DarkeSword

That's not a wrong note. It's intentional and it works once it gets contextualized by the chord hits. It's great. Really like this. Fantastic soundscape. Lots of energy and very groovy. YES

The performances here are too good to post with this kind of wall-slammy, overdriven distortion. I'm with Larry, this needs a production pass beyond what a Conditional YES would warrant. I mean, listen to 2:09. That's doing the performer a disservice. Please take this back to the DAW and take a hard look at the levels. NO, resub

This is incredible. I for one love these drums. Fantastic arrangement. Great soundscape. The meld between the two sources is great. YES!

At first I was like, "Is this too much reverb?" Then I was like, "No, this is not too much reverb." YES

I think prophetik's vote articulates everything I think about this track. You're working with a short source. That's fine. I don't think your efforts in expanding it are enough. That ostinato just dominates too much of this track. This is barely past 2:18 and I still felt worn out by the end. When you're expanding a short source tune like this, there are a few ways to approach it: just add an additional source tune for variation, i.e.get a melody from another Castlevania track and adapt it to work with the chord progression here. focus hard on an evolving soundcape with lots of automation on your synths so that you're manipulating the texture and energy levels of the piece. In either case your piece needs to have more of a contour. I appreciate the switch up where it's the bassline for a while but it's not enough. I think you're relying too much on the thunder SFX at the end too. NO

This whole track feels like an extended intro. I'm waiting for the B-section to hit and it never does. Gario nails it: this arrangement is static. Larry's correct in pointing out the slight variations throughout the track but overall this piece establishes one idea right at the start and coasts on it for not-even-3-minutes. Hop around the track and it's basically doing the same thing at any given point. I'm not as critical of copy-paste issues as other judges are (dal segno is a thing) but this is not a return to and reestablishment of a previous passage; this is just one passage. My honest evaluation is this: where's *the rest* of this track? Needs more. NO.

Incredible performance. That solo slays. I'm in agreement with the Js calling out the mixing issues. Anything non-guitar is getting buried. Do not touch the arrangement, it's perfect. The mixing needs a another pass though. NO, resub

Arrangement is great. Lots of variation and change-ups. Where you're losing me though is this sound design. The whole thing sounds thin as heck; whole swaths where we've got maybe 3 voices playing together, which makes for an incredibly sparse sound, which in turn kills the energy. Larry used the word "plod" and that's the word to use. Percussion is sizzling and not in a good way. Other Js have articulated the issues well, so I don't need to rehash further. As it is, it's a NO, resub from me.

Folks, I'm very curious/concerned at the YES votes on this given that there's an entire 2 minute original interlude slotted in to the middle of this. I'm not a stop-watcher, but I understand this technically is over 50% source usage; HOWEVER, this entire middle section feels entirely unrelated to the rest of the piece. Is this a melody from Final Fantasy IX? It doesn't sound like it at all. I'll also call out that there are tons of prosody issues with the lyrics here, which I absolutely cannot understand. If the lyrics are original and the melody is original, why are there problems with prosody? Syllables ought to be stressed according to the contour of the melody. These lyrics feel grafted on and awkwardly stressed. Dawnaria's singing the notes just fine but it still sounds messy, and the fact that it's not even from FFIX really makes the entire section feel unjustified here. Would love to see some more input on this one. NO

@Liontamer I get what MW was trying to say but I don't think other Js hooked onto 4.3 specifically in the votes that followed. I agree with MW's vote in the spirit of what he was saying and I'm glad he brought up the issue at the very start of that thread, but I don't think 4.3 specifically is where the track gets tripped up. Gario just now made a better case for 4.1 being the sticking point. Ultimately though I think it comes down to an evaluation of the track by the panel of judges. And I see the issue was raised in the initial decision but sort of glossed over with some judges essentially saying "I'm not if sure this a violation or not, so I'll just vote normally on performance and production issues and since I'm voting NO anyway I'll sidestep the concept issue." This is a very unique track, and ultimately where we screwed up as a panel is we didn't have a larger discussion when that first thread was live to really answer the question of "Is this conceptually a good fit for OCR?" Genuine question: do we really need to spell out in the standards that we want people to submit work that is musical, first and foremost? If so, then fine, let's put it in the standards. But like Gario pointed out, 4.1 asks for "arrangements in any genre of music." I feel like we've already covered it.

Larry, you are wrong in stressing that the "source material" line is what the track violated. Source usage was not the issue, and this track isn't a standards violation as it seems to be framed in your subsequent posts in the thread post-decision. The entire work showcases material from the game, narration included. The issue was that The Little Girl and the Star largely centers a non-musical performance of the story from the game. As I said in my vote, the vocal performance is a narration. It's not sung, it's not rapped, nor is it recited as beat poetry. The narration takes the lead and the musical backing track supports it. Joe frames that as a bias but I will argue that it's a very valid distinction for us to make with regards to what we showcase in the OCR catalog. We would not post a track that, for example, takes a scene from a popular JRPG and recreates it as a full-cast audio drama with acted dialogue and the music from the game arranged in the background. A track like that would not be a standards violation either because everything is taken from the game; the issue would be that it's not wholly or in-majority a musical work. Now, I don't want to get into defining quantitative standards here; I don't want to go down the road where we're saying "At least 75% of the track should primarily be musical in nature" because then we're both inviting tracks that will skirt close to 25% non-musical performance and also that's just more stopwatching, which I personally am just not a fan of. This track is a very unique case. I understand that our standards don't specifically call out "non-musical performance" as a limiting factor. I think that this is just part of judging though; we're presented with a track that challenges our view of what fits into what we want OCR to showcase, and we make the judgement call in that evaluation. I personally am sorry I didn't catch this on the first go-around; I didn't see the first decision and I was specifically asked when the second thread went up by Dave to weigh in, which is the first I heard the track and when I made my opinion very clear that this track is not a fit for OCR.

