Protricity

Ugh finally.

Just got the response. At this time I'd like to ask everyone to hold off on their votes until one week when this song is revised. I don't think we should simply 'not pass it' if we don't recieve a revision. Once we do get a revision, I would like to ask everyone who voted again to reconsider the song. No need to rewrite anything if your opinions don't change; just reconsider. LOQ'd

One of the best songs on the SOUNDtrack. Very unique. What I especially like is how well arranged the song is. Consider the original. As far as I'm concerned its total crap. Yet this brought it out in very cool new ways. Its almost like a compo-limitation remix with killer results.

yea, this was quite the obvious NO. Gettin real tired of the whole 'this isn't godly amazing, but its nice, so yes.' What the hell kinda standard is that for judging. That is to say; please do a better job in explaining why this song is acceptable when we've rejected plenty of songs with far more impressive rearrangement, actual composition, good improv, good sound recording, and all the other stuff this song simply lacks. Its not enough that a song so simple that lacks in all areas should pass due to it sounding 'ok'.

LT Edit - Old decision: http://www.ocremix.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=32752 [00:09:22] Shields up, Weapons online.: hmm i'll just copy/paste the description I just wrote in this window [00:09:31] Shields up, Weapons online.: Long story short: sadorf submitted this song some time ago. I liked it but it had some problems so I asked him to let me work with it. when I came back with the first demo, he was impressed with what I had done with it, so we agreed to get it finished and submitted. After a loong time we could come up with something we liked, and well here it is. This mix should be credited to Sadorf and S|r_NutS. if anyone remembers the old version will notice the huge improvement that we could do with it. Enjoy. [00:10:24] Shields up, Weapons online.: Thanks in advance. [00:15:10] Protricity: shut up. So yea.. I guess this is a submission or something. Iduno, who cares. afk EDIT: YES ITS A REAL FALL THROUGH. Hes been waiting months.

I can definately hear the 'dont care' aspect in the improv. Normally I am all about improv, but this is sooooo lazy. Theres no inspiration here at all. It feels very very random and unskilled. The bass is way too loud. Drums are amature and dont ever change off a single loop. The jazz chords sounded nice at the beginning, but then the loop for the next 4 minutes without changing at all. No key changes. Just nothing going on here at all but weak minimal arrangement. NO

Regardless of whether it is allowed or not, it doesn't count as we recently agreed such lackluster decisions should never count. Beyond that, I'm strongly opposed to a judge ever voting on his or her own song. Its just ridiculous.

And I want to quickly not that I still feel this song is drastically below the bar. I don't object to it being posted or anything, but I just wonder how hard it would have been to up the quality of this song a bit. Not too much work I think. I believe more focus should be placed on trying to get the authors to improve minor problems with their songs that could easily have been fixed. This is gonna be on ocr for a long time. Furthermore, I feel that decisions like the one malcos gave in this song should not be considered until they are rewritten as real reviews. If I had figured this song really stood any chance of being passed (I'm still rather suprised) then I certainly would have been more detailed in my first review. It appears that this thread has 5 yesses, so it looks as if by chance or deliberate action malcos's incomplete decision wasn't really considered which is good.

I don't think thats a good reason to reject a song.

Not really, but ignoring the fact that the db level of the loss in a negation test is actually a very good way to determine loss is simply absurd. I'm talking about actual loss here, not 'what sounds good'. I've seen mp3 loss artifacts make songs sound better if you would believe that. To me, the negation tests are very critical. Mp3s tend to sacrifice or distort high frequencies more readily than ogg vorbis. It becomes very noticable on high end systems or very good earphones. Sure the songs stilly might 'sound good' without the high freqs, but that doesn't change the fact that they are certainly suffering loss. This whole topic is pretty much my arguement in favor of the ogg vorbis codec because I would rather have the blame placed on the encoder user or the original artist for loss and artifacts rather than the ogg vorbis encoding rate. Remember there were at least 4 tracks that binnie never got waves for and had to deal with high bitrate (but lossy) mp3s. This pretty much disqualifies this soundtrack as any kind of test subject. The ogg vorbis codec should not be responsible for the artist's shortcommings etc. Rotc was 100% wave submissions, and the vorbis encodes for that soundtrack sound great. I went through them on many earphones, speaker systems, and negation tests to qualify a certain degree of quality. Obviously this soundtrack did not.

