virtually nothing about it. Just having to search for every city and shooting fireballs at everything. And the weird transformation mechanic thing that made every boss fight virtually on rails. So I understand that one. I played WA3 for a while, but I don't even remember why I quit. I understand Alter F (the remake) was garbage. I did finish the Meat Circus, eventually. It was hard, but not one of my top most frustrating platforming/action sequences. The Ares fight in God Of War, the 8-bit Luigi stage in Mario Galaxy, and every single occurrence of the blob-monster at the end of Devil May Cry were way worse for me. Oh, that reminds me: Super Mario Sunshine. I beat the game, but so many of the shine stars were utter BS. Only 3D Mario game I every played and didn't complete 100%.

Breath of Fire 2, Xenogears, and Final Fantasy III (Japan), same problem: Most of the game was great, but the final dungeon was a long slog that I had to grind in order to get strong enough to beat the forces of attrition. Got bored very quickly at that point. Phantasy Star II, same deal, except that the slogging thing started way before the last dungeon. I've restarted that game 3 times, and always get bored during or just after the dam sequence. Got stuck on one of the Riku fights in Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories. Massive leap in difficulty there, where I had to choose between trying over and over for a near-perfect battle, or go back and grind (and grinding effectively in that game was hard). I don't even know how close to the end of that game I was, but certainly more than half. Oblivion, exact opposite story: I've restarted that game 3 times as well, spent probably 100 hours on it each time, and never even started the main storyline. Once I restarted because my build clearly wasn't good enough and every damn thing I ran into anywhere nearly killed me; the other two times, I got busy with other things. Soul Reaver just got boring. I killed all the henchman vampires, getting increasingly stupid powers with each one while the fights with incidental monsters got longer and longer. Just wasn't enjoying myself at that point, and the prospect of killing hundreds more random crap monsters in slugfests to reach a personality-free final boss with a personality-free protagonist wasn't tempting at all anymore.

You shouldn't need dosbox, running cmd (in Windows XP compatibility mode if your OS is 64-bit) should be good enough. You can try that next time.

It shouldn't happen at all, server-side. VBulletin uses session cookies, so your getting logged out prematurely would be due to your cookies getting corrupted or cleared, or your internet connection going down (and even if your connection goes down, the cookies should persist in most cases). You might have an overzealous internet security program that's nuking your cookies.

It's an awesome idea, but I see a lot of threads asking for female vocalists already. And site participation in general seems to be at a low right now. I think you'll have a hard time drumming up enough participation.

I just discovered something interesting: Audacity does indeed introduce distortions into your render if there are muted tracks in the project. Really bad ones. I can't think why. The distortions aren't there during playback within the program, they just show up when you export to .WAV.

Submitting now. Got a nasty stomach bug before I started mastering, and then some strange rendering artifacts, so it could definitely stand to be cleaner. If people like it, I'll try fixing it some other time. But right now I need some rest in a bad way.

I'm still having trouble with this.I noticed that in the mix I'm working on right now, the crest factor goes up when my mix gets louder. During the quiet buildup, crest factor is less than 1. Then it gets to 6-7 as I add instruments, and about 15-16 when I start hitting the limiter. That's with SPAN before the master limiter in my mix; when I move it after, the numbers change but the pattern remains (about 10 when I start limiting). I also notice that SPAN keeps track of the max crest, which suggests that big = bad. I'm also pretty sure that crest, being a ratio, is unitless (not measured in dB. On a related topic, I see the following two comments frequently: 1) You should set your master limiter at around -0.2dB. 2) TLs Pocket Limiter is the bomb. Except, as near as I can tell, TLs doesn't let you set a limit at anything but 0dB. Are these two statements contradictory, then?

Coming along. Arrangement is nearly done, production is tomorrow. A little more medley-ish than I'd like, but these are two very complex sources with very different meters.

Also, resubs get fast-tracked.

