MindWanderer

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.

Also, Nintendo has always been garbage at 3rd party, since the N64. Look at this list of top-selling Wii games. The first 3rd-party game is Just Dance 2, at #16. Then Just Dance 1 at #18, with rest appearing en masse at #27+. People don't buy Nintendo consoles for 3rd-party games, and haven't done so since the SNES. Once the Wii U has Zelda, Smash Bros., DKC, and Mario Kart, it'll be in a much better position. Add new Paper Mario, Metroid Prime, and Kirby games, and everyone will forget the doomsaying ever happened. The Wii U will never be another Wii, but if it's another N64 or Gamecube, that'll be good enough.

If I may suggest, the Beginner Race from Marble Madness has a similar rhythm to Marble Zone, although the bass line of the Silly Race has some similarities to Marble Garden. They'd actually mesh quite nicely. Funny, I listened to Endless Mine for the first time just to see if I could hear what you meant, and it immediately sounded to me like a sad song of lost love, if you slowed it down by just a few BPM.

That is pretty cool indeed. There are some melodic parts where the strings are in the uncanny valley range (too mechanical to sound real, to real to sound intentional) and should probably be glitched up/filtered a little. And if you're using the actual source for the choir, that's of course a no-no. But otherwise I'd love to see this turned into a full remix.

Whoa, that's awesome! This thread had been dead for a while, so I was getting worried, but no longer! I'll get my nose to the grindstone as soon as I'm done with this week's PRC.

Well, I have next to no theory either, but I heard one sour note at 4:22, and the bell arp starting at 4:44 felt off, too.Overall it was one helluva solid entry, so don't feel bad at all.

I only hear piano and bass except for 1:43-1:53, when I just barely hear guitar playing the exact same part, pitch, and timing as the piano, and 2:16-end when it finally breaks free. Ending is kind of abrupt. Otherwise, it's simple but effective and enjoyable.