DarkeSword

Hi everyone. In the past couple of years, competitions have gotten kind of a shot in the arm here at OCR. With the advent of the tournament style competitions like GRMRB and WCRG, more and more people are taking part as remixers and voters. Because competitions obviously get people really fired up, there have been some issues having to do with fairness and sportsmanship that I and other competition organizers feel need to be addressed.
I want to lay out a couple of basic guidelines that people should be following when participating in our competitions and tournaments as runners, competitors, or voters.
Competitors
As competitors, we should always remember that while winning is awesome, our competitions are more about making great music, improving as an artist, and to a certain extent, helping each other improve as well. To that end, here are some guidelines and rules to follow:
Don’t fixate on voting patterns and behaviors. If people aren’t voting for your entry, that’s their decision. Don’t criticize voters because you disagree with how they are voting. It’s not your job to make sure people are voting “the right way.” Don’t campaign for votes or instigate vote-stacking/ballot-stuffing. Your entry to a competition should be all you need to garner votes. Don’t use your social media accounts to tell people to vote for you, and don’t contact people in private to make a case for your entry. On the flip side, do encourage people to visit OCR, listen to entries, and make their own decisions about the entries they want to vote for. Don’t badmouth or belittle your opponents. Good-natured ribbing and light trash talk can be a fun part of any competition, but avoid making snide remarks and acting indignant when things don’t go your way. This includes making comments about whether or not a remixer is posted to OCR or not. Competitions are for people of all skill levels. Respect the decisions of the competition runners. When you sign up for a competition, you’re agreeing to abide by the rules the runner lays out. It’s okay to bring up issues if you think they’re affecting fairness, but the runner always makes the final call. If there’s a really serious issue with how a competition is being run, we can look at it and take appropriate steps to rectify the situation. Voters
Most competitions on OCR use some kind of voting system to determine winners, so they end up depending on a lot of people to vote. Voters also have a couple of things they need to keep in mind when participating.
Follow the voting guidelines laid out by the competition runner. Most competitions will tell you what to consider when making your vote (things like arrangement value, production, etc.). As a voter, you should try to adhere to that, rather than just picking what you like for your own personal reasons (e.g. “I like rock music better than techno so I’m picking this one”). Don’t campaign for votes on a contestant’s behalf. Make your own vote and encourage people to visit OCR and make their own decisions. Runners
If you want to run a competition, here are a few guidelines to follow:
Have a clear, unique concept. This can be anything from focusing on a game series, requiring collaborations, combining source tunes, or doing original music. Competitions cannot, however, be thinly veiled requests, so avoid doing things like “make me a couple of remixes from this game, and I’ll choose the best one.” Stick to your concept. For example, if you’re doing a collaboration competition, you shouldn’t allow solo remixes just because a person couldn’t find a partner. If you’re doing a Mega Man tournament, you shouldn’t allow Castlevania remixes just because you like music from that series. You created a concept that people are buying into; don’t throw that away. Think hard about your format. Some competitions work better as weekly or monthly events, whereas others work better as tournaments or longer events; tournaments generally require a lot more commitment from people too. Don’t over-complicate things. Especially with tournaments, there’s a real danger of trying too hard to make things really elaborate. Keep things straightforward. Have a clear schedule, but be flexible. Weekly competitions are easier to manage, but longer tournaments can get crazy. Competitions are more fun when people are able to participate, so try to be accommodating. Generally speaking, don’t restrict anyone from entering your competition; competitions should be open to all people of any skill level. Restriction should only occur in cases where a person has repeatedly violated the Code of Conduct. For competitions that use voting, be clear to voters about the criteria you want them to use when evaluating entries. Minimize drama. Competitions are for fun, not for people to get angry with each other. If you see people behaving in an unsportsmanlike way or violating the Code of Conduct, call them out and put an end to it. If you need help keeping people in line, ask a moderator to step in. Most importantly: be fair, but firm. If you have an issue (deadline extension, suspicion of vote-stacking, etc.), get the people affected involved. Consider all sides of the issue before making a decision; if you’re having trouble, catch me on Discordand I can help you.

When you have a soundtrack release set up let us know and we can promote/retweet on OCR social media.