well i've dealth with ogg for years as well. i used to hang out on the developers mailing list too, and i know the developers tweaked the -q3 setting deliberately to produce 128kbps mp3 quality (typical lame encoder as reference) my own experience with ogg reflects their exact intent. btw, the settings you posted are the ones i used when i originally listened to the KiC oggs. cheers. And I built an ogg vorbis playback dll for c and vb. So we both have experience. Thats already been given. To go any further, you're going to have to show why "75-80kbps range ... doesn't quite reach 128kbps mp3 quality", cause as far as I'm concerned, thats an absurd claim. I do negation tests on just about every song I encode for release. I've always found far more negation loss in mp3s than oggs at those levels. Always. I can perform the tests on any wave. Occasionally the content of a song may vary the results up and skew the data, but on the average, I've found 64kbps ogg = 128kbps ogg, and 94-104kbps ogg = wave quality + irrelevant dismissible loss. It is also important to note, as I've said, that if you compare the latest lame with the earliest ogg, you may get closer to the results you've found in your experience. Its also also important to note that thare are crackpot audio tests out there on the web that claim everything from ogg vorbis = 3x quality of mp3 to mp3 is better than ogg vorbis at the same rate. Highly subjective issue, for sure. Nevertheless, I still think your claim is very biased in favor of the archaic mp3 format.

I didnt encode the oggs or even listen to them yet, but I"ve dealt with ogg vorbis for years. Had to deal with it extensively during the rotc thing. In my experience, ogg 75-80kbps is certainly as good as 128kbps mp3 and usually better. Typically if I'm going for 128kbps mp3 quality, I'll use 64kbps ogg. Note, I'm talking about general mp3 encoding quality, as in not mp3pro encoders or anything that actually works well. I'm talking about old lame and blade and all the typical average mp3 encoders. At the same time, I'm talking about the average ogg encoder like cep's or dbpoweramp's encoder which is around 2 versions behind the latest. for Rotc, the ogg files were around 96-104kbps and there was no significant differences between them and the waves. Any differences that existed were very very minimal and insignificant. Finally I've noticed bugs in popular ogg vorbis players like winamp. They have a dither option enabled which makes some ogg files sound like shit. Seeing as how winamp enables dithering by default on all installations, this makes it a very very widespread problem. So make sure that this isn't whats happening to your ogg files either. If the oggs were poorly encoded, I can reencode them all the right way. I'll find some time to listen to them in detail.

Asuming a certain level of quality due to a bitrate is rather shortsighted. Please download the wave version and compare it with the ogg version. I would like to know how much significant difference you really here. A blind test would be preferable.

Something to note> 1:27 to 2:17 is straight from the weapon attacking theme - this included sephiroth's theme at the end already, uematsu also likes to play with themes 2:50 is the recapitulation of the beginning, but what is neat here is that a flute foreshadows an upcoming theme at the exact same moment 2:50 is two ff7 themes at once, the main theme of this part (weapon theme) and the main theme of ff7 (the title screen theme) 3:04 is the weapon theme again, but with a neat chromatic/rhythmic accompaniment 3:35 is the ff7 main theme This whole block here is still just weapon raid. That song encorporates many themes in ff7. The fact that jeremey is simply using it does not award him credit for rearrangement. Beyond that, he used the airship and overworld. However those two are also used in conjunction throughout the game. At best case, he used 3 songs from ff7 with the socalled variation 6:09 is my own john williams-like ending, because the thematic placement was mostly imitating his action music 0:47 is the continuation after some john adams-like interlude that I am very not impressed with.

I dont recall anyone making a big deal about gigasamples, especially in this thread. Mostly the reference was to how well this guy uses his samples. Thats about it.

