zircon

Dhsu, all mixers will receive a copy.

It has been submitted. Takes time though.

Haha, I know the feeling Happy birthday Chris!

Steffan Andrews is a big fan of Danny Elfman, who scored Spider-Man 1 and 2. Plus as was noted by an earlier poster, "Jenova Returns" is a direct reference to "Batman Returns", another movie scored by Elfman.

Fine with me.

DotH lyrics: Into light Into sound Into time Let love surround Let love surround Simple enough

Well, you can get a pretty awesome laptop for $1500 (and a top of the line desktop for that price). $1500 will buy you a middle-of-the-road hardware workstation. With that laptop, you can pick up stuff like the free Tascam GVI piano, the free Independence sampler, gigabytes upon gigabytes of soundfonts (most of which are culled from hardware anyway), ridiculous amounts of free synths + effects from KVRAudio, blowout sample CDs at Soundsonline, and so on and so forth. Thus, your dollar goes further than with the $1500 non-expandable hardware workstation. Don't get me wrong, I do love my Korg X-50, for example, and I've spent a decent amount of time with upper-range (~$2k) keyboards... but I would pick a new computer every single time over hardware that costs the same price. A no-brainer considering today's software offerings, IMO.

Considering the vast amount of FREE/dirt cheap samples/plugins available, I'd say a laptop makes your dollar go farther than anything else.

The quote was Larry's idea; he loves Wikipedia and whenever he can't think of something, that's the first place he goes. Works well, right? The Ys were suggested by TO.

As a bit of history, this song might have been the first one to go up on the project WIP boards back in 2006, yet was the last one to be finished. Dave gets props for that alone But seriously, ever since the first MP3 demo, I was really excited about it. The drum and bass sequencing is particularly awesome; there's a lot of nuance to the jazz drums that you just rarely hear. I think the Neskvartetten sound was successfully captured. The solos are also highly enjoyable, including Vig's well-played guitar wankery. The whole thing fits perfectly into the scene of Seventh Heaven.

Correct... he did have an MP3 version, but not only is that not 44.1/16 WAV (required), I did not feel that what he submitted to the contest was up to project standards. I gave a list of things he could do to improve, and he was working on them - with Sixto's help - but he basically dropped out of communication. I never got a version that addressed my full list of critiques, in MP3 OR WAV. Maybe he felt that it was not worth it to revise his track to that degree. That's fine with me, of course. For the record, I asked a LOT of people to do extensive revisions to their tracks. Reuben was certainly not the only one. For example, I can't even count how many times I had Another Soundscape go back to "Golden Feathers".

At this point, Kanthos, I HAVE been uploading the latest revision of the bot every so often... someone (dNA) has already started helping me w/ code stuff too. So, I think we can call it open source now.

Moved into my new apartment, slimmed down my keyboard to a Korg X-50, got a new desk. Same general idea; My living room can double as a nice recording space, too. pixietricks lived with me over the summer; this is her mini-studio in the bedroom. Laptop + mic. Aww.

No, while he was invited and completed several WIPS, I was unable to get final, tweaked WAVs from him.

Very few VSTs these days will let you change samples mid-song on the same channel, though it can be done. Otherwise, with VST2 standard (VST3 is not quite done yet), yes, 16 MIDI channels per VST instrument max.

Huh, guess you learn something every day. Oops. My 1337 encoding skills Many of the 'flood' mixes had to be re-encoded to ABR/VBR in order to get under 6mb. Valse was especially tricky. All of the project MP3s in the torrent and on the mirrors, however, are straight up 192kbps CBR.

The file name is 132 characters, which apparently is giving some people trouble... though most seem to be having no problem with it. I suggest renaming it something like "4-10 Various Artists - Black Wing Metamorphosis.mp3" when you download. What OS are you using?

HAHAHA, yeah, I'm pretty sure he does go back to the '1' as part of the block chord... that is amazing.

Actually, Jimmy did most of the work on that... I shaped + polished a bunch of the sounds, did mixing/mastering, created one of the main drumloops, a couple of the synths, and a little bit of arrangement. Recognizable contributions, sure, but my fellow judgefgt deserves most of the credit.

Ah, I understand now. Yes, you ALWAYS want to use as few VSTs as possible. Virtually any VST, no matter how simple it may seem, uses CPU and RAM. This is especially true with samplers. That's why they are made to load multiple instruments... they would ravage your CPU if you had to make another instance each time you wanted another sound.

Err.. so you're loading a lot of sounds, and you're wondering why your computer is having trouble playing them all back? The more stuff you try to do in realtime, the more your computer will 'choke' - as CPU usage rises, the audio doesn't get buffered fast enough and it produces glitches like the ones you've described. Solutions: get a faster computer, increase buffer size, get a better audio interface/drivers. The first option is vastly preferable, as the latter two may only marginally help.

Dhsu: Simply put, most people already have a decent BT client capable of just DLing the MP3s - or they can just get the MP3s off the mirrors. However, FLAC is not a widespread format yet. Simply because you "care about lossless" (which may just mean you want to burn files directly to a CD) doesn't mean you automatically have a FLAC decoder. Doing it in that format would have inconvenienced a number of people for the sake of a small minority. Saving 1GB on the torrent isn't worth that, IMO. Jorpho: Again, you don't HAVE to download the WAVs. While a few people have posted here unaware that you could deselect them, the overwhelming majority of people I have personally spoken with had no problems doing that when they only wanted the MP3s. I don't consider learning the ins and outs of your BitTorrent client an "inconvenience"; I do consider forcing anyone who might just want to drag and drop WAVs into WMP for burning to download extra software an inconvenience. Anyway, there's really no point in arguing about this further since the decision has already been made.

The only strictly orchestral pieces are Jeremy Robson's "Valse Aeris" (2-02) and Steffan Andrews' "Jenova Returns" (4-07). However I really think it's silly to limit yourself like that. There are tons of other genres on here besides metal and electronica, and even within those, that are a lot of subgenres that you might enjoy. Just listen through, you won't be disappointed.

WAV and MP3 are there because some people want lossless. Doing two torrents would be silly when any decent client lets you deselect what you don't want (or prioritize what you do). This way, if you only want MP3, you deselect the WAVs. Plus, even if you only want lossless, it's nice to have ALL the 45 songs uniformly tagged and encoded. That took hours for me to do. Why not FLAC? Not accessible enough. A lot of players don't support it, and if you're trying to reach the widest number of people, it makes more sense to go with a format that *everyone* can use. After all, the main reason people ask for lossless is for CD burning, and if you have to go through another step to do that (FLAC->WAV) then isn't that kind of silly? Anyway, glad you all are enjoying it!

Yeah, the torrent size is from the WAVs. Why WAVs over FLAC? Because not everyone has a player that comes with FLAC, and for those people it would require extra software simply to play the files... and/or to decode them so you can burn them to CD. Honestly, I don't think that's worth it. With the WAVs, you can immediately burn them and you don't need to worry about compatibility. Same reason we went with MP3 and not OGG.