ASK A JUDGE: While we're busy NOT voting - your questions, we want 'em

[Argle]

I think the queue has finally ground the judges down.

[Mirby]

they actually can't handle the fact that that Shinesparks track is still sitting under "conditional on production" after 5 long years

seriously, is that just gonna sit there forever?

[Liontamer]

I know you guys are working on releasing FF6 and are super busy but I'm just wondering, I saw the latest judge process update, and it seems like it's been on December 28th for a while. Have you been adding stuff to the panel that just hasn't been listed yet or is it still on December 28th?

I think the queue has finally ground the judges down.

Not just the queue; real life as well. But it's boiling down to 1) more submissions than ever, 2) a higher percentage of submissions being too good to reject with the form letter, 3) less availability and enthusiasm from staff, and 4) a need for new judges. We're actually ahead of the usual pace of posting mixes, but we're also passing a higher percentage; we may have come to a point where the overall community has gotten better than where the bar currently is, but we're not going to raise that bar because this is a hobbyist community and we can't have it unreasonably high.

After the FF6 album release & Kickstarter fulfillment is done, we'll be addressing this, but it boils down to rejecting more submissions without paneling them (raising the bar on the form letter rejection), letting inactive judges go & whip-cracking the staff, and testing some new candidates to bring in some new blood. In about a month, I'll have more free time to address the inbox side of it, but I'll chip away until then.

they actually can't handle the fact that that Shinesparks track is still sitting under "conditional on production" after 5 long years

seriously, is that just gonna sit there forever?

If the artist doesn't do anything, possibly. He's known about the issue for a while, but his source files are pretty far away. We're nice people, and we'd hate to reject the track, but fixing it likely won't happen. I'll remind him one last time to send something or we've gotta ice it, but it looks like it wasn't meant to be.

[Draconiator]

they actually can't handle the fact that that Shinesparks track is still sitting under "conditional on production" after 5 long years

seriously, is that just gonna sit there forever?

When it was submitted it was most likely above the bar, but time moves fast or so they say, so they might have to axe it anyway, unless of course he submits a new one with upgraded sounds

[Liontamer]

When it was submitted it was most likely above the bar, but time moves fast or so they say, so they might have to axe it anyway, unless of course he submits a new one with upgraded sounds

No, it's not a matter of the bar moving up there. If something passes years ago but is held off (which generally happens for project mixes submitted early in an album's development), it isn't re-evaluated in any way when it's time to post it.

In the case of "Shinesparks," it was conditionally accepted on improving the production (addressing the pervasive distortion), which was never above the bar. Nowadays though, we'd just reject it on account of the production being jacked up and ask for a resub rather than give conditional YES's (to avoid situations like this). Why wait so long? Aside from periodic asks/check-ins, we're pretty relaxed. So I'm checking in one last time with the artist to see if we can anticipate any touch-ups, or we'll just reject it since the conditions for the conditional YES's haven't been satisfied.

[Argle]

Thanks for the explanation. Hopefully you can figure something out. The panel seems constipated these days.

[Liontamer]

Thanks for the explanation. Hopefully you can figure something out. The panel seems constipated these days.

Nothing we haven't solved before. Prepare for a colon-cleansing bowel movement of music!

[Abadoss]

Nothing we haven't solved before. Prepare for a colon-cleansing bowel movement of music!

So... we should expect shitty music?

[Liontamer]

So... we should expect shitty music?

Depending on who you ask, that's all you guys do.

[Abadoss]

Depending on who you ask, that's all you guys do.

Yeah. It's all techno anyway.

Could you add one more day to the panel? I subbed my mix on December 30.

[Brandon Strader]

Yeah. It's all techno anyway.

Could you add one more day to the panel? I subbed my mix on December 30.

Yeah I subbed one on December 30th as well.

Poop.

[Abadoss]

Yeah I subbed one on December 30th as well.

Poop.

You probably have on the 31st too, I'd imagine.

[Brandon Strader]

You probably have on the 31st too, I'd imagine.

I just subbed a song today, after around 2 months of no subs. I've only subbed 6 songs this year. I cannot be blamed anymore for any stuffing of the panel box.

I do wish they'd go a little quicker though, some of these albums will be coming out and it would be nice to know if the songs pass or if I could fix them up before the albums come out.

[Argle]

Perhaps a weird question, but do you actually prefer mp3 for subs? Or do you mind FLAC? Makes little sense now, but perhaps a decade down the road when we have 10x the storage space. Then you have a HQ version at hand.

[Liontamer]

Perhaps a weird question, but do you actually prefer mp3 for subs? Or do you mind FLAC? Makes little sense now, but perhaps a decade down the road when we have 10x the storage space. Then you have a HQ version at hand.

I don't mind FLAC or WAV, those just can't be attached. But if you host them, that's fine with me, since an MP3 can be made from those.

[Palpable]

Perhaps a weird question, but do you actually prefer mp3 for subs? Or do you mind FLAC? Makes little sense now, but perhaps a decade down the road when we have 10x the storage space. Then you have a HQ version at hand.

I personally prefer MP3 when judging so that the download is quicker and takes up less room. But we don't have an official preference, and it can be nice to have the lossless version on hand if the song passes.

[Argle]

Is there a desire on the part of Overclocked Remix to have lossless files for some future time, though?

[Liontamer]

Is there a desire on the part of Overclocked Remix to have lossless files for some future time, though?

Yep. Hook 'em up.

[Brandon Strader]

What can OCR community do to help raise jooj morale

Apart from making depressing doom metal

[Chimpazilla]

What can OCR community do to help raise jooj morale

Apart from making depressing doom metal

Hey Big B! Here's a thought. How about you reduce your number of subs down to say.... 30 per year? Down from your traditional 85.

