metafarion

Pretty good stuff here! I actually hadn't seen any of these sites before, so this is excellent information for me. Hooktheory looks especially promising since it can be embedded; I wonder how legit would be to use it as a major part of an entirely different site though I have considered making this a sub-section of an existing community; and I'm sure in-depth dissection of VGM is extremely relevant to ocremix's interests/purpose. This is only preliminary research though. Like I said, I'm not a tremendously sophisticated web developer, and I would not want to pitch an idea without some idea how to pull it off technically. My plan is to make some kind of proof-of-concept site, see if anyone is interested, and then decide to throw in with someone or go it alone. As I've been thinking about this more, I think a wiki structure could work if there could somehow be a mini-discussion section/forum for any section in an article. That way there could be focused discussions about specific elements of the music. Also it would need to be presented in a more integrated manner than the traditional MediaWiki where the discussion and article are not visible on the same page together.

Hi folks, I'm in the planning stages of a game music website and I wanted to get some input on the concept and maybe some ideas on how I might pull it off on the technical end of things. The site I envision is a large database of music from games with lots and lots of details about the aesthetics, music theory, thematic usage, plot significance, etc. to function as inspiration/reference for discussion about those topics. Though there will be recordings for the purpose of analyzing the various pieces, this would not be a VGM archive; there are already tons of those. It's really all about the discussion of these works which I think is fascinating, particularly regarding the more...shall we say "technically-constrained" soundtracks of the 80s and 90s. Nowadays you can use all the sampled audio you want, stick Gordon Freeman in a forest and have an ambient forest soundtrack. But back then they had 3-7 sound channels to work with on a primitive synthesizer and somehow made incredibly evocative "foresty" sounding backdrops (I'm looking at you Donkey Kong Country). How the @&&^*$% did that work? I'm getting off-track and ranty, but this is just barely scratching the surface of the sorts of things I want to discuss. But to even have those discussions, I want to have at the ready, recordings of the pieces in question along with the breakdown of instrumentation, tonal centers, themes, motifs, screenshots (if applicable), character relevance, etc. The website will function as a mechanism to gather that data as well as provide a venue for discussing it. The part I'm stuck on now is what framework to build the site on. I'm not a full-fledged web developer and I can't whip up a custom platform, though I am proficient in HTML/CSS and some established systems like MediaWiki & Wordpress. A wiki could do the job (seems to work alright for TVTropes), but I thought there might be a better system yet with more integration of discussion with data gathering or some other functionality I haven't thought of yet. Whaddy'all think?