lazygecko

I wouldn't necessarily lump together action and tactical RPGs within the same sphere... What I'd define as action RPGs are those that are more about immediate, twitch-based action gameplay with much less focus on abstracted systems to represent the combat. Tactical RPGs have a much different pace and are more slow and methodical.

Too bad the product itself doesn't seem to be worth the money. Seeing lots of reports about input lag and all around sub-par emulation quality.

The kind of people who vehemently oppose learning academic theory ironically tend to end up sound kind of samey anyway. I think the attitude is ultimately kind of ignorant of how human beings work. We don't exist in a vacuum, and most people who have no formal grasp of theory are still going to converge around the same fundamentals they find pleasing. You'll just end up making your own language in your head of things that already have standardized explanations in music theory. In the end, theory is about effectively communicating musical ideas with eachother.

You'll find this is mostly the case with older music as well (that isn't a re-release and in all likelihood remastered). We pretty much have calibrated our amps for heavily compressed music. Some stuff I can barely even crank up above the lowest settings because it gets unbearably loud beyond that. This is also because compression also introduces inharmonic distortion. It manifests all over the frequency spectrum unlike harmonic distortion which just stacks overtones and is thus "musical", so it is something that is much harder to quantify for most people. All you really know is that it sounds like crap. Inharmonic distortion (AKA intermodulation distortion) is something that always exists when you mix more than two tones. It's just a matter of keeping it at negligible levels. Compressing the master will increase this distortion, so if you play it louder you'll notice it more. This also means that uncompressed music can be played at even louder average volume and still sound very pleasant and palatable. This is pretty much how I was taught that the best general benchmark for technical audio quality is how loud you can play something before it gets unbearable. Dynamic music invites you to play it louder. Brickwalled music does the opposite. I think in particular music released in the latter half of the 80's does an excellent job at utilizing full dynamic range, and this is when the overall technical quality peaked in mainstream music. Digital audio was still new enough at that point to be considered novel and this utopian ideal which has finally been realized, so producers made sure to take advantage of its perks. After a while, the situation normalized and people started to regard pristine, digital audio as something mundane, which also played its part in contributing towards the loudness war with very romantisized notions of processing/mastering (also related to mastering engineers needing to justify keeping their jobs when vinyl was being phased out for CDs. Unlike vinyl mastering which is a very specialized and delicate process, getting audio on CD format is just a simple linear transfer of binary information).

Here he is talking about Balloon Fight and the start of his career https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63mG4k-VIyY

http://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/pdf/2015/150713e.pdf For those who don't know he had been undergoing cancer treatment recently, but there wasn't much indication of it being this serious.The death of beloved high profile people just keep piling up these past couple of months, unfortunately.

EBU R128 is already well on its way to being standardised worldwide across broadcasting and streaming services. And even those who don't follow EBU guidelines specifically usually have their own equivalent in place, like music published through YouTube's new music service. You're not really going to do yourself any favors brickwalling music today, as most outlets will have algorithms in place to gain-adjust the track pre-emptively so the average loudness will not be perceived as louder than music with more dynamic range. I think people who do this and notice their music being played next to more dynamic music are eventually going to wise up and utilize more of that real estate in dynamics that they're not getting. I don't see anything in the OP hinting towards compression being an inherently bad and destructive tool. I think you're jumping to conclusions here. And I believe the whole "different RMS works better for different devices" argument is largely blown out of proportion as well. And, at the end of the day, it just seems completely backwards to me that you would mix/master for the absolute lowest common denominator output in mind and deprive everyone else of the option for better quality. The actual logical solution for this argument would have been to implement processing options in the player devices themselves (which some seem to be doing for movies/TV with "late night mode").

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/chris-squire-yes-bassist-and-co-founder-dead-at-67-20150628 Dead at 67 from leukemia. He was the one constant member in the otherwise revolving door of members for the long running prog rock band, including high profile names like Rick Wakeman, Jon Anderson and Trevor Horn.

Some art from the scrapped Mad Max anime. I remember reading about this project many years ago, before the movie was a sure thing.

I think a lot of people will end up disappointed. FF7 is abstract enough for people to make up this image in their head of what the game is really like. And the developers' vision is inevitably going to differ from that. Another factor is how Square specifically creates their games to appeal towards a teenage demographic, and they have said as much in the past. Many fans probably grew more lukewarm over FF as they entered their 20's and start realizing that the games just aren't for them any more. It's not like, say, the more insular superhero comic book industry where the creators shifted over time to serve older readers.

Aly James FM Drive does a good job of emulating the 2612 quirks, and even simulates hardware revision-specific non-linearities. The interface is not exactly great though. http://www.alyjameslab.com/alyjameslabfmdrive.html

In FM8 it probably helps to set the digital slider to around 40 or so. The FM chip in the Genesis has unique distortions in its signal, so it's never really pristine sine waves it's working with and this fundamentally affects the timbre. It becomes very noticeable when playing sounds (especially bright ones) at lower tones where they get kind of smudged out. FM8 cannot replicate it fully, but at least you can get something close with the digital feature (I think it adds some type of mixture of aliasing and bit reduction?). That kind of distortion is also very useful if you want to make more varied noisy sounds. People who designed SFX on the hardware had this very common pitfall where they'd just max out the parameters along with the feedback if they wanted a lot of noise which is the most instant gratification method of doing things, but this mostly just yields this overwhelming static white noise you can't change the character of. This is why a lot of games get accused of sounding kind of screechy and abrasive. If you instead make a bright sound with minimal to no feedback and rapidly play a wide range of low frequency tones, you can get a lot more flexible kind of noise. Listen to things like explosions or the thunder sounds in Revenge of Shinobi which makes good use of this technique. Very smooth sounding.

