zircon

It's a sampler format native to the "Gigastudio" software. In other words, it was designed with that software in mind. However, there are tools which convert giga to other formats, like kontakt or even soundfont.

It has less to do with having played a game, and more to do with general familiarity with the OST. I played World of Warcraft for thousands of hours but if you asked me about the OST I wouldn't remember most of the music. I haven't played Super Turrican ever but I know the main theme backwards and forwards. Familiarity with the source material makes judging MUCH easier, in general. Some mixes, where I don't know the source and it isn't particularly catchy, I've had to listen to the source 5-10 times to get it in my head, and then keep switching back to try to link up melodies/harmonies from the remix. It can be very frustrating.

I've got some kit lying around I'm not using, so it's time to offer it to the good peoples of OCR. * SONY Acid Pro 6 - $160 (normally $375) This is sequencing/recording software for Windows. This is great for anyone doing MIDI stuff, and it has some of the best loop capabilities of anything (tempo-syncing, in particular). There is a huge library of ACID loops out there if you want to expand your sounds, and at acidplanet.com there are great remix contests you can enter.. recently Nine Inch Nails was one of them! ACID can also do multitrack recording and video editing/scoring.. I used it for this recently, myself. Comes with over 2GB of built in sounds, too (Kompakt) http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/products/acidfamily.asp * Garritan Orchestral Strings - $150 A GIGA-format string library, one of the original gigasamples - it sounds amazing even today, having been used in countless commercial productions. Jeremy Soule uses it, too! It's not in production anymore unfortunately so this is the only way you'll be able to get it. It CAN be converted to Kontakt. * 6 Sonic Reality sample CDs with Sampletank 2 LE - $90 for everything (not selling individually) These are six individual sample CDs which can be installed in any of these formats: SampleTank, Kontakt, EXS-24 (Logic), Reason (NNXT), HALion, Battery, and others. The sounds are great, and each CD has a theme; 1. Acoustic Guitars (six string, 12 string, steel, nylon guitars with multiple velocity layers, fret noise, slides, mutes...) 2. Electric Guitars (also thorough sampled with lots of guitars and articulations included) 3. Bass Guitars (pretty self-explanatory! includes acoustic upright and electric bass, thumps, slaps, pulls, etc) 4. Grooves (lots of drumloops in different stylistic categories, good for getting ideas, and excellent for quick production music foundations) 5. Eclectic Drums (weird and processed drum sounds - drum machines, electronic stuff, lots of effects) 6. Studio Drums (detailed acoustic kits for realistic drum sequences and mockups - not loops) You also get Sampletank, which is a multi-platform sampler plugin (VST, AU, RTAS, DXI) that cn load any Sonic Reality sounds. * Quantum Leap Rare Instruments - $40 http://emusician.com/libraries/emusic_eastwest_quantum_leap/ http://www.eastwestsamples.com/details.php?cd_index=698 This is a GIGASTUDIO format library, about 3 CDs, of rare and ethnic instruments. Includes very detailed samples of the Erhu, Taikos, Dung-chen, Tablas, Sarangi, Middle eastern fiddle, Gongs, Low-whistle, and more. In order to use this library, you need a utility that can convert from the Gigastudio format. The free demo of "CDXtract" will do this. Also, many modern samplers will simply load Giga files directly.

I can be bribed with Subway gift certificates, cookies, and baked ziti.

Dave is the only one who can answer that definitively. However, if I remember correctly, between all mirrors we do a couple terabytes a month.

This is pretty hard.. harder than VGMQ, I think, which is exactly this kind of thing. My initial score was 21 (42%)... you'd think it would be higher after being a judge for three years, but I guess not

Valse wasn't encoded at low CBR, it's VBR.. the best I was able to do under the circumstances. Still sounds pretty good to me.

Welp, after extensive RAM tests via Memtest, looks like one of the sticks are bad. I did a few passes on one of my old sticks; no problems. Tried one of the new ones; no problems. Tried the other new one; 16 errors while running Memtest overnight. All on "test 5" consistently. Just RMA'd a minute ago.

There is no easy way to export all channels separately. If you want to render just the cello, you would solo it (right click on the green light to the left of the channel, hit "solo") and then export the whole song. This is the easiest way to deal with it. You will have empty space in the WAV, but that's just the price you pay.

How do I "check my power supply"?

OMFG... bad RAM again. I already returned one set of bad RAM a month ago. Can't believe this stuff.

Tons of remixers do that all the time. Hell, some remixers aren't even gamers. It's extremely common.

You might not be doing any harm by going into someone's unlocked house and walking around either. That doesn't mean you have the right to do it. "Legal" and "Illegal" are not based strictly on "Harmful" and "Not Harmful". You really have no excuse, also, considering there is software like Reaper that costs $30 and has as much functionality as programs like Sonar, Cubase, etc. So, that argument doesn't work at all.

