[OCR01196 - Sonic the Hedgehog 3 "The Outer Space Machine"]

Excellent. This has been one of my favorite recent Sonic mixes since I downloaded it off of VGmix a while back. Awesome work, Relik.

[OCR01001 - Street Fighter II "Sagat's Moonbike"]

I enjoyed the track a lot, Mazedude. I noticed some reused sounds compared to your older stuff, which kinda made the track stand out as yours. Anyway yes, great work. I do have one request though, I see you encoded your mp3 with BLADE mp3 encoder. There's a lot of better mp3 encoders out there. Blade is at the bottom of the list when it comes to quality. You might want to look into LAME or one of the FHG encoders.

[OCR00980 - Donkey Kong Country 2 "Assembly Line Apparitions"]

Protricity, great work as always. I really enjoyed this mix.

I did notice you speaking of VBR troubles again though, VBR Fix from this site http://www.willwap.co.uk/ should fix the VBR header so that time is correctly displayed for players that read the header. If not that, LAME defaults to inserting a correct header itself, compared to some encoders that don't. It's always worked for me anyway. Thanks again for the 1337ness.

[OCR00905 - Age of Empires: The Rise of Rome "Realms of Africa"]

Well, I used Creative's encoder. I wasn't aware that it was Xing or old. Anyway, I just wanted to point out that there is a higher quality version (and smaller filesize) of this song in the superior ogg format, and you can find it at http://www.public.asu.edu/~arasulin/Age_Of_Empires_Realms_of_Africa_OC_ReMix.ogg for the time being.

I used to use LAME (and I still do) but I dont use it for submissions anymore since a few friends told me they get errors and deformations when playing these songs on some mp3 players. I do agree that Lame is the best out there.

Ooh. OGG is nice, <nod> you wouldn't happen to have OGG versions of your older stuf wouldya?

Also, the only instances that I can think of where a player has trouble playing Lame mp3's is a certain model of a Sony player that couldn't handle 320kbps frames in VBR mp3's. A lot of problems with mp3 players can be avoided just by using ID3v1.1 instead of ID3v2 tags, as the v2 tags confuse some players when used with VBR mp3's. Aside from Lame, there's also the FHG codecs, which while not as good as Lame, are still a far cry better than Xing. Thanks again for replying though, and thanks for the OGG link. =D

[OCR00905 - Age of Empires: The Rise of Rome "Realms of Africa"]

I really enjoyed this. I can't think of any criticism for the music itself, I've always liked your stuff plenty, Protricity (especially the DKC mixes.) The one problem I did have, is that this mp3, and others you have made are encoded with the old Xing mp3 encoder. As far as mp3 encoders go, Xing is one of the definite lower quality ones. It has a tendency to mangle any sound above 16khz, and the rest of the music doesn't fare too well either, usually ending up with a harshness for the higher sounds. Because of that, and some other things it manages to do to mp3's, I was just hoping to ask if you'd consider reencoding the orignal with a FHG or LAME mp3 encoder. Both are far superior, in terms of quality, at the same bitrates as Xing.

[OCR00874 - Raiden Trad "Gallantry (Nobility of Spirit Mix)"]

I said it before, I really really like this mix. Raiden's been in need of mixage for some time, and I highly enjoyed this one. I especially like the sound of your lead synth, which also kept reminding me of Golden Axe for some reason. As I'm now listening with headphones and taking in more of what's going on in the backround of the music, it only gets better. Awesome mix!