Even going into this movie having heard the complaints about feminist agenda beforehand, it was never something that really actively registered with me. It's just something I don't think about and nearly a complete non-factor. An interesting angle was also brought up when Jim Sterling's podcast was discussing the film. I consider this movie to be in the same eschelon as unanimous action classics like Aliens and Terminator 2, which was echoed in the podcast, but the coincidence also brought up was that both of these films also feature very prominent female action heroes.

You need to go see this movie if you haven't already. Was a big fan of Road Warrior for most of my life, and I had been anticipating a new Mad Max for about as long as the internet rumors were circulating. Still, I went into this mostly blind without obsessing over pre-release media and production info/rumors as hyped movie fans tend to do these days. All I wanted was more Mad Max with post-apoc car chases and that would have been totally fine. What I got was way beyond anything I could have imagined. Everything was cranked to 11 with wacky ridiculousness yet somehow still manages to make sense within the world. The action and cinematogrophy puts modern CGI- and shakycam-laden filmmaking practices to shame. I shed tears while watching just because it was so damn good. It grabbed me in a way that no other spectacle-driven movie of this century has done. Whether that be action, superheroes, sci fi or epic fantasy. Go see it just for this guy if nothing else:

That's pretty good. I hope you'll get into the nitty gritty of 16-bit sound effects as well as that's where it starts getting really interesting. Either through the implementation of FM, or using samples with the same 8-bit design principles (the iconic monster impact/death sounds in A Link to the Past is a cymbal being heavily pitched around for instance). I feel that a lot of modern retro-style games treat these sounds in a very superficial way and doesn't really take into account the amount of thought and craftmanship that went into them. I think sound design for games really entered this long, uninspired lull from the mid 90's and onwards as this type of sound design was abandoned in favor of recorded PCM samples, which were often the most generic library sounds possible with minimal to no editing done to them. It's really just over the past 10 years or so I feel that the bar has been raised and things have started to get interesting again.

If you just want to do the pumping rhythm thing I actually find sidechaining to be a kind of roundabout way of doing it. Instead I just create a volume automation clip that is 1 step long and just duplicate it. The curve between the two points can be visually altered to change the character which I find a lot more intuitive than relying on a mixture of kick sound and compressor settings.

The full versions of Sytrus and Maximus that come with 12 are retroactively licensed for 11 as well, so it's worth installing for that if anything.

I've seen all kinds of rationalizations for it when queried, mostly in the form of excuses, suggesting that they personally don't really want to and acknowledge that it's bad. It often feels disingenuous to me though. I think if you just keep asking why enough times, eventually it just comes down to "I'm just doing it cause everyone else is doing it". Broadcasting and streaming services worldwide are currently adopting loudness normalization standards that work by analyzing the average loudness across blocks of material and adjusting them accordingly, so that compressed audio will have their volume compensated to have the same average loudness as something with more sensible dynamics. This mostly grew out of legislation to combat the insane compression levels on TV commercials making them appear much louder than the regular programming, but it encompasses all kinds of broadcasting. I think YouTube already have their own system in place for music published under their own music program.

I can't for the life of me figure out how to add something as simple as plain old sample and audio clip channels in FL12. If they got rid of such fundamental functionality, I think I'll just stick with FL11.

Names are like brands. Make a new name or "project" for a different kind of music you want to make, if it doesn't overlap with what people expect from your current name.

Somehow the overall perception is that good music is, or should be, inherently tied to a good live performance. It's a problematic and outdated attitude that just needlessly stigmatizes things. "Authenticity" is fetishized in music to a degree you don't really see in other mediums.

Prefab sequence/rhythm style are funny in several ways. I remember listening to some of those that came from the Korg Wavestation and one of them sounded awfully familiar. Turns out that in the US version of the Sonic CD soundtrack, Metallic Madness has practically the whole song made out of just that preset being held down at different keys. Then there's the conundrum with how it affects the ridiculous Content ID system which is implemented in online services like YouTube and Soundcloud. If you use one one those presets and someone else has used it in their material earlier and gotten it registered in the Content ID list, then you risk being labeled for copyright infringement. Just goes to show how at odds with reality that kind of shit is. Another interesting thing I've notedis in how communities centered around making dance music, when people are talking about "chords" they are more likely to be talking about synth presets with harmony baked into them.

There have always been 2 demographics for synthesizers which is both those who have a great passion for fiddling around with them to create their own stuff, and those who just want something useable straight away. The DX7 in the early 80's was massively successful on an unprecedented scale in spite of being a bitch to program for, because it was one of the first synths to come with factory preset banks. Even before the days of memory-stored presets in the 70's, musicians who programmed synthesizers would largely gravitate towards the same kinds of sounds. Since in the end it's really about what sounds pleasant and functional to us humans, which in reality is extremly narrow compared to the actual possibilities. It's just the same with theory and composition where the vast majority will hardly ever venture outside the 12 tone system even in avant garde circles.

This has been the norm since tape made editing records possible. It's always been happening to a much greater degree than people really think about. Orchestral recordings are some of the most heavily edited out there and that's typically one people bring up as "authentic" performances.

You know, with how stealth games have gotten more mainstream in recent years, it makes me wonder why we never see any ninja games that are faithful to the actual idea of a ninja rather than just balls to the wall hardcore action. I'd imagine a kind of game like Thief/Dishonored which promotes patience and careful planning, and the pacing of the action would be more like Hotline Miami.