Sure. Basically, I'm hearing a very very low quality song. Everything has a low-bitrate encoding sound to it. Lots of lossy drums and flanged instruments. Furthermore, the whole intro sounds terrible with these low fi drumloop things playing all over at awkward rythms. Later on when the ride comes in, things get far more relevant. I can hear skill put into the percussion, but it doesnt change the fact that the whole song sounds like it was made solely using 5kb instrument wave samples. There are many awkward sections that do not appear to have relevance to anything at all. 1:00-2:00 has sorta cool percussion, but a great deal of random cellphone-beep synth work. Rhodes are nice, but they, just like everything else, sounds like they are 5khz wave files with a great deal of encoding loss. Later on there is nothing that is even somewhat impressive enough to justify the terrible, terrible, terrible soundquality this song has from beginning to end. Normally I'll give more detailed and lengthy decisions if I feel the song has a chance at making it or if I feel the artist needs to know something in perticular. In this case, I think the aurthor knows exactly what hes doing, but needs to drastically, significantly upgrade the sound quality of this song for me to pass it.

Great original, decent cover. Please make it twice as long with some rearrangement/remix aspect. This is OCRemix after all. Pretty cool though. NO

Gave it a few more listens. I still dont know what the hell you guys are talking about. Sounds pretty terrible to me. I've heard better sound quality from cellphones. My vote aint changing.

So.. pretty cool. I hear original things happening. Good sound quality, nice groove. Notation at 1:45 is kinda meh. Nice take on a pretty minimal original. YES For some reason the file I download is incomplete. Looks like firefox's fault. If something sucks in the ending, please let me know.

This is a real tough one. The samples sound so good, and yet there are such problems. So I'm ont sure how to word this without making it look like a gigasample-bias, or an envy thing, or one of the hundreds of other variations anyone who rejects this will surely be called. The problems I have with this mix are some of the same ones I had with his first ocr submission. Firstly, that low brass. So loud and obnoxious. On headphones its like listening to someone farting over the music for 6:30. Like 5:08.. man what is that? Secondly, lots of rather abrupt, rough edged string strikes. Examples are sections like 0:43, 1:05, 2:20-2:32, 2:50, 4:10. Theres a lot of that. Just no merit in doing that all over the place. Thirdly, the majority of this song is a remix of 'Final Fantasy 7 - 4-02 - Weapon Raid.mp3'. Theres some minor rearrangement, but its mainly just a recomposition of this song. This theme is covered in different orders, different keys, here and there. Then 3/4ths of the way in, the song starts covering the air ship theme. Point is, I'm not feeling any innovation here. Its mostly another orchestra version of an already-orchestra song. Higher quality samples I suppose, but like I said, not very well used. Forthly, percussion. So common. ta-ta-ta-ta. FF7 had some pretty damned cool percussion, but this song simplifies it into very simple, common progressions. I'm pretty borderline on this song. Frankly my biggest problem is that damned brass. Its just so annoying. I don't feel there's much innovation as far as rearrangement goes. On the other hand, the sound quality is good, the skill is there, somewhat, and there are no major issues. I'll have to come back to this one.

Off notes at 1:03 something. Pretty straightforward arrangement. Below the bar for orchestra. Way too standard, trite. Then loop loop. Some rearrangement at the end, not too impressive. Sorry, just below bar. NO

Cool stuff. Perhaps the highs on the hats could have been eqed a bit down. They can be painful on hearphones. Good synthage going on here. I find no problems in this mix at all, bit low fi at the end. Definately acceptable. YES

This is one killer arrangement. Man, that kick is an ear sore. The the orchestra is ok, lots of delayed brass though. You should really learn how to manage high quality samples better. Ending is pretty weak. I would totally ditch all that percussion, but it doesnt destroy the mix, so YES

Pretty cool stuff. Nice bends. This is the kinda innovation I liked to hear. Excellent chime breaks. Ahh fade ins. Everythings great. YES

THRASH THRASH this is a total midi rip, totally off key, terrible. Oh wait, I was listening to a daknit song, sorry. Ok, this rocks. Very cool shit going on here. This is Microsoft Excellent. That was terrible, I'm giving myself a NO and this a YES