Arcana

Sorry for duplicating threads Big Giant Circles.

Anyone here try this out? I'm currently still sporting Logic Pro 7, I bought an academic version a few years ago and didn't really use it much until just recently. Wondering if anyone here is a Logic Pro user and has tried the new stuff out yet. One reason I'm considering the upgrade (I'd have to buy either the full version or another academic version as academic versions are not upgrade-eligible) is because I'm pretty reliant on tutorials and the differences between Logic Pro 7 and 8 and 9 are becoming larger such that it's annoying to try to backport tutorials. Regards,

Ultima Quest of the Avatar or the series in general

I looked at the stats page and discovered that I've put up the second-most entries in OHC. O.O I think I spent at least 20 minutes today listening to songs from Yesterday's compo.

Oh just thought I should throw this out here - yes, us Disciples make music sometimes too.

Meeting people at OCR is like meeting people at a party. You don't necessarily trust, or even like those people you meet at a party, but the idea is that you each go to the party in good faith and with good intentions. There's also another kind of accountability, and that is that if you're a total douche to others, people are going to see this and talk about it. So if you value your social standing in the community at all, it is simply in your best interest not to be a douche. But, I reiterate what Darkesword said, I wouldn't trust most of you in my house either. Meetups happen in public places for a reason - it's not like, "Okay there's a meetup, let's meet at my place for the evening." No no no no no no no no.

I don't know why you guys hate the keyboard so much. I think it's great because the keys aren't heavy. They travel enough to make you feel like you're pressing something but they're not heavy enough to make your hands tired. The keys don't "get caught" on the downstroke (something that occurs with keyboards as they age if they're not like IBM Model Ms) and the keys are spaced well, too. I can type maybe 10% faster on the new Apple keyboard than I can on most "traditional" keyboards. My hands also don't get as tired, either. The mouse isn't very good though, I always get a wired one with a new computer (since you can't opt to not get it) since it's okay as a backup mouse. The mouse ball is really, really awesome. I like it. But, I can't stand how the entire top clicks for BOTH sides.

S'up guys. I like, totally play this game.

Sorry for delay, I'll check back more often. I sent you a PM!

Hey guys, I'm thinking of selling my Echo Mia MIDI card. It's a PCI audio card that I used to run in my PowerMac G5. However my new computer doesn't have PCI in it so I won't be able to use it. The description of the card is here: http://www.echoaudio.com/Products/PCI/MiaMIDI/index.php I'm not 100% on the price yet, but I don't really want much for it, just want it to have a good new home. If you're interested send me a PM or reply to this message!

New patch is out! 3.1 Ulduar patch. The Disciples are going to be all over this content.

Chrono Trigger was relatively innovative for its time respective to other Japanese RPGs. There were many elements in Chrono Trigger that were already implemented by North American RPGs (namely, the Ultima series starting at #5) but Ultima was not a widely-released game. Another thing was that Chrono Trigger had high expectations on it: it had the "dream team" consisting of some of the best minds from the two juggernauts of the JRPG in that time: Dragon Quest, and Final Fantasy. For most North Americans, it was the last JRPG they would play on the Super Nintendo system (as star games after it such as Fire Emblem, Tales of Phantasia, Star Ocean, Tactics Ogre and Dragon Quest VI never made it to North America). One thing that Chrono Trigger did very well was pace its story. In under three hours, you went through two forests, a castle, and were introduced to four significant characters in the story. After another hour, you learned about the game's main antagonist, which - and this is important - does not change throughout the course of the game. Another thing about CT is its polish: little details such as shading on swords, battle poses, and changes in NPC scripts as you jump through the time periods are things that show its shine. The battle system was dynamic and fun without being extremely repetitive, and the battles, though not exactly difficult, were still challenging and required a bit of thought (fights like Magus and final Lavos were exciting and required a small amount of thought to get through). Chrono Trigger was very short though: my first time through, finding all of the secret story arcs, took me only 24 hours: a pitiful amount compared to other JRPGs of the era (and even later eras) which capped at 40 hours for just the core game. However, in retrospect that probably played in the game's favour as it keeps the pacing tight. Chrono Trigger is kind of like the Halo of console FPSes - you played it not just for the awesome fighting (though it was good), not just for the awesome story (though it was extremely solid) but for the whole experience wrapped up into a nice package. It's one of those games that you say you should play once "just for the feeling". The game does age, especially since what was really innovative at its time is nothing anymore (ex: on-map battle system, team attacks, New Game+). It's nostalgic for us who've played it before, because young minds are easy to engage. Don't worry if you're a bit underwhelmed overall - the game still follows the JRPG structure which kind of gets old as you get old

