MindWanderer

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.

I think my beef is that the reverb doesn't seem to be consistent. In 0:13-0:30, with the sweeping "landscape" pad, the piano here sounds oddly like it's in a small, padded room. The subsequent section is similar, where the individual instruments don't seem like they're all in the same "place" (the bass sounds more shallow than the lead, especially). Might be the reverb levels, or some EQ that's swallowing some critical harmonics. I suspect EQ, because both the piano and the bass sound fine elsewhere.

Agreed, but there's something just a little unpolished about it that I can't put my finger on. If it's already as clean as timaeus knows how to get it, I think it could stand a mod review before submission. Someone else may be able to articulate the off vibe I'm getting from it (unless it's just me).

The judging status page says: Since you said the original submission was 8/13 or 9/13, and they're on 7/13 now, they haven't caught up to your resub yet. The only reason your original one went through so fast was because of the album. Check with them if the date on that page is later than the date of your resubmission. Usually updated versions of album tracks are still flagged as being part of the album. I suppose it might not if you altered it drastically enough. They'd probably contact you to discuss it, though.

Results! First Place: "Cruisin' the Docks" by Esperado feat. timaeus222, with 24 points. Second Place: "I'm your huckleberry" by Hollow feat. evktalo, with 18 points. Third Place: "Spectrum Path" by BrothaDom feat. Argle, with 16 points. Esperado and timaeus pull off a flawless victory, earning a first-place vote from every voter. Voting was close on BrothaDom and Argle vs. Hollow and evktalo: of the five votes placed by everyone else, three favored Hollow and two favored BrothaDom. Good round, everyone! RMWtS will be taking February off, due to the SZRC, and will resume in March, once 3/4 of the Sonic competitors have been eliminated.

The SZRC gave me an idea for resurrecting this. The problem, IMO, isn't that it's only 7 songs (which would be enough for an EP), it's that only about half of those songs are long and interesting enough for remix ideas to come easily. So what if it was a Marble Madness Mashup album? Beginner Race with Marble Zone from Sonic. Practice Race with Aquatic Ambiance from DKC. Or whatever. There's a particular Ultimate Race mashup I've wanted to do for years, and have been holding off on trying until I think my chops are good enough to pull it off. And if there was sufficient interest, this could easily bring it up to the target of two mixes per track.

7 hours left to vote! I have 6 votes so far, and I'm missing some from participants.