Arcana
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Posts posted by Arcana
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Not really possible. It's not publicly traded; plus that'd be a conflict of interest.
Plus OCR's whole "free" thing isn't changing, so there's no real way to make money off of ReMixanator. It's proprietary, but we're not licensing it out either.
It's possible we might release it as open-source somewhere down the line, but right now we want to play this close to the chest.
How do we know that the ReMixinator isn't just a bunch of songs that someone created ahead of time, and when we select those songs, it just plays back these songs?
How do we REALLY KNOW it's generated in real time?
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The A.S.S. hasn't come out with this yet - there's no megamix option on it (yet).
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Guys, I have a problem with the Remixinator... whenever I select the same parameters it always gives me the same song. Can this be fixed?
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I bet Darkesword bought shares in their company. He's gonna get rich off of this. Mark my words.
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Alright, someone else noticed too. No need, I already contacted them and they informed me that extreme measures are being taken and by tomorrow we should see some results.
THIEVERY SHALL NOT GO UNPUNISHED!!
So if the Remixinator goes away tomorrow, we'll all know that it was due to diligent copyright upholders like you and me.
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The part of the vocals on the female vocal solo-piano Schala remix are the same as .hack//ROOTS "God Diva".
NOT ONLY DOES THIS THING MAKE REMIXERS OBSOLETE, IT ALSO ENGAGES IN MUSIC PIRACY THIS IS AN OUTRAGE WHAT DOES OCR HAVE TO SAY ABOUT THIS IMA GET THE RIAA ON YER ASSES
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Since you bumped this old thread, it's probably a good time to remind everyone that the expansion pack, Dragon Age: Awakening was released a week or so ago. I don't know if I'll pick it up myself, but it's definitely something that would be of interest to fans of this game.
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I started making music using Reason and it was really fun, and taught me a lot about concepts like signal routing, effects chains, and mixing. The interface for Reason is actually quite good. The synthesizers make sense, it's easy to see where your signal paths are, and you can make some really, really awesome effects that I've yet to replicate in any other program I've used (you can do crazy stuff like mapping LFOs into another synth's pitch and then mapping that back into the other synth's LFO rate and you end up with synths that basically interact with each other.)
That all said, I moved on to using Logic Pro one day and I haven't really looked back. As DJP and others have said in this thread, the ability to use external plugins is extremely useful. I don't know if I would say 'essential' in quite the same way he did, but, depending on what kind of sound you want, you might simply be unable to recreate it in Reason (this goes especially for orchestral samples). Everyone else who's getting serious into music might be using Kontakt or East-West Symphony Orchestra or Omnisphere, but you can't because of your choice of program and sometimes it feels limiting.
However, it's quite possible to create lots of OC ReMix quality work with Reason alone with no need for anything else. If you're more about making music with what you've got, rather than purchasing new toys, then Reason is a great way to make music for years. Its sound is good, the samples and presets for Reason are a really good base to build an array of interesting sounds from, and with Record, you're able to integrate external sounds as well without a problem.
But if you've been using FLStudio for a while and enjoy it and don't see any reason to change (remember, Reason is an expensive program) then I don't see it being a good investment to get Reason. If all you want are different/better sounds you might be better off buying a 3rd party plugin.
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All right, so it's a suburb of the DS thread. It's still no place to trash talk the PSP, as that could start some bad things brewing. Next thing you know, PSP owners come in here snapping their fingers, singing about "When you're a Go, you're a Go all the way" and then a D-pad fight breaks out.
I visualized you saying this like a Gangsta and I totally laughed.
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You know, to be honest I kind of agree with you on that. I think it's WAY more important for people to have fun with remixing and making music, not to study textbooks first. It's easy for me to look back and say "oh, I wish I had learned the ins and outs of subtractive synthesis from day 1" or "if only I had studied music theory for 5 years", but maybe if I had tried that I never would have been motivated enough to really pursue it. My first piano teacher was not a strict disciplinarian, and neither were my parents when it came to playing the piano. They encouraged me to enjoy it (while still practicing 20-30 mins a day, expanding to 45) which eventually led to greater proficiency.
I think also a lot of people also get into OCR with the belief "I'm going to get posted on OCR" without a thought on exactly how much work it takes to, well, get posted on OCR. I think it's pretty much agreed among us that if you make it onto OCR, you're a pretty good musician.
And, if you don't realise that it takes a ton of hard work (I still believe it's years) and practice to become posted then you, well, end up working and getting frustrated in the short term.
I've had more fun with music when I just stopped caring about standards and just created stuff.
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I'm finding myself agreeing with pretty much everything Coop has said so far. These terms are made up by marketing groups and gamers that seek to differentiate others for personal bias.
