Arcana

This has me really confused... is it like DOTA, or is it like WoW? Fundamentally the games to me are totally different: one is an RTS, the other is a 3rd person adventure game. I'd normally try out HoN and just see for myself but I'd rather not buy a beta for a game I don't really have good information about you know?

I clicked on this thread for the first time. Can someone give me a rundown that's a bit more detailed than "like DOTA but better"? I've never played DOTA but from what I hear, it's a tower defense game so I'm presuming that this is one too. Does it require DOTA to play? Wikipedia says it's "upcoming DotA Based Game" so I'm guessing that it's a Warcraft III mod. There's no info about this on their official site unfortunately. Also it seems that open beta registration is closed or something Sorry for the noob questions!

In the research world collaborations tend to usually happen based on what you can provide to the other person, what he can provide you in return, and how well you know each other. Intuitively (mind you I don't have experience asking musicians for collaborations but if it's anything like researchers asking for research collaborations) I'd say that you should start with getting to know the guy first. You know his work so start with that and discuss how his work is relevant to the work that you've done and how his techniques/composition/themes/whatever have inspired you to do things the same/differently/etc. Ask him a few questions about his technique and his methods and get him to talk about himself a little bit. I'd get a bunch of the "how well you know each other" out of the way first, for sure.

I did a book search on Amazon and found: http://www.amazon.com/FL-Studio-Power-Comprehensive-Guide/dp/1598639919/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1256331615&sr=8-1-spell along with about a half dozen other books with FL Studio in the title. If you're not in the mood to dig around for an online guide or through the manual, then dropping the $30 on this might be a good idea. I used the Power! book for Reason 2.5 (2004) and it was a really good way for a newbie who had zero idea about music to get started with the program, but it won't help you actually make good music.

I was in your position, once. I took piano lessons for approximately 8 months. I've lost a lot of techniques since then since I haven't played for 3 years but the mere ability to press the keys with more than one finger has helped me immensely when understanding both theory and my music-making program.

Collaborating? or Advising? You might want to decide which one you are looking for, first. Collaborating is a big effort from both of you and it might even cause issues with his agents and lawyers. Advising is easier if it's on the path of, "I have a few questions...". If I were a professional, I would be pretty wary of someone I didn't know who asked me to collab, but not so cautious about someone who would have asked me some questions about my particular technique or setup. Just my 2 cents

This is good advice, thank you for this Will Rock. I think I'm inspired to take a first plunge into doing synth rock guitar.

I talked a little about "addiction" here: http://ocremix.org/forums/showthread.php?t=25702 I don't feel that I was ever addicted to the point where WoW seriously had a negative effect on my social life and work life. I was a little less sharp about randomly contacting people I haven't talked to in years, and I was a little less eager about finding ways to pick up new hobbies, but I don't think I was ever on the verge of losing a job, failing school, or neglecting my health as a result of WoW. I guess moving to a new MMORPG kind of showed me some highlights of how good and bad MMORPG communities are in general.

Wow I don't think I've spent more than an hour on a song since I've returned to music stuff What would I do with an entire WEEK?

Illidan is a busy server and Starla and other people in the guild are good people

I didn't hear the old version, so I'm going dry here. I used the version at: http://www.box.net/shared/f65kbtyqxn downloaded Wed October 21 22:15 PST. The rain sounds fine. The introduction is pretty hot. I'm having issues with how dry and treblish the snare is. I think it's a bit loud compared to the other drums. I think you know which snare I'm talking about (there's a lot of snares in this mix after all). The other issue I'm having is that during some of the breakdowns, the mix feels eerily quiet. There's only a few places that this occurs... 3:26, 3:33 at the end. The silence is jarring and I'd consider filling it with pads. Violin at 1:57 sounds really bad in the high register. In fact, when it's introduced at 1:17 I had problems deciding if it was a flute or violin. I don't know what you can do to fix it though. The ending is abrupt still. The fade out, in my opinion, is unsatisfying, and I think I'd rather have a breakdown of the instruments until you have nothing left. I think if you let the ending crawl out a bit more rather than doing a volume fade, it would be beneficial overall. This is really good though. Arrangement wise it's totally recognizable but it has a very unique take so I don't think it has any problems from that standpoint.