Posting this situation for a friend, though I'm sure any one of you might have to face this one day. Someone I know has an XBox 360 w/ 20GB hard drive. This person also bought one of those "extended service plans" from the retailer that allows you to replace the device, no questions asked, for something like 3 years. The XBox 360 is broken now. However, this person wants to back up the hard drive because the replacement plan requires that all devices be sent back for service, including the hard drive. What options are there to back up the hard drive (ex: to an external HD, or to a computer) and then restoring it to a new XBox hard drive?

I'm actually surprised that no one pointed out that this song was originally composed by Adam Freeland (which incorporates the Dune quotes) as a single, and the song was consequently remixed for Rez. The Rez version is better than the original, though! The remix caught my ear right away when I was going through it - the gating is pretty ear-catching and the original song was sampled ingeniously, but it was too much of a "tease" for me. I was really hoping for the orchestral hits to come through but that moment never really came.

In any case, Logic Express and Reason are enough to get you started. You should still provide us with some details about what style of music you want in the game. Electronic dance music? Orchestral? Synthy? The platform might help as well; maybe it's a Nintendo DS homebrew game, which has a different sound than an iPhone game or a PC game. Posting MIDIs and early "samples" are definitely helpful, and people are usually quick to respond to direct inquiries here (ex: if you ask "How do I make _effect_ in _program_?")

It's not that they start - it's that they start to stream data on load, which would kill people who might want to surf on limited-bandwidth connections, especially if the music + video is actually larger than the 6MB file that OCR hosts. I don't get the whole HD rationale in the first place though; if the file was simply meant as a preview for the whole song, why do you need to have a high-quality version on YouTube, and not a low quality one? (edit: did another search and found something called "Houndbite" which allows 8MB files and embeds. I surfed the site a bit though and I don't know if it's a problem with the users or something, but random clicks around the site has revealed that a lot of it isn't very good content. If OCR put music up on this place we would rock the crap out of every other user of the site. But as Pixietricks said, it's hard to know if "small" places like this will stick around or if they'll suddenly disappear from the planet.)

Is the available track list for this project still accurate, and is it still limited to the first three Dragon Quest games?

Don't worry. I don't think I ever got on one of those "group picture" things either.

I think Reason is fine (I'm rather comfortable with it) but then again, I learned in Reason and I find programs like Logic Pro kind of frustrating in comparison now. But, I'd ask someone who actually knows more than me in this area (I'm in very many respects a fresh noob). Another Soundscape is probably the best source about this, he seems very friendly and eager to help. If he ever posts random tips of the day, I'll be the first one to sign up. I don't know what your experience with Reason is, but if you've never used either Logic or Reason before in your life, I would expect the transition from FLStudio to Logic Pro would be easier than the transition from FLStudio to Reason. Yoozer is right in one respect though: prepare to spend a lot of time sitting there thinking, "I know how to do this in FLStudio, how do I do this in Logic/Reason?" Vivi is correct in that Mac OS X doesn't allow for a lot of customization, but it is actually possible to change it up quite a bit, even to the point where you're not using the default desktop GUI anymore. It's just that 99% of the Mac users buy a Mac because it, well, works like a Mac instead of like something else.

Are you guys set on YouTube/Vimeo and other video-based solutions? When I saw the direction this thread was running I immediately thought of the same things that SoulinEther here pointed out. IMO, bad things will happen if every remix's page starts streaming an HD video (which will occur if the video is embedded in the page). There'd have to be a way to surf the site without it automatically loading.

I've always wanted to get Dark Cloud 2 (Dark Chronicle) because one of my favourite CDs ever is the Dark Chronicle Premium Arrange Album. How you can get some of the best arrangers of music in the industry (Black Mages, Noriyuki Iwadare, Motoi Sakuraba, Yoko Shimomira, Kenji Ito, and more) each to do tracks on a CD is amazing. I know you've listed Final Fantasy X already as a game you picked up, but I'd probably recommend it first among the games that you should play. It's pretty representative of the PS2 generation RPGs and is one of the best games for the system.