I disagree that it's simply for personal bias.
It is possible to put a bunch of people together in the same room, put a bunch of people together in a different room, and then ask them to play a game against each other to win.
Unless you sample the populations from a pretty homogenous group, you're going to have some pretty vast differences within teams.
- The people who want to win, and who try to organize their teammates so that they'll win
- The people who are there just to enjoy the game
- The people who try to dispense a strategy for others to follow
- The people who don't want to be there because they don't like the idea of killing other humans in a game
Among others. It's a continuous spectrum, but I bet that if you position these two teams against each other for an hour it'll be not that hard to decide which ones are "hardcore" and which ones are "casual".
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There are a lot of articles online about this; I've read a number on the topic, but often times I end up clicking links within the article (or at the end) to other websites and don't bookmark them or remember who the author is. I suggest starting at www.Sirlin.net and reading his GDC articles, as well as the talk by Jesse Schell which he links to, and the response to that piece. There are elements of external rewards in games like WoW, but Farmville's design literally revolves around getting the user hooked on external rewards and encouraging them to spend as much money as possible to get such rewards.
Damn you've managed to totally put the onus on me to look up and explore these things on my own time.
I was curious if the psychological aspects had to do with gaming, or had to do with spending money, specifically. Because there are a lot of elements that I would think are common to almost all modern games, like positive reinforcement, low barriers to entry, etc.
My personal definition of "hardcore" vs. "casual" is an attitude toward the game rather than a time commitment. In my opinion, a "hardcore" person is willing to spend time practicing, studying and analyzing data, as well as going through numerous repetitions and experiments, to become "good" at some element of the game. A casual person doesn't care about those things.
It's the same criteria I'd use to describe someone who plays soccer or does research or some other activity. Most people don't agree with my definition though.
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Honestly though, again, if you just listen to my early remixes and originals you'd hear how absolutely awful they were. Those 8 years of piano experience really didn't mean much at all, and to make matters worse I was primarily relying on premade loops and sounds! I attribute my improvement (messed with music in very late '02, posted in '04) to sheer dedication. I made a hell of a lot of crappy ReMixes. I bugged people left and right for advice. I made it a point to try to collaborate with people like Unknown/Tyler Heath, Rellik and tefnek. I studied the tools out there and relentlessly upgraded my setup, from buying headphones (instead of using $20 computer monitors), to getting Komplete 2, to upgrading my computer, etc.
At the same time, I've used a premade loop only once ever in my songs and I stayed away from presets until I started doing one-hour compos. I stayed away from MIDI rips.
Why? Because people on this site said they were bad. I kind of wonder if that stole away a few years of fun especially since I heard of so many people here starting by doing MIDI rips, loop rips, and presets.
I've listened to your early work (you posted them once in some thread). I thought they weren't bad from a compositional standpoint even if they weren't solid technical achievements. But I know what you mean. I did about two years of band in elementary school and that knowledge hasn't translated to any benefit in my remixing. I played baritone for two years and nowadays I have no idea how to create a bassline. The irony!
But I do believe as well that sound design/production and composition are nearly orthogonal skillsets. One reason why people who get onto this site nowadays are so good - they're able to do both.
I just hate theories because they start generalizing and setting standards for people to meet.Everyone has their own pace.
Yes, how an individual approaches music is up to that individual. However, it doesn't mean that you can't detect and establish trends using publicly-available data.
I mean, what's someone going to do with the information anyway? It's just curiosity. Also, I did state in my hypothesis (it would be wrong to call it a theory as it's untested) "by today's OCR standards", which I *believe* started in around 2003ish. I'll check when I start gathering data.
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That theory makes more sense, what bothered me was your original "it takes 5 years of musical experience to get posted" theory.
In that you need to include an "age factor" and also a factor for how "gifted" someone is.
I still believe that this is true. Feel free to prove me wrong, but you'd have to do it not by finding one or two exceptions - you'd have to sample the population, take the average experience they have, and see what the distribution is like. Then you'd generate a random sample around the mean of 5 and do a t-test for comparison.
Maybe I'll go through this thread and see what the result is, I haven't actually crunched the numbers myself.
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Sorry, say that again?but I'm also better off than some people with a lot less experience I see on the WIP forum who are also older than me.
Of course someone out there, somewhere, is going to be better off than you. It's kind of hard to compare yourself to Darkesword and bLiNd and so forth because they've been like, doing music for almost as long as you've been alive
But, I still think that you're going to have an advantage because you started young. By the time you hit 30, you'll have spent half of your life doing "careful listening" to music, having experience with looking at project files, and having the flexibility of thinking about what music sounds like and what music is and what needs to be done for creating music in your mind.
