zircon

bluefox I don't think this guy has the capacity of doing ANYTHING like that, first of all. None of what you said was even remotely practical. Did you even read his post? He lives in his parent's house. Putting sound traps in corners is one way to help, any foam-ish object will work. Blankets and carpets are nice as well, if you can fold them up and put them in corners or even just along the wall to the best of your ability. You might consider headphones, too

Amazingly decent advice from bluefox, albeit overcomplicated. Get any decent motherboard that supports up to 8gb of RAM. I use an Asus P5N-E and it works very well, but any other midrange board will work fine as long as its from a reputable brand. Just read reviews before you buy. Get an E8400 processor from Intel. 2x3ghz dualcore. "hyperthreading" hasn't been used in years, dunno why blue would even bring that up. I suggest getting 2 gigabytes of RAM to start with. You can upgrade later pretty easily. Corsair and Crucial are good brands. You want the fastest RAM you can afford that has good reviews. Simple as that. Don't get super-budget stuff, but you don't need "gamer" RAM either. You should have two hard drives minimum. Your main hard drive can be smaller, and it should be where you install your applications. Your other hard drive should be more like 500gb and be where you install your samples. Streaming sounds can strain a drive so if EVERYTHING is all on one drive, that's bad news. Either an external or internal soundcard (or "audio interface") will do fine. Externals are more convenient in terms of physical location - it may be easier to connect things to them, and you'll have easy access to volume/preamp controls.

What kind of budget do you have? You can always browse free soundfont sites, where you'll find some passable sounds: http://www.soundfonts.it/ http://www.sf2midi.com/

Most hosts "oversell". They don't actually have that much storage available, or even close. They figure out how much the average person typically uses and then advertise way above that, and figure most people wouldn't use the advertised amount.

Thank you everyone!! It really means a lot that you guys are doing this for us. If any of you are in the Philadelphia area I will personally make you a cheesesteak or bowl of pudding. Your choice. BTW: There are actually two more rounds of voting coming up, though they're much shorter, with generally fewer battles available - semi-finals (figures out the best of each genre) and finals (figures out the best song of any genre.) So, since we're already at the top now, you don't have to keep voting - as long as we're in the top 10, we'll move on to the next round. THEN we wanna be #1

I guess I'm saying don't link to things when you don't really have any idea how to use them, or what even goes into making them usable. You have to map those IMIS samples yourself, which I don't think most people here know how to do, and they're FLAC, which is idiotic since most samplers don't support that and you'd have to convert them all back to WAV manually. Not worth it IMO.

Bluefox have you actually used a sampler plugin before?

Not in the quarterfinals. There are only twenty songs per category, and since once you listen to 15 seconds of a song you never have to listen again, it's really easy to get to songs you're looking for. But the "Become a Fan" thing is what we're really looking for here :3 Only one person so far did this and it wasn't anyone who even posted here

Prototype; if you give me the WAV files I can show you exactly how to mix/master it properly, and then maybe you can apply that for future songs.