A few points worth noting:
The site's UVP is the incredible game music arrangements. The community has been valuable for many of us, but it is secondary. The vast majority of the users on the site never even touch the forums. I'd imagine most of the people who still use the forums have for years. Those that have left, as others have mentioned, probably just got too old/busy. With that said, most major music sites don't even have forums. Maybe they have a subreddit, but not a forum. YouTube and Soundcloud killed OCR's community momentum, not the changes to the site. Gone are the days of finding MP3s on P2P networks. You don't have to have your own web hosting or submit to VGMix/OCR/whatever to share your music on the internet.  The internet is social. A lot of people don't like it, but a huge portion of the internet does. This is where blogs/pages/whatever would need to come into play. If you want to build a large internet community, it has to be a pseudo-social network. The vocal minority will hate it. The top sites on the internet right now are either social media (instagram, reddit, facebook, twitter, linkedin), "video sites", YouTube, which is a mash-up video and social site, and then Amazon, Wikipedia, and search engines. Forum activity has dropped, but Discord activity is booming. "Booming" may be a bit of a stretch, but it's far more active than IRC was when it died. That's because Discord is used by a lot of people and the age range is like "13" to 40. It's just most accessible.  And if you want talk about user experience, I can take this a bit further:
The web is dead. Web traffics across the board has dropped drastically in favor of mobile apps. This is partly also why social communities and focus'd web/mobile apps have become popular. People do not sit and traverse large chunks of content anymore. People consume content in short bursts, "micro-breaks", on commutes, in shopping lines, on the toilet. It's not true for everyone, but it is for the vast majority of the planet. There's no room for noise and visual clutter. Anything that keep that comes between a user and the content their looking for is noise. Noise makes users go elsewhere.

Folks, we're not bringing back signatures. Not as they were originally implemented, not with us hosting images as opposed to linking offsite images, not as text-only.
This is a done deal. This thread is not to discuss whether or not we should bring back signatures. This thread is for people to suggest other ways we can provide avenues for self-promo.

Wow.

As indicated in the announcement at the top of the forums, signatures have been disabled. This thread is for constructive feedback about what we can do to fill the void with regards to self-promotion.
Please be aware that djpretzel is working on revisions to the forum theme that will more clearly delineate where one person's post ends and another's begins. As always, OC ReMix is a WIP.
Thanks.

I've mulled over this topic since it happened, and I just keep coming back to the same conclusion: forums are dead. Traditional forum software on the internet is few and far between now. Most communities have moved to "discussion"-style systems like Discourse (not to be confused with Discord) or Reddit. Not that every site should be reddit, but how ridiculous would reddit look if every person had an image signature? Or even a text one. Removing visual clutter makes it easier to quickly navigate the conversation. Images on the page, especially large ones, should be meaningful and representative. Watching 2-3 people discuss something in a conversation and seeing the same 3 images in different patterns is not particularly meaningful. It's excessive.
I do agree it's nice for users have more customization/personality/whatever, but I don't think it would come from forums signatures. It would come from a organized and utilized user profile. Custom avatars are good. Banner images are better. Invision does a pretty good job of supporting both of those, but it's really base-level. Heavy text, low imagery. Very data, no flavor. Do I expect that to change any time soon? Ehh. Do I think reactivating image signatures is the right move? Almost definitely not.
 

Wow.

Me too.

Keep at it and good luck. Make sure you always get outside opinions on your work as you develop your pieces. Critical feedback is an important aspect of artistic growth. You won't get better in a vacuum.

I skimmed through some of your tracks. I'll second Shariq's criticisms, all of them.
Then there's also the matter of price. 10 bucks for this many tracks might seem reasonable from an artist's perspective, but you're competing with a lot of other remixers, with their own albums free and commercial. And it's incomplete, so 30 bucks to get the full experience? If the tracks were really good, and/or different enough from what's been done with these sources already, maybe people would want to pay that much for it. But even then it's a bit steep. Hence why many artists nowadays live on donations/tips/patreon-like things rather than sales, especially in the remixing scene to the extent anyone's making a living remixing vgm.
Besides developing as an artist, you might want to build your audience/fanbase/following/whatever (eg on soundcloud or youtube or maybe tiktok or whatever makes sense). This will help you gain both listens and sales on future releases.
I commend you for doing the licensing and trying the commercial album thing. Initiative, procedure, legalities. That's a good experience to have, you now know how complicated (or easy) that is.

Keep at it and good luck. Make sure you always get outside opinions on your work as you develop your pieces. Critical feedback is an important aspect of artistic growth. You won't get better in a vacuum.

Keep at it and good luck. Make sure you always get outside opinions on your work as you develop your pieces. Critical feedback is an important aspect of artistic growth. You won't get better in a vacuum.