This. If I was the OP asking for help and got some of the responses I see here, I know I wouldn't come back.

Way to turn this into a Mac vs. PC thread! Here's some information I find useful when considering buying a new computer. - Mac Hardware is more expensive. It also looks nice and tends to run well. More importantly, it comes pre-assembled and thus, when you get your computer you don't have to spend any time putting stuff together. You also don't have to choose components. For many people, this is a negative, but I do not see the lack of choice as a detrimental thing because you save a lot of time by simply pointing to the machine that you want. This is great for those DIY types, but when you get old like me, it just becomes a pain in the butt to hand-pick every part of your computer, and have it come in thirty different little boxes that you have to put together. Yes, you pay more money. However, you also get an operating system that "just works", you don't have to deal with drivers 90% of the time, you don't have to deal with as many viruses and worms, you get nice little extras like 2-finger scrolling on your trackpad, 3-finger application switching, MagSafe, and a backlit keyboard. - Don't buy RAM or bigger hard drives from Apple. Buy them yourself. - Some people are split on Applecare. I personally recommend it for a laptop, I only kind of recommend it for desktops. Apple laptops are not exactly built to be beasts; like any machine you'd move around a lot they tend to suffer a bit of punishment. If you live close to a Mac Authorized Repair Centre, you just take your Mac in if it has a problem and they fix it for you. I've personally had almost no issues with Mac desktops, but almost every Macbook Pro I've seen has had an issue crop up a few times. The one that I've been using has had a bunch of cosmetic repairs done to it (one time to replace the mainboard to fix the old model's problem with noise, and one time it was brought in to check a booting problem that turned out to go away after a run on their diagnostics CD. - Mac desktops are VERY expensive. Mac Pros are so expensive that if you're just a hobbyist, it's really, really hard to justify shelling out the $3000 on it. But, if you do, it'll last you a solid 4 years. - The resale value on Mac computers is very, very good in comparison with the PC market. If you buy a $3000 Mac, expect to be able to sell it for $1000 in two-three years. You cannot say the same for a $3000 PC. - Mac runs Windows fine. You dual boot and you go. - Logic Studio's price has dropped compared to the price of Logic Pro 7, so for $500 you can get a nice package with great sounds, a good interface, and good audio capabilities. - I would not recommend a $999 Macbook for lots of Audio stuff, you'll probably be wishing you had more CPU and a Firewire port. I'd get at least a Macbook Pro (it has Firewire 800). If you are willing to get a desktop solution instead, the 24" iMac is actually not a bad price considering how compact it is. Don't get a 20" iMac, it's not really worth it. - If you want to do a lot of recording you'll have to invest in a Firewire audio device. The new Macs (not MacBook) have Firewire 800, but it's backward compatible with Firewire 400 so you'd only have to get a converter plug. - It's easy to hook up a Mac laptop to an external monitor, so don't lament the small screen size too much. However, you'll have to get a monitor adapter, which is an annoying additional cost. - Keep in mind that Mac OS X is on a slightly faster paid release cycle than Windows. Windows tends to release a paid upgrade every 2-3 years or so (XP's release was five years, and that was abnormally long; you can see Microsoft wants to move to faster paid upgrades by moving to Windows 7). Mac OS X updates are released about once every 2 years and costs about $100 (i.e. Jaguar->Tiger->Leopard->Snow Leopard). - It is (IMO) much, much easier to maintain a Mac OS X computer than it is to maintain a Windows XP computer (or Linux, for that matter). I've never had to reinstall a Mac OS X due to degrading performance or unrecoverable OS driver failures. It is easy to use Time Machine to make incremental backups for restoring your files, and it is also easy to use SuperDuper! to image stable versions of your main drive to an external hard disk. I've yet to totally hose my machine beyond repair with bad software configurations. If you're a programmer or a power user, you can also install anything from the open source world on your Mac as well, including databases, web servers, programming environments. I hope some of this helps when it comes to deciding what kind of computer you want.

I love how "given the task of" suddenly equates, "was hired to". Nowhere does the original poster imply that he's being paid. Not that that isn't possible, but it's funny how there's so much overreaction here.

Wow I have a bunch of those games in my house collecting dust... Shin Megami Tensei: DDS, Shadow Hearts 1 & 2, and Suikoden V are among the games I own but pretty much haven't even opened. >< I personally liked Suikoden III a lot though.