OurStage (www.ourstage.com) is a website which sponsors a monthly music and video competition. Every month, they give away tens of thousands of dollars in prizes to the best entries in a number of categories. Various musicians from OCR, such as myself, pixietricks, and sgx have participated, and it looks like one of the most promising ways for good music to get discovered - a very democratic, fan-driven system for separating the wheat from the chaff. UPDATE: 3/31/08 - sgx, myself, and pixietricks are in the FINALS. We topped our respective genre categories and are now competing for the grand prize with a handful of other people! VOTING ENDS at 11:59pm EST tonight (Monday).... The songs that made it: * zircon - Breathing You In * Jill - Hajime * sgx - Coactive (Over My Shoulder Mix) Thousands of songs were entered... a tiny fraction of those remain. "So, what can I do to help y'all?" OurStage is based on a system where anyone can judge. That's right, YOU TOO can be a judge!!!!!1 All you have to do is register for the site, which takes all of 10 seconds, select a category, and judge away. You're presented with two songs at once, and you have to listen to at least 15 seconds of each. I recommend listening to more, of course, to really get an idea of what the song is all about. Once you've listened to a song once, if it comes up in another round of judging (you can judge a LOT of song pairs) you don't have to listen to it at all again, if you don't want to. You then choose which of the two songs in your song pair you prefer more. That's it. Here's the link to where you can judge: http://www.ourstage.com/judge We'd really appreciate your votes for our tracks - remember, the songs are cycled randomly, so you can't simply go to ours immediately, but once you get started it's actually really fun. I've judged hundreds of song pairs so far. You get hooked pretty quick. Can't decide which OC ReMixer you want to win? - If two of our songs are matched up against each other, just judge them "Same" BUT WAIT, there's more! Normally I wouldn't post about this kind of thing, but there's actually another contest going on right now. Any artist who adds at least 20 new fans (on Ourstage) will be submitted to AOL for consideration for future promotion, as well as promotion in Ourstage's own announcements. Becoming a fan on Ourstage is DEAD easy. It doesn't mean that you'll suddenly start getting spammed by us via email. It's just a mechanic on Ourstage, specifically, so you really have nothing to lose. Simply go to our individual artist pages, and hit the "Become a Fan" button, towards the right. That's it. You're done. Here are the links: http://www.ourstage.com/fanclub/zircon http://www.ourstage.com/fanclub/jilliangoldin "wuts in it for me tho" Besides our love and gratitude?! Well, we're going to select one random person who signed up as a fan of ours and give them one CD from each of us. So, you can pick from any of mine, AND you get Jill's new album when that comes out. But you gotta become a fan of each of ours. Feel free to post here once you've done so, as it will help us figure out who signed up from OCR and who signed up somewhere else (not that we're posting this offer anywhere else - just for OCR peeps) -- sgx has provided his own incentive as well: -- And hey, to all you other OCR artists. Do you write original music? You should enter the OurStage contest too! You can do it every month, it's FREE, and you can enter in as many categories as you want (though you can only do two songs per category per month, and don't submit things that are off-topic.) It's a lot of fun to not only watch your songs' progress but also to judge other music and help promote the music which YOU like. I've already discovered a bunch of great artists just by judging, and you can even download some of the full-length MP3s for free!

I have never heard of an effect called "gain pumping". You would most likely achieve this through gating., which it sounds like you tried, but perhaps you need another plugin. The gate needs to cut down on the sound after the initial attack and then release fairly quickly, so you're left with the tail of the sound. Having a big reverb tail in the initial recording helps.

The volume level here is rather low. When I loaded up the waveform I saw there was really only one peak that actually hit 0.0db, and few other ones... most of the audio has a good 6db of headroom, easily. I suggest putting a brickwall limiter on the master track (such as George Yohng's W1 Limiter, a free VST) and then boosting the overall volume by at least 4db. I agree that the recording setup here did not sound ideal... the way things were miced sounds sort of weird to me in terms of the reverb and stereo spread, but it's not a big deal, in the end. The arrangement is creative and interesting with a sensible flow. Some great writing overall. Production is pretty good aside from the volume, though the guitar could be boosted. So that leaves the performance, which I do agree could be tighter. I've listened to this a bunch of times now and though I can hear how the rhythms are not 100% tight at times, I just don't feel it really takes away from the piece as a whole. The arrangement is good enough to make up for it, and the playing never seems.. "sloppy", just loose. However, I'm giving this a conditional YES - I would like the volume to be raised first. YES (conditional)