Probably should have started a new thread, but a mod can split off my reply just as easily. Happens to all of us, but what you can try doing is hum a few bars into your phone's recorder, slap on something for rhythm. It won't even remotely approximate what you're going for, but it's sometimes enough to jog your memory back onto the same track. I'm not familiar with FL Mobile, but there are other apps that make this easy. Evernote, for one. You can also try Stringnote, which integrates into Evernote to let you double-tap the power button for instant recording. (My phone, the G5S, is only partially supported and that aspect of the app sucks for me).Although I can't fathom why it would be hard to upload WAV's with FL Mobile. That seems like it's the single most important thing it could do. http://bit.ly/1qzLZIg

Aha! I keep hearing how everyone drops high-pass filters on everything every chance they get, but I never really understood why before. Thanks Zircon!

Or, what more beginners/hobbyists around here do, swap out the instrument entirely with one with similar properties. You could even take a bad sample/soundfont and filter the hell out of it so that it sounds like an entirely different (electronic) instrument, but retains some of the "essential flavor" of the electric guitar. You just need to get out of the "uncanny valley" where your instrument sounds too fake to be authentic, and too real to be considered an electronic instrument. Crystal is one of my favorite tools for this; it lets you use a soundfont as the base waveform for a synth, instead of a square/pulse/saw/sine/etc.

I never knew the game was supposed to be played at mealtime! The things you learn! (Read Me.txt claims that it was a "lunch" title.) It's also made with the "•" character, which isn't recognized by any .txt reader I can find other than a web browser.

Size on disk is a function of cluster size. In this case, anything generally close to either file size will have the same size on the disk (because it rounds up to the nearest cluster). So no, the files are not quite the same size. Are they precisely the same length, to the millisecond? Otherwise, I'd guess that there are differences in the headers, specifically the format chunk (which is variable size, see http://www-mmsp.ece.mcgill.ca/Documents/AudioFormats/WAVE/WAVE.html).

A Taste of Ivalice: Very cool dissonant effects going on here, I like how disturbing it is. Very unique and memorable. Unfortunately, that aspect got dropped halfway through--it would have been nice if those electro-industrial instruments made a return toward the end. The EQ could stand some tweaking, especially the harp, but overall great production. Dustin Time: I agree with Eino, it's a little flat. The leads in particular get buried. The interesting timing sometimes works and sometimes doesn't--swing and arps, especially, are hard to integrate. Spirit of Beginning: It's a good arrangement, but not a genre I feel comfortable commenting on. It could benefit from some level tweaking, but otherwise it does what it does quite well (while it lasts). Avoin tie: There's a pumping that sounds like overcompression to me, and it's distracting almost to the point of being painful. I just couldn't get through listening to this a second time. Interesting that you went with a jazzy percussion section as well. I'm not crazy about the instrument choices--they don't seem to be chosen in any kind of unified way, they step on each other, some are clean and some are dirty. I hope everyone can make time for mixing next time! My own is coming along nicely, I'm having a lot of fun with it and learning some new things.

Destroyer. Definitely destroyer. Aw yeah, exactly what I wanted. I have some ideas cooked up already, I'll get something done if it's humanly possible.

Do you just need a file server, or do you actually need remote desktop access? What OS?

It's mostly because the last generation did so well, I think. Those were the most successful consoles any of the three makers had ever made, by a lot. And they all started in full swing. This time: Nintendo: "Our new console is graphically comparable to those of our competitors' last generation, its key feature is a peripheral no one really knows what to do with, its name makes it sounds like an accessory to our last system, and it costs almost twice as much!" Microsoft: "Our new console is still HD, does a bunch of things you can already do on your computer, features a gimmicky device that doesn't have any good game support despite being out for years now, launches with almost entirely games that are already out on older systems, prevents you from playing used games or from playing offline, and is the most expensive console in years!" Sony: "No changes. It's just more PlayStation. It's prettier. You know you'll buy one eventually, anyway, because the other guys suck." Now that new exclusive titles are coming out, there will start to be some buy-in. But it's not because the consoles are anything to brag about, it's because you need them to play the new games. Almost nothing was announced at E3 that couldn't have been made last-gen, and if they did, still no one would buy the new consoles.

Very nice. That's a really rich soundscape for 8-bit. Are the pads actually 8-bit, or are you cheating there?

Nice stuff. Needs a bit more buildup before getting into the exciting stuff. Low end is a bit weak for this kind of cinematic soundscape. And of course it's really mechanical. But it's an enjoyable arrangement.

What browser are you guys using? On Chrome for Linux, mine is present but moved to the left a bit. On Chrome for Android, mine is gone.