MindWanderer

Season 2, Episode 5: Pacifism Results! First Place: "Stop the Doc" by BrothaDom feat. Jean of mArc, with 17 points. Second Place: "Genesis" by Hollow feat. timaeus222, with 15 points. Third Place: "Practice Makes Madness" by Cash feat. Esperado, with 14 points. Download Season 2 Now! Theme This month's episode is dedicated to Lux, the 22-pound Himalayan cat who held his owners hostage until they could be rescued by the police. Cat we all just get along? To prove that we can, all of this month's remixes should either: Be based on a video game wherein none of your problems are solved with violence: no killing, squashing, punching, shooting, blowing up, etc. of any creatures (or robots, in settings with sentient robots), OR Be based on any source, and be peaceful and calming. Pairings The Eluryahn with wildfire. Cash with Esperado. Source: http://youtu.be/3jPcj569POc Hollow with timaeus222. Source: http://youtu.be/TLfj3pAlrs4 BrothaDom with Jean of mArc. Source: http://youtu.be/QAcM6JP8DtA About ReMixing With the Stars ReMixing With the Stars is intended to give beginning remixers some support, encouragement, and mentoring in their quest to become great, and as a sidenote, to become posted remixers. Beginners are mentored by experienced remixers to push their abilities to new heights and submit collaborative works according to the theme of the month. Who's a "Star" and who's a "Novice?" Any posted or accepted-to-be-posted remixer, as the only artist or as the lead arranger on a piece, is automatically considered a "Star." This isn't meant to be a statement on who's a "good" or "expert" artist, but it's a somewhat meaningful threshhold which doesn't require any subjective judgment on my part (however subjective the OCR judging process may be). Additionally, anyone who wants to sign up as a Star can also be put into that category. This is because a lot more "Novices" (who is everyone else) sign up than stars, and it's better to receive some mentoring from someone who's good but not posted than from no one at all. If you've done any of the following things, as examples, I strongly recommend you sign up as a Star: Contributed to an OCR album Had a submitted remix rejected but with one or more "Yes" votes Beat a posted remixer in direct competition (not counting forfeit) Sold your compositions (remixes or not) for money If you want to sign up conditionally (e.g. "I'd prefer to be a Novice, but if you need me to be a Star so more people can participate, that's fine too"), then go ahead, and bless you. Rules Enrollment/Pairings: Since this is a new season, pairing priority (should it be an issue) is flipped: newcomers get the first slots, while returning Novices will be dropped, by order of signup, if there aren't enough Stars to go around. As before, once the list of Novices is reduced to the same size as the list of Stars, novices will be randomly paired with Stars. Since this is a new season, Novices may be paired with a Star they worked with last season. Mixes: The Novice must be the primary remixer. Stars can contribute by giving advice, playing a live instrument or vocals, and with production, including sample quality, balance, and minor adjustments to fix timing or dissonance issues. They may also contribute a short solo segment. No one other than the Novice and Star may help in any way. Submissions: All entries must be sent to me by the 10PM PDT deadline via PM on the forums, with a link to a reliable host for me to download your mix from. Please don't use Tindeck, as it doesn't give you control over what the filename will be when downloaded. I also recommend you post in this thread that you've submitted your mix, since I know there have been issues in other compos with PM's not being received. Please submit your file as an mp3, preferably encoded at a high-quality VBR or 320kbps. Filenames must be in the following format: Novice feat. Star - Title (Game).mp3 Example: MindWanderer feat. djpretzel - The World's Worst ReMix (Pong).mp3 Proper file names and formats mean I can do my job of getting the compliation done and posted faster, which means you get to hear the great music produced by this sooner. Incorrect file names annoy me, and an annoyed host is an unhelpful host. Schedule All deadlines are 10 PM Pacific time (PDT). Signups until Tuesday, March 11, 10:00pm PDT. If you're signing up as a Novice, and didn't sign up for a previous episode, you must post links to at least two samples of your previous work! They don't have to be good, they don't even have to be game remixes, you just have to prove you're not brand-spanking-new to this music production thing. Things you've posted to the WIP forum are preferable but not required. If you're signing up as a Star, say a little bit about your strengths, and maybe post a link or three to remixes you feel best represent them. You can mention anything else you think would be helpful in working with you (software preferences, instruments you play, etc). Announcement of the pairings and theme on March 12. The theme will be broad enough to allow many, many options, serving mainly as a unifying factor. It's announced later so that no one gets a head start. ReMixing from March 12 to Wednesday, March 26, 10:00pm PDT (2 weeks). Rules and guidelines above. Voting from whenever I get the compilation posted (should be no more than a few hours after the deadline) until Wednesday, April 2, 10:00pm PDT. Votes should be based on, in roughly descending order, use of source (i.e. interpreted but recognizable), arrangement, production, and enjoyability. How appropriate the submission was for the theme shouldn't be considered (since this is easier for option A than option . 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. Please send me a PM with your votes, like this: 1. First-place ReMix 2. Second-place ReMix 3. Third-place ReMix Thanks for your interest, and lets get this show on the road! Previous Episodes Season 1 Compilation [thread=40611]Pilot Episode: "Beginnings"[/thread] [thread=41556]Season 1, Episode 1: "Spooky!"[/thread] [thread=41864]Season 1, Episode 2: "Origins of Home Gaming"[/thread] [thread=42143]Season 1, Episode 3: Special "You Can Never Have Too Much Mega Man" edition[/thread] [thread=42485]Season 1, Episode 4: "Yesteryear"[/thread] [thread=42797]Season 1, Episode 5: "Ultra-Modern"[/thread] [thread=43124]Season 1 Finale: "Touched by a Star"[/thread] [thread=43437]Season 2, Episode 1: "Country Road"[/thread] [thread=43702]Season 2, Episode 2: "Tropical Vacation!"[/thread] [thread=45320]Season 2, Episode 3: Special "Wish on This!" edition[/thread] [thread=45909]Season 2, Episode 4: "The Need for Speed!"[/thread]

