José the Bronx Rican

Since I'm around, preparing an update for the directors on our trailer, I can confirm eval is in process, and since it's mentioned in our video, we intend not to miss the anniversary milestone!

I'm coming up for air again. Absolutely the last update: the album is 100% ready as of mid-November. It came a bit too late to squeeze a release last month, but for a good reason. A track presented as finished was apparently not, and without going into detail (it'll be explained in the release notes), the artists, instead of the expected mastering polish, decided to overhaul! Very much appreciated, because it's slated as the opening track, and it's a good idea to start an album with FIRE. In that interim, as you can tell by our last album trailer (I hope), I was pretty much buried in my own work. It's in the hands of staff now for final release prep, so it can't be too long after the Mana release gets its shine.

We are imminent. All relevant artists are now confirmed, and we have something resembling an ETA. Other albums have popped up in our queue that need attention (here's one hint: "spoopy"), so there'll be a bit more time 'til release. I will call it "November... high probability". We're taking two weeks to finalize, and if all goes well, we're seeing 10 tracks and major props to Naofumi Hataya!

We're in the stretch now. Our issue is the same the previous directors ran into from time to time; artists are difficult to reach sometimes, and I can relate: I'm still swamped with my own life and stuff, but I'm committed. As soon as I hear from a couple more artists regarding final approval, we'll be done, hopefully within a week. My own track had some further tweaking in the interim, and I'm glad to have that out of the way. 7 arrangements are confirmed, and I'm trying for at least 2 more. To the finish line!

OK, guys should obviously be aware we had two more albums since my last reply. One of them is on me sorta: while reviewing our trailer for Sonic 25, I realized we were fast approaching the end of the anniversary, so we had to move with haste on that one. The next one came virtually out of nowhere, at least on my end; I was first aware of it maybe 3 weeks ago, and a trailer was essential there as well (sigh, more instant deadline). This weekend, I'm contacting everyone on VROOM for Content Policy and to see about any possible final development. There's another album incoming, but I'm gonna try to sked this one next. We'll see how it goes.

The following is also within the OP's update. ATTENTION: June 6, 2017: First, my big fat apology to anyone affected. First started on the 25th anniversary of the original release of Snatcher, I was certain my personal busy-as-hell situation would prevent me from following this project properly, and I wanted to recruit and set up a staff before that happened. I failed miserably, and this ended up being put off for years. June 6 is an important date in Snatcher lore, and I decided I would stop the nonsense on this date. I have people to help me, and I'm actively recruiting, but bear with me a little while on claim status as I contact interested parties from before. I'm also available on our discord chats and willing to answer questions and take constant nagging (to a point, of course). My other projects related to Snatcher's music are on again as well, for those that know about it; if not, see the above video for details. Further clarifications are forthcoming within the week. “Let’s go, Metal!”

Late again, what's good? Your gameplays seem fine, no glaring issues. No worries if the face cam rate doesn't match game rate: if you followed the resample advice, you won't have any blurring between frames, and things won't look noticeably jaggy as long as any source is at least around 30fps. Cams are tricky, though: some may say they record at 30, but actually record at 15 and then just double the frames... not cool. One thing about your face camming that I've noticed is the wide variation in color and lighting in each vid, which is natural considering you're recording indoors from, I suppose, a living room or bedroom, but they could use more quality and consistency. Proper lighting wherever you can, and/or good color correction wherever you can't, will work wonders, but that's outside the scope of the advice I can offer right now; I can't claim to be an expert on it at any rate, but know that Vegas has many great tools for color correction, including Color Corrector and White Balance. I'm sure there are good tutorials out there for it; maybe I can link something later.

An update? Like WHAAT?!? I realized I should come in and say something... at staff discussion a while back, I'm like "I'm ready for trailers, what's next?" We're like, not sure, but reminded ourselves we need to get VROOM out the door for God's sake. What no one knew was, around that time, with my first batch of free time in a long time, I was crazy enough to consider actually going back in and finishing my track, which was still stuck at WIP 1, and which up to then I thought was hopeless. Whaddaya know, it worked out, thanks in no small part to Naofumi Hataya's composition for "Replay", which has so damn many good riffs that any ReMix can practically write itself! This album is going to come out very soon, we mean it this time: we at staff are sorta the collective director, my Virtua Racing Deluxe arrangement is included, and we're prepping the OCRI release. We thank the past and present album crew, the artists and the fans for staying tuned and putting up with the twists in our timeline.