A production note real quick, this whole thing sounds a bit quiet... some compression/limiting on the master track would help to boost it up 2-4db or so. I like the texture here. This reminds me of old-school OCR in almost every respect, from the gentle bells and pads, to the simple (but solid) groove, bells, etc. I agree that given the length, the texture probably could have changed up more over the course of the song, but I don't think it's quite a dealbreaker for me. The arrangement is pleasant, if not a little on the conservative side, but it gets the job done and I didn't feel like there was a great deal of repetition. My primary complaint really is the volume. I think this needs to be boosted. I'm going to go with a NO resub because this isn't necessarily a dead-easy fix, and you might also think about adding some additional parts as per the critique of the other judges. But this is a close one for me, so please, resub! NO, resubmit

I don't really believe in "rules" like that... it depends on the instruments you are using, and even then, different recordings or samples could call for different EQ. You just have to practice and get your ear better about hearing what's off and what's not. I also have come to learn that it really does have to do with the samples that you have, not the production... I have a folder of kicks and snares that I've made myself called "Ultimate Kicks" and "Ultimate Snares". I can just drop them into the mix and they sound great with basically no processing whatsoever. Some samples are sort of polished as soon as you get them, either due to how they were recorded, or how the developer treated them before sending them out. If you have a specific song I can definitely give you advice on how I would view the frequency range in it.

Use uTorrent.

FYI.. for the form.. please put an "X" next to the items that you feel are relevant, and DELETE the ones you are not using. Don't put "N" next to them.

Most fangames are pretty crappy. We (fans) shouldn't have to pick up the developer's slack, since when we do, we usually do a pretty bad job of it. I'm with Coop - let's see more old-school Sonic, please.

This could be used to describe a cover, direct rip, or in any other case where the review feels the piece is, in general, too close to the source. It's not that hard to understand. Whatever the reviewer feels is unrealistic. Taste has something to do with it, sure. But in general we get a lot of trance remixes with over-used sounds that are immediately recognizable and uninteresting. Thus it's a common criticism. Also, I know how it's supposed to be spelled, but I don't know the shortcut to make that character. Obviously not if it's an ambient remix. However, MANY submissions we get are uptempo and call for energetic drums, for example any dance or rock genre. Many times people just can't seem to sequence drums that have energy. So that's why this is here. That would be redundant. I could have written "frequencies under 250hz lack proper equalization balance" but which is more intuitive? Yes, coherence and flow are the same thing, and no they don't have to do with the arrangement as compared with the source. It just means that the song as a musical piece just doesn't seem to be working. Mismatched instruments, awkward tempo, etc. It is used to describe an overall impression. We gets tons of plodding remixes. This needs to be here. Yes but that's very uncommon compared to remixes that simply cut out. If you read judges decisions you would realize that everything you just cited appears routinely, so I don't see what you're trying to do here.

I have no vested interest in "taking sides", I just prefer Granite. I thought overall it was a more interesting track in terms of the melodies, harmonies, sound choices, and chord progression.

This one is really so awesome. I get chills up my spine at the guitar breakdown with the massive pitchbends.

I'm still not sure what you're trying to do. Assign any synth parameter to velocity control? I'm having trouble understanding what you mean by "note modulation".

I knew about the "split mixer tracks" feature but what the OP is asking is kind of impossible. There's no way to render a cello part with five patterns without having some kind of silence in there... there's no way to do it even in theory without rendering the whole song.

Hmm... pretty cool... doesn't compare to Granite, though, IMO.

Just as a point of note, you are welcome to begin using the checklist now... it's a bit silly to say what it will and won't do until you actually try it.

If you're just doing emulation, I don't see why you would need a better computer.. most emulators have low processing overhead, I thought. However, that machine does sound like it's about 4 years old, so if you wanted a new one in general, I would recommend the following: * Windows XP Pro. Don't go to Vista yet. * 4gb of RAM. RAM is so cheap now that this is worth getting. * A new intel Core 2 Duo processor. The e8400 for example is 3.0ghz and faster than previous 3ghz duals, and is <$300, so it's a good bargain. * Any old HD or two. * Dunno about graphics card. prophet of mephisto on these forums builds computers. You might want to talk to him.