I ran across this juxtaposition earlier this week. I thought it was appropriate to mention here. http://kotaku.com/5825489/nintendos-hardware-sales-arent-looking-so-hot http://kotaku.com/nintendo-3ds-was-top-selling-system-of-2013-because-it-1503082139

Oh, I'd love to do Phantasy Star 2, but I'm still working on my Dr. Mario RPG mix. If someone wants to take it, that's great (especially since I don't have an audition-worthy remix to my name yet), but if it's still on the table by the time I'm ready, I'm all over that sucker.

I was until a couple months ago. Last time I had upgraded it was to play Fable, and that was just the video card.I think one restriction per round is enough, I.e. one vst or soundfont. Restricting the theme or source in addition seems unnecessary, and too similar to existing compos. A super-broad theme might be OK, but DoD ranges from broad (Japan) to narrow (TMNT). Although their re-remix theme would be pretty cool for this. I also think the winner should choose the next round's instrument, and I don't think it necessarily has to be a super-obscure one. It probably shouldn't be Synth1 or FluidR3, but choosing 'Bleep or setzerspc seems reasonable enough.

Well, TLs sounds good to my ear, and I know nothing about premium plugins, but better ears than mine have recommended Limiter No.6 (One of the six is a clipper with a knee parameter), and Melda's MLimiter looks like it has strong potential in that area as well.

I'm amused by this, as white noise with fast attack and slow decay is what 8- and 16-bit music use for crash cymbals anyway.Used sparingly, dead air for a beat before the new measure can serve just as well as a crash. Occasionally another instrument with similar properties, like a tubular bell or triangle, can do the job, but that doesn't seem to suit many types of music. I suppose the cannons in the 1812 Overture accomplish the same thing.

Did I miss the memo that this was classic hardware synth appreciation week?

Thanks! All this time it's been "Arse-Ace" in my head, which hardly seemed intentional.It always both depresses and encourages me when I see posted remixers refer to themselves as newbies. On one hand, it reminds me that I don't have to be perfect to get posted, but on the other, it reminds me that even when I do reach that watershed, which seems a long way away right now, I'll still have a long way to go.