#letsomeothershaveachance <3

[Brandon Strader]

I will increase my subs tenfold!

Also, when OCR updates the youtube video to 1080p, it would be AWESOME if you made a single uniform custom thumbnail for every OCR upload. You could even go a step farther and put the artist information on the thumbnail, but that would require editing the thumbnail for each sub, which I'm sure would slow the process down even more. Nay, a single custom thumbnail that is nice and presentable would work just fine.

It's not a huge deal, but I think it'd be a nice touch. Currently embedding OCR youtubes gives random snapshots that say to buy T-Shirts or something.

Very excited to see what you guys come up with for the new youtube video. I hope it's simpler and less cluttered than the current one. Sometimes making something simpler and less cluttered can be just as challenging.

[Anorax]

I will increase my subs tenfold!

Also, when OCR updates the youtube video to 1080p, it would be AWESOME if you made a single uniform custom thumbnail for every OCR upload. You could even go a step farther and put the artist information on the thumbnail, but that would require editing the thumbnail for each sub, which I'm sure would slow the process down even more. Nay, a single custom thumbnail that is nice and presentable would work just fine.

It's not a huge deal, but I think it'd be a nice touch. Currently embedding OCR youtubes gives random snapshots that say to buy T-Shirts or something.

Very excited to see what you guys come up with for the new youtube video. I hope it's simpler and less cluttered than the current one. Sometimes making something simpler and less cluttered can be just as challenging.

how does one "custom thumbnail" on YouTube? I still haven't figured that one out

[Liontamer]

Also, when OCR updates the youtube video to 1080p, it would be AWESOME if you made a single uniform custom thumbnail for every OCR upload. You could even go a step farther and put the artist information on the thumbnail, but that would require editing the thumbnail for each sub, which I'm sure would slow the process down even more. Nay, a single custom thumbnail that is nice and presentable would work just fine.

It's not a huge deal, but I think it'd be a nice touch. Currently embedding OCR youtubes gives random snapshots that say to buy T-Shirts or something.

The ability to do custom thumbnail images would entail being a partner channel, which I don't see us doing, since we don't own the music on the channel, we just republish what's submitted to and approved by us.

[Brandon Strader]

It's true that being a partner enables monetization, but it is still up to the content creator to enable monetization or disable it. You can send it to be disabled by default. Then there's some nice partner features that could probably improve the channel, like the custom thumbnails.

[Damashii!!]

Going to chime in a little bit with what I observed.

I think the YTP is very iffy because I know that some channels or specific videos get slaps on the wrist for containing copyrighted content yet other channels (regardless of views, subscribers, etc.) seem to have no ominous agency clouds looming over them chanting "touch that monetize button and you're dead." Ex., and I love these guys so I'm not "hating," but Schmoyoho using clips from whatever to make a song while monetizing the vid and putting it for sale on iTunes, versus an average joe Youtuber doing the same thing and NOT monetizing it or selling it or whatever (just uploading for views or whatever) and then having the video removed due to "copyright infringement =/" .

However, many of my favorite Youtubers, especially some musicians on Youtube, use the YTP for its benefits other than monetizing and generated ad-revenue. I have to plea ignorance to this because I stopped bothering with hefty Youtube copyright research after giving up on the above generalization (there's always exceptions, but obviously some get pegged and others are excused so I feel like you can never really be sure about anything pertaining to derivatives), but I believe Nick Bertke ("Pogo") used to (or still does? haven't kept up with his stuff in a while) have custom pop up/annotated ads basically saying "if you like what you hear, come check out my website for updates and more great stuff" in place of the generic Axe, gamefly, Samsung, Farmville etc. ads that would be randomly generated as a default in the past with YTP. And, not saying that this helps at all, but to put it into perspective, this dude had/has a very interesting relationship with Disney for his sampling techniques (not just re-arrangements, direct sampling).

**I can't find ANY articles at the moment for some odd reason, but "Nick Bertke Pogo sampling fair use copyright Disney" or some other combination of those words should give you the gist of what I'm getting at. I'll edit in some links later today if I find some examples of what he had to deal with and how he came to an "agreeable" understanding with Disney.

and then, there's this:

http://www.youtube.com/nonprofits

Bottom line is, I feel that once/if OCR makes the move towards either route, there will be comments giving unfortunate implications and jumping to the automatic assumption of monetizing like "Wow, glad to see OCR is a YTP now, they do deserve some money for all the hard work they put into their stuff," and immediately we'll have the Square situation occur on a much greater level with possibly catastrophic results.

(ex. Square/Nintendo/Bungie/what have you: "Oh heeeeeeellllsss naw, did somebody just put 'money' and 'OCR' in the same sentence?")

So, yeeeaaah. There are many people like me he would love that nonprofit route as it'd give us the opportunity to give back to OCR more often throughout the year instead of just through the Paypal thing (nothing wrong with the Paypal, but I personally feel like that donation link is hidden waaaay back within the crevices of the site; admittedly, others probably like it this way, as a front-page donate button would rub others the wrong way, but you can't please everyone so...), but it seems like the risk of anything going completely wrong concerning copyright would increase dramatically simply because of the implications of Google Revenue services.

EDIT: Donate button is on front page, but I meant a donate button with sparkles and strobe lights around it (not literally, of course, just something to catch folks attention, but again, this is my preference and I understand many people don't enjoy having an extravagant donation button gravely staring them in the face all the time like a street vendor.

sorry for the long post, not an expert or anything, just getting it off my chest because I WOULD like for OCR to expand as long as we're not raped by lawyers for negligence or implications. :/

Edited July 8, 2013 by Damashii!!
clarification