Just got reminded at discord, so I need to throw in. I failed last year and don't want it to happen again. I want to get this great concept I have out of the way for the holiday. Time is already short, so not cool, but please bug me all you want about this. I'm serious: I'm always swamped with stuff, but very little of it is immediately consequential. I'm following discord reasonably well, so hit me up whenever.

My ignorant ass is late, but I do wanna remark, as I'm about to work on materials for Pixel Noir, and I found out a couple things relevant here. First, I only recently found out that Vegas Pro was bought by Magix. I don't dig the uncertainty that comes with new ownership, especially since a corp. like Sony was almost uniquely resourced for tight integration between their products. So far tho these new guys seem keen to keep things high-quality. Their first word was "stable"... very promising, as ver. 11 was infamously unlike it. I'm still on ver. 12, which is more than fine, but I want to see how much things have changed before committing to upgrades. One of Vegas' main hooks is the ease in building impressive visuals, due to non-linear editing, compositing and project nesting capabilities that made it a decent alternative before After Effects became something resembling affordable. Some of the things I see in Dashie's Mario Maker videos make it obvious he's using Vegas as well. Another Vegas hook is audio layering and processing, second to none for a long time: it's practically a DAW without the MIDI note input. timaeus, like myself, found out on his own how useful VirtualDub is along with the Vegas workflow. Most footage we amateurs get is likely less than ideal, so most of the work is basically "cleaning up the crap", that is, artifacts, unwanted blurring, low resolution, etc. Vegas can handle most of it, but more effective tools are found in VirtualDub; even better if AviSynth is used in tandem, which is also free, but requires some occasionally deep scripting knowledge. Too much to get into here, but some anime sharing communities make a convenient resource for learning. I will say here that whatever software is used, keep in mind all the things these tools may do to "improve" quality and productivity may actually hurt the final result. "Nearest-neighbor" is what I do as well to enlarge older game footage, and "disable resample" within a Vegas video event will work wonders in keeping video output clean, just to name two examples. From what I've seen, those who want to avoid trying out anything and everything would probably not go wrong with Adobe or Vegas, if not the "full", then whatever they consider "cut-down". My experience is much like most folks': I find something that works well, I stick with it. On that note, for capturing gameplay, CamStudio has been good, but recently needed resources freed and 16-bit color from the game itself in order to capture smoothly, so I had to switch for my current project requiring game footage... not to mention, it seems to be a malware trap nowadays. Free options seem to be few, but I like LoiLo Game Recorder so far. Smooth, with no noticeable dropped frames, even at HD. Cons so far are: few resolution options; no way I can see to record without audio if I wished; it captures in MotionJPEG, and the inherent artifacts are juuust above tolerable, even at its highest-quality setting, but then that's exactly the kind of cleanup I mentioned earlier.

Easy favorite at my end, right up there with The Answer. Just a fully realized vision. My earliest reaction upon listening is lamenting how much I've missed Neskvartetten. "Dream of Green" in particular is quite amazing, with the kind of soul that's hard to describe, but I suspect the bass is a factor. Tight arrangement everywhere. No question, keeping an eye out for any and all future product from the Collective.

Of course... one hundred fifty percent.

SCC! That's what I forgot to tell 'em.

Don't forget the product page: there are music demos embedded from Soundcloud (including one from Yuzo), and there are links to videos on Zircon's youtube for the general overview, editing/arpeggiator/sequencer functions, and effects/mod matrix. Should be enough to help you decide. I'm so on this, because this may be just where my synth needs are (just above Sytrus but nowhere near the insane complexities of absynth), and because I wanna find out if I can utilize the mods and other functions to help recreate additional, authentic chip sounds.

I always wondered what the llama did to deserve it. Anyway, my interest in this - apart from a sound library that leaves Mega Drive well-represented - is seeing how capably it can emulate the sort of things that happen with chips that is more difficult to capture through samples, even though authenticity is only one feature of this project. For example, LFO control should obviously be a given, but MD's chip has a small range of possible settings that I think should be simple to reproduce. Some of Streets of Rage's instrument sounds are distinct partly because of the LFO settings, and the .tfi rip won't cover that. In fact, the reason I've been missing for a while is a heavy research project definitively and quickly identifying MD instrument use, which happens to be totally relevant to this product: the TFI collections out there are nearly useless without proper vetting and organization.