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Awesome! What I want to know is if the "Nephilim Song" from Xenosaga is stock from somewhere. I swear that I've heard it in a Red Cross Blood Donation commercial and in an early Da Vinci Code trailer, but I haven't been able to find those examples online. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqjCT2yB3i8 Maybe you guys know what stock clip or sample library it's from? It's been bugging me for a while.

Sorry I should have been more specific in my original posting. In particular I'm using the mute trumpet from the free Kontakt 3.5 demo library. Obviously looking for another mute trumpet in the library really isn't an option. I think I thought of this because I listened to another song recently and as soon as I heard the trumpet it immediately stuck out in my head. But then again I could also presume that not everyone in the world's going to know what mute trumpet sound you're using unless your song's so badly mixed that it sticks out. Part of the reason is immersion. It somehow loses a lot of the immersive quality if, upon playing the song, the first thing you think of is, "Hey, that's the mute trumpet sample from Kontakt."

The original poster has other YouTube videos where he is playing the piano (is it him?) which leads me to believe that he's capable of performing the piece. I think it would be great.

WoW is a well-made game with a lot of good qualities. Rama summarized it much better than I can though, refer to his post for information. I have a feeling that people really want a game to be tailored specifically to their own personal tastes, but because the selection in MMORPGs is so terrible, people pray that their current game of choice will be modified to their liking?

I've been working on it. I'm trying to finalize the composition now... I've got a number of bad transitions that I haven't decided how I'm going to fix yet.

Why is the proportion of people on OCRemix or on my old Suikoden game forum comparatively nicer than on MMORPG boards, though? Why were the respondents over here, on OCR, all like, "Well this is how things work in my experience" rather than, "LOL U NOOB HA HA UR BAD CAN'T HANDLE THE INTERNET CAN YA?" Especially since the responses so far about "bad communities" have singled out MMORPGs. It's got to be more than just Internet anonymity.

Why are there so many trolls and dickheads, in general? Is it simply impossible to build a multiplayer game with a semi-decent community now? All of the "nice" people in forums are either on forums like this one (general topic) or on singleplayer games. What is it about multiplayer co-operative games turning people into dicks?

So I have some samples from Kontakt that I use... my issue is that if I use them, people will be like "ZOMG THOSE R FORM KONTACT LOL". What kind of techniques do you guys use to make the samples less recognizable, but yet authentic, especially if you want to use them to do solos or similar?

I don't care about micro transactions, it's just another way to make money especially if the game is free-to-play otherwise. But, many of these games are designed to make you play the most hours, rather than to have the most fun. Dungeons and Dragons Online was a subscription-based game, but no one played it, so they released it for free instead and are charging microtransactions for new "content packs". That's the thing that gets me is that people who defend things like "the grind" are saying things like that will keep casuals from wrecking their experience, as if somehow their community is great or something. Edit: I feel somewhat vindicated that the administrator of the webhost that hosts the AionSource forum wrote a post that flat-out said that they should smooth the levelling curve and make it less painful - Letter to NCSoft Korea. Of course the same people are saying that the AionSource community are sucking up now by posting his post on the front news page when his views aren't much different from the other QQers on the board.

Well, it's not a bad game really. I'm not being fair to it by saying it's not that good. But in its current form, Aion is a fun but forgettable experience. It's not solid enough to be widespread, and it's not alluring enough to be frighteningly addictive. It has amazing art, really nice landscapes, and an interesting backstory. The game mechanics are good, for the most part. I like how they handle weapons and armor and I love the graphics. What's not fun are the technical problems, and then the little nails in the coffin are the rather long grind (I'm not facing it now really but I dread it when I hit 30) and the lack of consistent loot drops, as well as the boring crafting system. It's a good game marred with just enough frustrating elements that relegate it from good to mediocre. I think the worst part is that I really wanted to like the game too and to be involved in it, but now I'll probably just play with my girlfriend. The game's three times more fun in a group anyway. EDIT: oh shit who moved this thread into General Discussion?

If you're going to correct someone the facts should be right... a CD holds 650 MB of data (about 74 minutes) though most have a capacity of 700 MB (80 minutes). Anyway... Listening to the Gears disc now. One thing I really liked about the albums so far was the thematic idea of using more soft, organic instruments for the first disc, and gritty, distorted sounds for the second disc. So far it's held together extremely well and gives the album a nice cohesive feel.

I think I was secretly hoping that Aion's community would be nicer than WoW's community and could at least form an intelligent argument or accept that other games are other games and just go play Aion. BTW Aion's not that great.