Did this in 30 minutes... it's not really serious, but enjoyable, I think Daft Punk - Harder Better Faster Stronger vs. u-ji - Phantasy Star 2 PleasantlyDanceInTheClub OC ReMix Here's the result. http://www.zirconstudios.com/music/random/PleasantlyStrongerInTheClub.mp3

We definitely take into account general musicality. There are plenty of remixes that have been NOed despite having good production and interpretation - the overall arrangement and structure of the piece is just lacking. I guess this isn't explicitly stated in the guidelines, but it should be assumed nonetheless.

I stumbled on this the other day. Image-Line, the company that makes FLStudio and a bunch of other music software, just recently released a new synthesizer called "Biohazard". It integrates 100% into FL, of course. Check out the product page: http://www.image-line.com/documents/toxicbio.html I couldn't help but notice the demo player has two songs, both by the remixer Audix. No doubt lots of demos were created/submitted, so it's impressive that his music - and his alone - made it to that front page demo player. Congrats, Greg!

No errors. However, it seems like it's a RAM issue. I ran a bunch of Prime95 tests. The CPU-intensive test turned up no errors. The RAM test did, consistently (on CPU1 though, not CPU0, for some reason.) Each of the dumps from the BSODs were quite different too.

OK, so I got another serious error with that rollback. So I ran Driver Cleaner and COMPLETLEY uninstalled ALL nVidia drivers, then installed the latest again. I got a BSOD just 10 minutes ago using FLStudio. IRQL_LESS_OR_NOT_EQUAL.

Philly cheese steak: * 1/2lb of ribeye steak * One of the following (in order of preference) - Cheese Whiz, American Cheese, or Mozzerella * Sandwich roll, ~12 inches * Ketchup * Optional: Onions, Salt, Pepper 1. Slice up the steak into ultra-thin strips. 2. Heat a saucepan on high, put in some canola/vegetable oil when it's hot enough that drops of water evaporate instantly on contact. 3. Put the slices of beef into the saucepan all at once. 4. Because the beef is so thin, they will cook very quickly - likely in less than 60 seconds. However, you must use a spatula to move the meat around constantly and flip it so it does not burn. 5. Around when the beef has reached medium-rare status, add your cheese, salt, pepper, and onions (whichever of those you want). 6. Let it cook just a tiny bit longer then take the whole mess and slop it on to your sandwich roll. 7. Add ketchup. 8. Eat.

Right off the bat, mimicing the bass drum hits from the original, the ones in the remix sounded lo-fi compared to Jeremy's. If you're gonna duplicate a part make sure you can make it sound just as good as the original, if not better! Luckily, :21 picked up into a nice new style. However, the guitars sound extremely thin, like they're being played through a phone. You have virtually no bass at all on the rhyhtm guitars, and the lead just doesn't cut through like it should. Get some reverb/delay on there to make it expansive as well. As Palpable said, the mix does kind of lack energy. The drums sequencing is pretty repetitive and the tone is not aggressive. Changing up rhythms (eg. using more smaller note subdivisions) and adding more fills & embellishments could help with this. I also agree with him that the orchestral break is overly similar to the original. There are lots of creative things you can do without just using the source 1:1. The soloing definitely helps things along and I would have liked to hear more of that. More counter-melodies & harmonization. In general, I think you could have gotten away with some kind of extra synth parts or orchestral parts (eg. harp) interacting with the rock ensemble instruments earlier in the mix to spruce things up. As is, the arrangement is solid, but not quite up to our bar. It would be nice to hear this revisited with production and arrangement tweaks. NO

Agreed on the issues with the treble... I also think the compression was a little excessive. I agree with most of Larry's criticisms except the 2:24 guitar wank, which I thought was excellent. Now, this IS a really creative mix. I liked the ending with the chopped guitar, the style changeups, and the interpretation in general. But I had a couple more issues. The section at 1:16 is just poorly written. It's somewhat dissonant, and dissonance is OK, but mainly it's just wandering and pointless. Doubling the guitar with piano doesn't make sense either. Then at 1:42, why is the rhodes playing major chords? It just doesn't sound right. As that section progresses, some of the harmonies don't seem to work for me. I like the thought but it's not well executed. This one is just too sloppy for me to YES or condY at this stage. Keep at it, resub. NO, resubmit

Pretty much what the topic says. This is for a student-developed game. The first portion of the song is the intro to the boss fight, then comes the loopable section (I began one loop of it so you can get the general idea.) Basically, the game is set in the future, and you're a highly stylized dude with a gun that ends up fighting a giant robot owl sentry that warps you underground to his lair. The designers were sort of going for a combination of Shadow of the Colossus and Megaman, if that makes any sense, so I wanted to integrate something of an old-school feel to the music. http://www.zirconstudios.com/music/wips/ED%20Owl%20Boss.mp3 Enjoy!

Where's the love? Happy birthday, Dan!

I am not using XP64 right now actually. This is my XP32 partition. I already did increase the paging file to 2048mb after my first blue screen. I also did uninstall the old nVidia display drivers before installing new ones though. I guess I will wait and see what happens. Thanks for the tips.

It's just, I don't ever get BSODs with this machine unless there's a serious problem. That's why I'm worried it's not just a one time thing. I decided to try rolling back to some older drivers that were closer to the date the computer was built, in the hopes that maybe it was just an issue w/ the newer ones.