My argument is that starting when you're 14 and doing it until you're 20 is going to be a different beast than if you started at 24 and did it until you're 30. There's so much that your brain does to hardwire itself as you grow older and it's a mental challenge for someone who's had this mental wiring to rewire the brain to think differently.
I also think that you're quite fortunate to be able to start at your age and learn from people like Darkesword and zircon and bLiNd. The community as a whole has matured significantly since it started up ten years ago. The barrier to entry is significantly lower now than it was back then, since software audio production programs are coming down so fast, price-wise. In addition, you've got so many people in this community who are able to help who simply didn't exist in the community eight or ten years ago. This actually goes as a general good thing for the community. People are better able to collaborate. We have broadband, we have screensharing, real-time voice communication, increased air travel opportunities, increased frequency of real-life meetups, and all of that. The community, even though it's grown larger, has grown closer because of the improvements in technology. Not long ago it was extremely rare to find out someone's real name. Now it's as easy as friending a single person from OCR on Facebook and then reverse-engineering that person's friend list.
Since you ninja-edited:
Which is why people like Blue Magic who've had the same amount of experience as me still manage to be 5x better AT AN OLDER AGE?How long have you been making music for? Six years? Assuming that he started in 2004, then he has six years of experience.
The reason I think this whole "theory" of yours is because it's basing the abilities of humans on the "studies".Just accept that everyone's different and call it a day. :/ You keep saying "this person being an exception" and eventually you have too many exceptions to call them exceptions any more, in which case the other people following your theory are called exceptions; at that point in time your theory is a theory for exceptions and there is no theory for the previous "exceptions" who are exceptions to your theory but outnumber the current "exceptions".
This makes the new people not "exceptions" any more. They're just a group of people who follow your theory.
You don't tell me what you actually think, but I'm going to presume that you mean "the reason I think you believe in this whole theory".
The real reason is that it's just an idea I had based on talking to a lot of people and asking them what their experience was before they got posted onto today's OC ReMix.
And social studies do work and are able to give some sense of generalizability to people, given certain factors. There are always outliers but there are many trends, too.
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What kind of cheap psychological tricks are unique to Farmville/Mafia Wars that are not unique to most other games like Bejeweled or Peggle? (or World of Warcraft, or Heroes of Newerth or Team Fortress 2 or Mass Effect)
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My big gripe with people in general is that people think your age is a factor.
I'll say it once right now. Age has nothing to do with it.
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I'm 14. I'm not as good as guys like Zircon and bLiNd who have lived longer with more experience, but I'm also better off than some people with a lot less experience I see on the WIP forum who are also older than me.
Age does have an effect, especially with how quickly you learn and how quickly you are able to adapt your mind to something like music. Your paragraph below is supporting evidence of it, where you describe that you, someone who's young, is doing better than someone who's older. The younger you start the more of an advantage that you have.
There are a lot of studies of the effect of age on learning, and that in particular, skills that are quite mathematical and involve that are of the brain (such as music) are more difficult to pick up as you grow older. Not to mention, older people tend to have more constraints in their lives.
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When was the last time we saw a strong female lead in an adventure movie?
I don't really watch movies so I don't know but I'm wondering if this is isolated to games.
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I don't know if you were serious or not, but I have to disagree. (I'm living proof of that.)
I started working with music at the end of 04, and got a mix posted in March of 05.
I was being serious. Average of five years to get a song that's up to today's OC ReMix standards. If you got yourself posted after a few months of starting music from no knowledge then I would call you exceptional.
I mean, there's a whole range and there are going to be exceptions. "Experience" is kind of hard to define. If you start at the age of 4, do violin for 2 years, then don't touch it until you're 18, you don't have 2 years of music experience, really. If you buy all kinds of gear and then do only five hours a year and do that for a couple of years, that's not really two years of experience.
Little do you know that for at least 5 years, 99% of my remixes were done using the mouse input only, not with a MIDI keyboard. Knowing how to play the piano did very little for me, as evidenced by the poor quality of my first ~12 remixes. I attribute my fast growth to borderline obsession at getting better.I find that interesting. I can't sight-sing from the piano roll (that is, I don't know how something sounds by looking at the notes on a piano roll).