In love with the harmonic changes here. At first glace it feels like a close cover but ooooooh that bit at 1:30? Are we for real here? I'm bummed this is so short but it does what it set out to do. I'm glad to have had the opportunity to hear this. Fantastic work. YES!

Agree with Joe. It's a NO (resub or else) from me too. I think the arrangement is good but some of the performances (outside the trumpet) feel a little wilted. I'm not sure if that's the EQ or the mud or what but it feels like the energy is being sucked out of this one. My touchstone for a track like this would be (obviously) Pulp Fiction but also Juno Reactor's Pistolero. There's a clarity that's missing here and it's hurting this track, which is a shame. Would love to see this on the site eventually. Hopefully it's not too late to fix up.

This is one that's gonna make you sit up and pay attention. Very dark, going for an almost 80s horror feel. I hear some of the other Js complaints about soundscape and balance but I don't feel like this one's too far off. Where I'm getting caught up is some of these longer original passages. I don't mind a little bit of original writing here and there but there some significant "Not Fire Emblem" chunks that could do with some source connection. 1:31 puts way too much emphasis on the fifth interval going up and down for a little too long. I'm not a stopwatcher like Larry (counting fractions of a second definitely not my style) but I share the overall concern that this one steps away from the source a little too often. NO, resub

This sounds so thin. Everything is squashed into the middle. This should sound bigger than it does. Performances are alright. The middle section gets messy with timing though. I'm getting some weird intonation issues at the end with the guitar too. Can't put my finger on it. This needs another pass on the mix and some cleaned up performances. It's a NO resub from me.

Arrangement is incredible but the production leaves a lot to be desired. Other Js have outlined it really well. The percussion sounds like it has timing issues because of how it's mixed. The choir at the start of the track sounds ill-defined and muddy. There's a lot of mud overall in the track. The middle is nice and the choir is okay there. There's a solo synth string that's just out of place; it's too quiet to convey the melodic line but noticeable enough that it distracts you. I like this track but it needs another pass. NO resub

Other Js have outlined the issues. I have no problem with the arrangement. Very fun, very creative. Let's get a fix on the issues. YES (CONDITIONAL)

I don't think enough of the arrangement here has enough recognizable and identifiable source usage. I appreciate the source breakdown but I think that overall the arrangement only hints at source usage at points. If you changed the lyrics to be about anything other than Paper Mario, I don't think I'd recognize this as a Paper Mario arrangement, and I feel like I shouldn't have to sit down with a source breakdown to make sure that this is actually covering music from the game. It's asking a lot of me, which is fine, because I'm a judge and that's my job, but it's also asking a lot of regular folks who are just listening on shuffle. Nice performance though, and I like the "PAPER MARIIIOOO" bit at the end, that was pretty good. NO

I agree that most advanced torrent users are accustomed to selecting what they want to download but I'd also suggest (and this is pure conjecture) that the average torrent user is just downloading everything. Like Larry said, OGG was a thing many years ago but ultimate it comes down to what file formats are ubiquitous amongst the larger listener base. I don't see any significant advantages to offering ALAC alongside FLAC aside from catering to the specific use case of iTunes/Music.app not supporting FLAC. MP3s are offered because MP3 is the ubiquitous, de facto standard when it comes to lossy compression. FLAC is offered for the same reason (ubiquity), and also because once someone has lossless files, they can do whatever they'd like, such as converting to other formats like OGG, AAC, or ALAC. My personal feeling is that having the one lossy set (MP3) and one lossless set (FLAC) covers all of the bases for our distribution channels. If we start offering more encodes based on the idea that people can just deselect what they don't want, we're going down the rabbit hole of providing more and more sets. This is extra work for everyone for very little return, IMO.

Beautiful track, right up my alley, that sort of dreamy big band sound, but after the initial treatment of the melody it just spiraled away. Source usage just isn't dominant here. NO

I love the wall of sound here. Detuned lead is great, actually. I agree with Larry; I think other judgements are skewed a bit high. This track sounds very good and it's well performed and well produced. The detuned lead is a stylistic choice that works, IMO. YES

Nice arrangement, sticks close to the original's energy but some nice performances. Love the callbacks to older Yoshi music. Bongos are great. Mixing is an issue though. What happened here? Other Js articulated it well. Needs anot pass on that. NO, resub

NO We absolutely should not post this track. I don't say that as a qualitative judgement on the track itself, but look: this is, as Joe said in the previous decision, an audio book with background music. The focal point of this work is the storytelling. I've often defended vocals in remixes we get but those are tracks that feature singing or rap. This is not a lyrical performance, it's a straight narration. The backing music is good. If feels loose and organically performed, which other Js might take issue with but I thought it sounded nice. There are some intonation issues with the singing at the end, and it feels very exposed when all of the accompaniment drops out. But back to my main point: the narration here completely pulls me out of listening to this as a piece of music. This is not, in its entirety, a musical work. There's too much focus being pulled by the non-musical storytelling performance. I don't see myself ever putting this in a playlist of music to listen to. I don't think OCR is the place for this.

Arrangement and energy is killer. Production is not killer. Other Js have outlined the problems already so I won't rehash. Needs a production pass and then we'll be in business. NO

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