I agree with Gario 100%. Older games tend to have more of a melodic "hook" that's catchy, identifiable, and stands out. Some more recent games do, too, but recent games more often consist of "scores" rather than "melodies." If someone did a remix of, say, Mass Effect, I'd never recognize it even though I've spent many hours on that series. Another factor for me is that I like video game music, but I do prefer to listen to more modern instrumentation when possible, even when it's only 9-bit or even fakebit. Recent music that I like--Metal Gear Solid, Civ IV, Portal--goes straight into my music collection as-is, no hesitation. 8- or 16-bit music... I have to like it a whole heck of a lot to listen to the OST for fun. The reason I started remixing is that I want to create music I want to listen to, and most of the time that means modernizing the classics. Edit @Brandon: It's usually true that modern == expansive, but not necessarily. I have no problem remixing expansive music if it has a noteworthy melody, again, like MGS. As a counterexample, Terraria. It's a 9-bit soundtrack with not much in the way of melody. Modern, but not expansive, and also not the kind of thing people seem to love to remix (or at least, not me).

Looks good. The loudness analyzer, expander, vibrato, and tremolo are things I don't currently have other free alternatives for. It's also the only free visual compressor/limiter software I've seen. And it looks like they have tutorials for all of it, which is a really nice bonus. But ugh, there are so many "these are the best free VST's that do X" threads and blogs out there, it's really overwhelming for a newbie. Everyone has their opinions, I don't have enough experience or ear training to form my own opinions, and new stuff comes out or becomes free all the time.

Random thoughts and comments, non-comprehensive, mostly intended as constructive criticism: Sterling: There's a decent arrangement in there somewhere, but the instruments are just really, really bad. That ...kick...thing... is pretty annoying, and everything else just sounds thin, lifeless, and badly balanced. With better volume levels, some reverb, and better percussion it wouldn't be half bad. Garpocalypse: You're one of those remixers who's getting better by leaps and bounds lately. You have no idea how much I was expecting, and hoping, for a sax to kick in during this mix. Some "wrong" notes starting at 2:21. DusK: Seems to be lacking in the low end. Timpani is a little lifeless. Lead solo violin sounds pretty bad, it's really thin, fakey, and mechanical. Great arrangement, though. Eino: Awesome that the title works out so well in your native language. Overkill on the snare, and the guitar is kind of muddy. Not a whole lot of variation. BrothaDom: Sometimes your lead and accompaniment aren't in the same key, so watch that. Rapping is pretty unenthusiastic, good rapping sort of shouts! Each! Word! BlackPanther: Smooth but quiet and a little short. Chernabogue: Now that's some belly-quivering bass! Brass isn't very convincing, though. Even I can hear the overcompression making the brass, ooh's, and violins throb. And the timpani starts getting fatiguing by the end. Arceace: I really like the arrangement, but the disparate volume levels are painful. Some of the "blips" are really loud.

> We need 2 weeks instead of 1 The advantage of a 1-week deadline is, with two brackets, you get one on, one off. The disadvantage is tighter deadlines. I think 1 week worked better in the past, because more of the competitors were able to make something good in a few hours, but most current competitors need longer now. > Don't limit it to character themes, include ALL FF themes Agreed. Another possible idea is to make thematic suggestions at the beginning, e.g. fast, slow, comical, X-on-the-floor, etc. I feel like people really struggled with mixing two very disparate themes, and while it was an interesting challenge, I feel like the overall quality suffered. > Possibly make mixing competitor themes optional (the focus would be on simply making the better mix) I disagree with this for one reason: one awesome thing about this general compo format is that it forces you to try different things. If you already have several ideas for a Relm remix, that's great, but a lot of people get inspired by their opponent's source. I definitely think some sort of external restriction needs to take place. It could be a different format, though. For instance, everyone could make a love theme or a battle theme based on their source (and if their source already is a theme of that source, have a backup genre or just make it a wildcard round for them). And in this case, it wouldn't have to be a single-elimination tournament, but could be more like the Gauntlets, or just simply have everyone go every round for the duration.

