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soulflay

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Posts posted by soulflay

  1. There's no bad track on this album if you're a fan of the game but I wouldn't even call the two that are on official site (as of August 2018) my favorite ones in it. The first track immediately takes you back to the first map of the game, a pretty solid remix without changing the style. The selection was lean and well done, including this track. Would be nice to have tracks like these ported to Heretic running on Zandronum as fmod audio.

  2. We see most remixes of popular games, understandably.

    Here are some other options, different games, maybe different music genre.

    I suggest a remix of Aztec Adventure for Sega Master System, especially this track:

     

    Something more upbeat, from the makers of Puzzle Bobble, Parasol Stars:

     

    And finally, Slap Fight MD. (Only the arcade was released outside Japan as Alcon):

     

  3. Here are my suggestions for remixing, from Air Zonk.

    3 tracks in particular.

    Stage 1. I imagine a remix of this like jazzy electronica, with the main instrument being a saxophone.

     

     

    Stage 2. This one I imagine a straight forward electronica remix, kind of 90s pop.

     

     

    Stage 4. I imagine this one like some kind of big brass doom jazz remix, with echo heavy electric guitars, and the instrument used for the longer notes part to be a full brass section.

     

  4. I think it could have used more varied texture, but I like the general direction. I admire the oddball composers such as György Ligeti, and even more modern ones like Jasna Veličković, and I think people interested in creating this sort of music should study the work of people like those. I wouldn't listen to this sort of music all day, but it's an excellent change of pace and I'm glad it's here.

  5. I have an mp3 from who knows when and who knows where. I can't remember where I got it, but it was probably some fan website from several years ago, possibly even before 2000. It's a Gradius 3 remix mp3  but bad quality, old-school 128 kbps with hideous sound artifacts. Does anyone know who made this and if there is a better audio quality version somewhere? The link to download below.

    https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B0JWHr6wZL6WTGR3dkg1N0h3dWs

  6. My request is for a remix of this theme. I think one of the more exotic metal genres would work very well for a remix of this. The track name in the game seems to be "Questionable Century", but a variation of it is also the final boss, which the game calls "Self Determination". It's kind of reminiscent of the future theme in Chrono Trigger, but this has chords you can work with. 

    Here's videos of the regular and the final boss version:

     

  7. Yeah, as far as Hagane, that's pretty much the idea.

    And on Psycho Dream, here is the chiptunes: http://snesmusic.org/v2/profile.php?profile=set&selected=14752 In particular I'm thinking of 'Title' and 'Runner'. I'm not sure if there's any appreciation for that weirdness, but if not that then I'm just giving ideas for at least another remix style to anything. Thinking of a minimalist style in electronic form. By minimalist I mean something orchestral like Arvo Pärt, which might be seen as the prototype to techno without beats. I might even try this myself one of these days.

  8. The cowon iaudio e2, comparable to the ipod shuffle but not as lame. And all cowon players are one of the few known for supporting more than inferior formats like mp3. The sandisk players seem nice, too, but I never tried one and are afraid to try. I don't get the point of large portable players. I say if you want a nice screen, carry a smartphone around, and it does more stuff. The biggest I'd go is an ipod nano, even if they do have a battery-wasting screen, but I don't like ipods because they force you to use iToons.

  9. Why not use -q 0 instead of -h? Anyway, the lame manual states -h is always enabled when using VBR.

    The lame manual says -q 0 is just slower but not usually better, but no harm in anyone setting that.

    Oh and besides CBR and VBR there is also ABR. MP3 really is a mess but research led me to believe successful resistance to improvement is $ and not much else (mp3 equipment shills, etc). There is no point in going against that with technical improvement. http://jthz.com/mp3/ That is an old page, but to this day VBR is barely used compared to CBR. I also remember the crazy talk against Joint Stereo.

  10. The licensing fees with MP3 only come into play for commercial applications, not individual artists distributing their stuff. In theory, anything that does MP3 decoding and encoding requires a license fee. Also, I thought iTunes didn't use MP3, but it's own format (AAC) to avoid this (and other) issue(s).

    itunes will encode to aac by default but it can play mp3, at least last time I tried. It's a terrible program.

    I'd just like to say one more thing. You could insist people use lame and encode with the tags -h (higher quality) and insist on -V 1 (I say this because I see you are now accepting VBR 1)

  11. opinionated article written by one guy riddled with contradictions

    Which parts?