You really want an honest opinion? It just doesn't sound very good. You're using really low quality samples and there's a ton of reverb in a lot of the tracks. The EQ is really skewed towards high frequencies. It sounds harsh. The arrangements are sparse and kind of boring.
I had a hard time sitting down and listening to even one track all the way through. I wouldn't buy this.

Love this OST.

Video game remixing isn't an industry because the concept of what makes a remix is very vague, and isn't agreed upon.

If you define it as an arrangement of video game music and released for profit, there is an industry for it. The issue is that some people refer to it as "cover" rather than "remix." Go to youtube, and you'll find thousands of remixes posted frequently, many for profit. Some of the largest channels doing it make a decent amount of money doing it. Even more, there is a record label - Materia Collective that publishes arrangement albums several times per year. These are albums of remixes, but they generally aren't called that.

On the area of copyright, plenty of people understand it just fine. The main bit is to understand is what a mechanical and sync license are. Pretty much everybody that releases VGM arrangements for profit on a large scale secures a proper license. Even then, most of, if not all of the OCR staff understand copyright on a functional level to make the site function and to keep the community in a safe place.
So then I ask what you mean by enhance? I think it's going just fine. We have significant people that are working hard to advance the industry, in many different places. Would you suggest improving education on copyright? A centralized database of artists?
I do have opinions about what I disagree with in the industry, but I generally stay quiet about them. I apply those opinions to my own work.
 
Anime is a different thing altogether. Releasing anime music in the US is difficult mainly because of the much smaller number of soundtrack releases in American storefronts. Because of the smaller number of legal releases, securing mechanical licenses (for albums) and sync licenses (for videos) is much more difficult. You won't see many people releasing anime remixes for profit because of the legal risks involved.

Nier Automata is pretty deep. FFXIV expansions like Heavensward and Stormblood are also up there.

I'm going to lock this thread. A lot of it is just speculation from people that didn't really know him. Gray was a great guy and a real friend, and he had his own reasons for exiting the community which we'll probably never know. I feel like a lot of this "he's probably dead" or "he's just someone's alternate account" is being disrespectful to one of the best members this community ever had. He was an amazing musician and one of the most dedicated staff members we had when he was with us. I'm not comfortable with people in this thread diminishing that with random, uninformed speculation.

Sure it does.

I think we should re-enable for the time being. It's like like we're live with a dark theme right now anyway.

I think we should re-enable for the time being. It's like like we're live with a dark theme right now anyway.

Has it really been 15 years since this came out? I remember being enthralled by this mix years ago, and it has failed to lose any of it's original luster. It's earned an eternal place on my playlists, an remains a musical inspiration. A triumph, DarkeSword.

For stuff like NES, SNES, and PSX mini, I pretty much passed. But this seems like it's right up my alley. Wily Wars is huge.

Aaron Webber @RubyEclipse on Twitter, Social Media and PR guy for SEGA of America was delivered by us, over 70 copies of the physical Arcadia Legends album! They also sent over copies with personalized letters from us to SEGA of Japan where a copy got into the hands of REIKO KODAMA, the producer of Skies of Arcadia! She was VERY pleased! We did it guys! They appreciated all the hard work and effort we did to make this a reality!   It may not make a huge difference in getting a Skies of Arcadia 2, but I'm willing to take whatever we can get! Thanks again to everyone who contributed and supported us!

This is a killer track. I'm really not feeling the complaints about the repetition. The percussion stays fresh, the syncopation rocks, and I dig the whole texture with the strings and synths.
I will co-sign one complaint though: that fadeout is no good. I use fadeouts all the time and I will go on the record in saying that this is the wrong way to do a fadeout. Let's break it down:
The fadeout is only 4-bars long. This is really bad in a song that relies a lot on groove. It's just too short of a fadeout. The volume drops significantly, right on the downbeat. It sounds like it's just a single-curve with no adjustment to the tension (i.e. it's just...linear). Despite the song fading out, you can still hear when it ends. Why fadeout at all? Here's how I'd fix it: a song like this needs a fadeout of at least 8 bars. I would do 12. Use a double-curve with the tension adjusted so that the fadeout is VERY gradual when it starts, then drops out faster, and then returns to a gradual fade into silence. In FLStudio it looks like this:
And while the fadeout is happening, just solo/doodle in your lead over your vamping rhythm section. This gives the impression that the song is continuing, but ALSO that it's not REALLY important to hear the rest.
I wanna vote YES on this but I'm gonna say NO. That fadeout is really jarring. Let's fix it up and get this resubbed, fast-tracked, and posted.