Well, really just two new tracks, "Drowsy" and "Dizzy." Everything else is, I believe, a remix of something else from the series. But those two have some potential.

So... there are quite a few details missing here. How does enrollment work? What's the timeframe for each round? How are submissions submitted? How is voting done, and what should the voting criteria be? What's the prize? Also, what makes this more interesting than the other compos running concurrently, especially the SZRC? Why launch a second Sonic compo when one is already going on, which just recently started? What's the draw/hook?

@Eino: Yes, the track title was supposed to be a lowbrow pun. Laputa, Miyazaki's Castle in the Sky plus Vega, the pretty-boy of Spain. I was experimenting with Synth1's capabilities as a drum set. I don't think I'll be doing that again--the kick was OK but everything else came out pretty flimsy.

Lenna's is obvious for about 30 seconds' worth, and since I know to listen for it, I can pick it up for about another 60 seconds' worth, heavily arranged (30 following the "obvious" part of the theme, 30 later). Lulu's theme isn't really used as melody at all.

Yeah, Tuberz's entry had a lot of great ideas crammed into one mix, and while the transitions did always carry part of the instrumentation forward while changing other parts, the overall impression was that it couldn't settle on an approach. It did, however, make much more recognizable use of the sources.

That's amazing. I used Fluid for my first attempt at a remix, and got torn apart for using poor samples. Massaging that into something that sounds as good as your mixes in more than impressive.

Yeah, the database and file-naming convention they use requires one game to be considered primary, but I can think of mixes that use half a dozen sources, or that come from 3 or 4 games. They just have to all meet the OCR criteria--any use of of a non-game source could put a mix in trouble.

Cool, I didn't even notice this was so close--the first zone from the first Sonic game with the second-to-last zone from the most recent game! Just too bad it wasn't Lava Mountain.

My apologies. Once of my duties at work is to intercept common questions that get asked all the time, so the administrators don't spend their precious time on that sort of thing, so I guess I get into that habit. I'll refrain from trying to "help" in that manner going forward.

Yeah, but the data I was looking at, in multiple places, was using a factor of 10 for some reason. Not sure if that's because of a difference between transfer speed and throughput, or because the powers of 2 just work out that way (using SI units).Anyway, this is now off-topic.

Whoops, yeah, missed the magnitude when I converted transfer bits to throughput bytes, for all but Thunderbolt. Fixed above.

USB2 is 35 MB/s throughput, which is garbage for your purposes. If you can't go internal, then Thunderbolt is your only real option. Someone with more experience loading large samples can probably provide you with better advice as to whether an SSD is worth the cost in this situation. I suspect a 7200RPM would be perfectly adequate, but look for one with good read access speed.

That's a bit of an apples and oranges comparison. (Edit 3: Oops, mixed up bytes and bits here. Converted to bytes for consistency.) Thunderbolt is a connection type. For an internal drive, you're comparing Thunderbolt (1 GB/s) to SATA III (600 MB/s), USB 3.0 (500 MB/s), or SATA II (300 MB/s). SSD vs. traditional magnetic platters is an issue of storage medium. It's hard to compare one to the other without getting into a thousand data points, but the important thing is this: Thunderbolt drives are also SSD's, or 7200RPM hard drives (probably not slower, that would be silly), or flash memory. As near as I can tell, access speed is likely to be your bottleneck here. I found one, perhaps not reliable source that said, "SSDs are around 200MB/s read, and 100-150MB/s write. Modern hard drives are around 120MB/s for both." So most likely you'll barely notice a difference between Thunderbolt and SATA III for your purposes, whereas an SSD will be remarkably better. Edit 2: The Intel X25-M has a read speed of 250MB/s, but 70-100 MB/s write speed. Tom's Hardware places traditional hard drives at about 40-100MB/s read speed--lots of variability here! My answer is unchanged, though.