As a guitar teacher, I've noticed something interesting about teaching adults. We tend to have a developed sense of what we'd like to sound like based on the music we like to listen to and our own personal guitar heroes. It's frustrating to us when all we can do is play G, C, and D7, and it takes about 5 seconds to get between any of those chords. There is definitely a wall to break through where it might not be that enjoyable to practice guitar because we're not at the point where we can make it sound like the songs we listen to. This is a problem with hand dexterity, something that can only be overcome with practice. If you can push yourself past that wall, eventually you get to the point where you can play actual songs, and guitar becomes a lot more enjoyable and rewarding, and this can take on a snowball effect.I'm one of those people who gets frustrated at music. I listen to things and want to make them. I sit down and crank something out and it's not what I wanted to make and I don't have the skill or the technical knowledge to make what I want to make. I try making some kind of trance song and I can't do it.
I get frustrated and I try to look up "how to make trance" but you get all kinds of people like
who really can't describe what they're doing. Even though there's thousands of conventions for trance or similar music, no one's thought of writing them down. People keep trying to reinvent the wheel. Even here people are reluctant to describe or teach in technical terms what it is about a track that makes the merging of a certain kind of detuned saw and a PWN string pad work "together".When you're old like me small things are extraordinarily more frustrating than when you're all young whippersnappers learning a new fancy hobby.
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At least half of the games I bought in the past year are casual games.
Peggle and Plants vs Zombies woooooo
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This is not quite accurate. I had been playing the piano for ~8 years prior to my attempts at remixing. However, I had only a basic understanding of music (major, minor, scales, quarter notes, eighth notes) since playing complex pieces does not require that you understand their compositions. It wasn't until I took music theory and ear training courses at college (2005-2006) that I would say I really started to understand what I was doing.
Ahh, this is a bigger picture of the puzzle, then.
I don't think it's necessarily a prerequisite, but the ability to play piano (or any instrument) to some extent also appears to give you (not you zircon specifically but just in general) the ability to work faster.
I know that there are exceptions, but almost all of the video tutorials that I look at seem to feature extremely able musicians who can barely explain what they're doing. They go to the keyboard, say, "This piece needs pizzicato strings" and begin to pound out arpeggios with their fingers. Personally, I took a year of piano, and was took up piano because I wanted to start up remixing. In fact, I was totally unable to work with the sequencer until I learned some basic piano-playing. I can barely play anything, but it's enough to arrange a few melodies. However, playing it all one note at a time (or drawing it in with the mouse) is an extremely slow process and without more lessons I fear that I will never be one of those "I crank out an OC ReMix in two days" musicians.
I still stand by my previous statement of "you probably need five or more years of music experience to get featured on this web site".
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it's meant to encourage you to visit the datalog constantly. they put so much info in there, you're meant to read it.
it's a western thing - look at, say, the codex entries in Dragon Age, as one limited example. it fleshes out the story without killing the cinematic feel of the cutscenes. just another one of the many outsider things they integrated in a way that i think is good for the series.
But my statement is that the datalog provides information that the cutscenes should have provided. It's not like, "This is background about the neighbourhoods of Cocoon's cities" or "Here are the technical specifications of the various vehicles you can fly in Cocoon" or other complimentary information.
I agree with Necrotic, there's information in there about the main storyline that either deserved some cutscene time, or shouldn't have been listed in the Datalog because it makes the Datalog appear inconsistent.
I don't really believe so much that Datalogs are a specifically Western thing though. It was used extensively in Xenosaga for example, as well as Ogre Battle/Tactics ogre and Final Fantasy Tactics.
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Yes, I realise the Datalog does update - the info I posted above about Vanille disappears after a few scenes.
If there's something else I am disappointed about in the game it's how the text in the Datalog seems incongruent with the cutscenes that you've been shown, like the example I listed above. There are a few other cases as well where the event synopsis reveals more than what the cutscenes show.
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Like how they decided why they went to Oerba isn't explained well in cutscenes and is explained better in the Datalog. Also, another instance where Vanille "decided" to go onto the train to Pulse is explained in the Event Datalog for Day 11, but never presented. Also, how Vanille and Fang found Serah is also described in the Datalog but no flashback scene was given (though I am expecting one to come soon, so maybe it'll still happen). There are a few other small incidents. Anyway, they're small but it kind of makes you as a player wonder "did I miss something", even though you probably didn't because the game is so linear.
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No, I got that cutscene:
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I know that Vanille remembered what happened whereas Fang does not (you see it when she's kidnapped with Sazh and she tells him about her past). However, in the Datalog it clearly says that "Vanille became Ragnarok". Later you get a cutscene (when Vanille gets her summon) about how Fang figures out that she was actually Ragnarok (though there's no reason given as to how she figured it out) and calls Vanille out on it.
My confusion is: (1) why'd the datalog ever say Vanille was Ragnarok? and (2) How did Fang figure out?
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[April fools!] OverClocked ReMixanator Release!
in General Discussion
Posted
The copyright lawyers got to you didn't they? Didn't they?