    It's debatable how far solid state drives will advance in 5 years, though my speculation is there will be some pretty substantial improvements.

    That said, I don't mind being forward thinking and asking for WAVs or FLACs when available, but we're still going to keep MP3 as the primary format for the forseeable future. It's the 1 universally accepted standard for compressed audio.

    I have WAVs of only 294 mixes out of 2246 so far (mostly album project mixes). There will always be big gaps as far as what's available for lossless files, when the day comes where sharing lossless files en masse is feasible without killing our bandwidth, but MP3 is still the universal standard.

    I think the issue with file size downloading is more about bandwidth than space. And the major problem I see with forming a collection with mp3 (if you don't deny its flaws) is that once it's 'published', and if the creator disappears from the scene, that's it, flaws and all. A lot of the older files you see here are 128 kbps and have pretty terrible artifacts if they are a certain type of music. Why continue the trend with newer files when options are available? I understand the thinking of "just because it is" reason, but don't agree with it. Well, at least the albums are flac.

  12. I wouldn't take such a flawed article as consensus.

    It's a consensus, not the consensus. There will always be people that disagree with something. But from my view it's a matter of empirical evidence. I can hear the flaws in mp3 just like the guy in the article.

    "A 128 kbps mp3 of a live show sounds bad compared to the lossless version, so that makes mp3s of all compressions sound bad and that we shouldn't be listening to music in the mp3 format!"

    The article said no such things. It was very specific about its claims.

    Sorry, but that's a bad article, especially in light of all of the studies out there that shows that most people cannot distinguish between a 192 kbps mp3 and lossless, and it's dubious whether any human is capable of making that distinction.

    Again, that wasn't the point of it. For one, some people can hear the flaws at that bitrate (you just have to know where to look). Second, there's the low bitrate problem of going too low (128), then there's the general inefficiency of needing to go to 320 when other codecs achieve quality at smaller sizes and are better at mitigating artifacts. The article mentions this. In either case, ocr doesn't seem to release 320 kbps mp3s.

    For example, your average CD player or car system will typically support MP3 CDs, not AAC or M4A CDs.

    Isn't this an obscure target if this is all there is? The only other one I can think of are some die hard club djs using mp3s, but that's still just a few individuals.

    If you can hear the difference between 320kbps mp3 and lossless

    YOU'VE GOT SOME SERIOUS KILLER STUDIO CHOPS.

    The question is why bother with such inefficient compression if you're trying to retain quality? If size is no object might as well release everything in flac.

  13. The adoption of AAC/M4A is definitely not nearly as widespread when you look at the full spectrum of players, plugins and hardware devices.

    But I'd be willing to bet that the amount of people relying on these mp3-only environments are even less than those using vorbis. If that is true it's an obscure environment to cater to, and things can be transcoded into mp3 as easily as to vorbis. I can't think of any examples first hand where aac audio support was absent.

  14. I grant you that it can impact the subtleties of music once you know what to listen for

    Yes, as the link I put up shows it's not a hard thing to learn what to listen to. I can't go back to mp3 after that.

    but... well too bad.

    I guess.

    Hmmm, where to begin.

    Let me just make an ideological point that bears making: open formats, and open technology, are both "good things". However, they are not the ONLY things, nor do they outweigh real-world considerations and practicality. Open format zealots usually have good intentions, but I hate to break it to you: the world is full of patents. Not all of them are bad, not all of them are evil, and some of them actually protect & inspire innovation, as opposed to curtailing it.

    But let me take another step back, re: MP3 specifically: the cat's out of the bag, the ship has sailed, and the fat lady has pretty much sung. Not in terms of MP3 being superior from a technical perspective - that's a whole different can of worms - but in terms of it being a format so widely-employed and easily accessible that it is, for all intents and purpose, "open". Maybe not on paper - although it's my understanding that it IS essentially open in terms of playing/decoding, just not encoding - but in practice. Practice makes all the difference in the world, as any site that focuses on fan arrangements of commercial game soundtracks can tell you...

    I know my post was moved here but I was never really advocating open source. My argument against mp3 is purely technical quality. AAC is in a similar boat as MP3 as far as patents, but still technically better than mp3. And any current portable that supports mp3 also supports aac. I don't think I ever held an mp3-only portable in my hands, although I'm sure they exist, just not so much anymore. Software players certainly support aac/m4a as commonly as mp3.

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