Nowadays, it's dead easy to study source tunes for transcription; naturally it comes many years after my wave of experience in it since 1999 Since I'm a masochist, however, my return to transcription now involves heavy research into an entire 16-bit game's sound design and number of individual "patches" before I start inputting a single note. For "Contra Overdrive", I had each sound channel isolated and exported to wavs in a Sony Vegas workflow to get it done, then realized even that's not enough for the sake of authenticity. It's fine so far, tho: You don't have to go through all that. General MIDI has an extremely limited sound set to work with, so it's mostly satsfactory to go with patches that sound close enough to the original song, and with 16 separate channels to work with, you may even combine some patches using the same notes to get what you need. I'm assuming you have basic knowledge of General MIDI and posess sequencing software; if not, you're gonna have to learn a few things. Foobar and Winamp can play back the chiptune files out there (get most of 'em at OCR by searching the game) using plugins. OCR's own Chipamp will cover most of it in Winamp, but you can aso collect up-to-date plugins separately around the web. The best ones allow you to isolate each sound channel in the song for study, then you can export to wav or mp3 if needed. The "easiest" tunes to transcribe will not necessarily be the ones with the fewest channels, unless you think "Silver Surfer" would be a breeze to create authentically. They would likely be tunes that don't have any programming stunts done to enhance the sound - anything from pitch bends, vibratos and tremolos to arppeggios - that would require a great many notes to be entered or many CC controllers to be drawn. I chose "Contra Overdrive" mostly because of the challenge - the programming done there is insane! In the case of SNES, sampling may cover the stuff usually programmed in a synth-type chip. Simply listening may be the best way to determine how easy the transcribing job might be. You can also study most of the "simple" music that's likely already been transcribed: open in your sequencer and see how it's done.

This may be more like something someone just noticed because that person just passed away, which is understandable, more so because - obviously - 70's R&B and disco could be at the very far end of music lovers' consciousness in the general Internet. Someone like me who's lived through it is more aware. Another reason is that this is not the first time White has worked in animation. Earth, Wind and Fire's "Dance, Dance, Dance" was written by White for the soundtrack to Nelvana's "Rock & Rule". One more reason is that, for myself, anytime I see an English name appear in Japanese music credits for a Japanese program, it's something to be paid attention to. Two examples: one of my favorite soundtracks to one of my favorite animes is from "Riding Bean", created mostly by David Garfield, who's been involved with a ton of soul and jazz artists, featuring vocals from Phil Perry, another 70's soul artist; the kinda-sorta followup anime, "Gunsmith Cats", was composed by Peter Erskine, who's performed as a drummer with Weather Report and Steely Dan.

Right: the blog overlooks that the entire soundtrack included music for what eventually became a separate release, not to mention all the people shouted out under "SEGA Sound Team" and "Sound Special Thanks".

Oh my Jesus. "...Wanna knock dildo down?"

That was exactly my thinking, and just about what I was prepared to say if I caught anyone going "See, Michael didn't want his name attached cuz 2612 sucked!"

People are forgetting our main video. I made sure our logo was hella inclusive! Speaking of the opposite, though, the only disappointing thing about this whole story is the additional ammo that some SPC fanboys might think they have now.

That leads into my only piece of advice: generally, don't worry, but understand even a tiny risk is much greater if you mess with the popular stuff. We all know what I'm referring to. We also know you won't get any views covering Final Fight instead. Or Legend of Kage. Just something to consider.

My primary concern is probably similar to zircon's: ability to draw/edit/tweak as many notes as possible in a big fat hurry. I finally got around to building my own MIDI programming template in FL, because the "Scale Levels" function in their piano roll is indispensable to me, and I haven't found anything similar yet in other DAWs (it's a difficult thing to search for on the web). I should ask here to the experienced users: what does S1 offer that's similar, if anything, and do other DAWs have it? I expect Reaper has something.

Necro'd an old reply, 'cuz obviously still very important; you never know when you might have only one speaker to work with while listening (yes, the situation is still relevant: phones only have one built-in speaker). There are many tracks currently on this site that lose quite a bit of information after the phase cancelling. Anyone who's heard the audio the time we accidentally posted the Maverick Rising trailer in mono might have realized this. I started checking things in mono for a different reason - because I can't trust my tinnitus-ized left ear with freqs around 7kHz - but it turned out to be a good common-sense approach to mixing. FL's Stereo Shaper has become very useful for getting some of my sounds (especially pianos) to behave on one channel as well as two.