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ReMixer & Composer Merged into "Artist", Change Near-Complete


djpretzel
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Note: This thread will eventually be moved to the Site Feedback forum but for now I wanted more eyes on it.

I've been hellaciously busy with both school and work lately, and to make matters worse (in terms of posting new mixes), we've been working on reorganizing our database a bit. It was becoming very silly to store ReMixers and composers in separate tables, because:

  1. There are some artists like Jeremy Soule and George Sanger who are both, and hopefully more ReMixers will become composers, and that's a lot of duplicate data entry.
  2. Any supporting data (references, images, associations) resulted in another set of duplicate tables.
  3. Consolidating the two saves a huge amount of money and passes the savings directly on to you, the consumer.

Alright, everything but 3. There are probably more reasons, but the first two were enough. For the technical among you, this is called "normalization," and is almost always a good thing. For everyone, here's what this essentially means:

  • The artists list (and quick search) brings back both mixers and composers
  • ReMixers now have brand-new profile pages. Because we had to move a lot of data around, I went from being ReMixer ID #1 to being #4279 - ex.: http://www.ocremix.org/artist/4279/djpretzel
  • On both lists and detail pages, colorized (sue me, it needed to stand out) labels indicate roles (Composer, ReMixer) and counts for each
  • Soon, existing ReMixer pages will go away, and redirect to these new artist pages. Redirection should stay in place a very long time, but not necessarily indefinitely, so start updating your links.
  • This new structure allows us to add more profile links and multiple images.
  • We'll be sending out an email to ReMixers soliciting photos, updated contact info, birthdate/place info, and cash monies.
  • I'll be working on getting artist feeds reimplemented, forum profiles reintegrated, etc. as I can find the time

Thanks for your patience & feedback!

-djp

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THE SEX! More information to the people! When I can find Jeremy Soules XBL account here I'm satisfied.

(also, 70 remixes? I have a LONG way to go!)

EDIT: hmm.. Since I do have some official composer merit, will my profile go by my remixer alias or real name? For example The Fatman is listed at George Sanger with multiple aliases attached. If possible, I WOULD like to be listed by real name granted the aliases added are searchable.. Toughie, I know, sorry for making you think and work and shit. :*

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THE SEX! More information to the people! When I can find Jeremy Soules XBL account here I'm satisfied.

(also, 70 remixes? I have a LONG way to go!)

EDIT: hmm.. Since I do have some official composer merit, will my profile go by my remixer alias or real name? For example The Fatman is listed at George Sanger with multiple aliases attached. If possible, I WOULD like to be listed by real name granted the aliases added are searchable.. Toughie, I know, sorry for making you think and work and shit. :*

Nah, good catch. I guess, for now, since we have no composer credits for you, we're good. Aliases ARE fully searchable, btw. As far as when/if this problem crops up and a composer/remixer wants to be credited one way for mixes and another way for games, we might have an issue. I'd vastly prefer to keep it simple... your real name will always be on your profile page. What we COULD do is consistently present real name as an additional field whenever it's different, even on ReMix detail pages. That's the easiest solution.

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Nah, good catch. I guess, for now, since we have no composer credits for you, we're good. Aliases ARE fully searchable, btw. As far as when/if this problem crops up and a composer/remixer wants to be credited one way for mixes and another way for games, we might have an issue. I'd vastly prefer to keep it simple... your real name will always be on your profile page. What we COULD do is consistently present real name as an additional field whenever it's different, even on ReMix detail pages. That's the easiest solution.

Damn you ignoring my awesome AAA titles and whatnot :tomatoface:

What you said is probably a good idea, you tend to know that stuff best. I would still prefer to be credited with my real name for games (since that's what I go by in credits and whatnot) but as for OCRemix that might be too much. I think as long as the real name is visible enough (second biggest in case of remixers and biggest in case of composers only) it's cool. If you search for a composer and just get remixer names it might be confusing when we get used as a databse for game music in general and when remixers are making it big... IN HOLLYWOOD! Who would pay the bills then? That's right, HOLLYWOOD-KID!

~I kid.

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I could code it so that, if an artist has ANY composer credits and their real name differs from their display name, it prefers the real name, but some folks might want it the opposite way. Yeah, I could then have some sort of boolean in the db that tracks who wants what, but then we'd be getting a little crazy.

On a different note, I did forget to mention that we've also added a buttload of references for both artists AND games. ReMixers who have one should have their VGMDB profile linked, and many games now have links to gamespot, gamefaqs, IMDB, etc.

Word.

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I could code it so that, if an artist has ANY composer credits and their real name differs from their display name, it prefers the real name, but some folks might want it the opposite way. Yeah, I could then have some sort of boolean in the db that tracks who wants what, but then we'd be getting a little crazy.

On a different note, I did forget to mention that we've also added a buttload of references for both artists AND games. ReMixers who have one should have their VGMDB profile linked, and many games now have links to gamespot, gamefaqs, IMDB, etc.

Word.

Just noticed VGMdb, excellent addition!

You could put up a poll about remixer/composer real-name preferences? Or a way to set that from your forum profile or something? *cough*.. Okay, I'll stop now... :)

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http://www.ocremix.org/artist/171/joe-mcdermott

Kind of took me awhile to figure out which songs he composed, and which songs he was a remixer for....

Also:

http://www.ocremix.org/artist/171/joe-mcdermott/remixes/

404'd

Edit: Specifically...

[18:08:50] <+Bahamut> it's not hard to tell

[18:08:58] <+Bahamut> 1 credit for game music composition, and 1 remix

[18:10:21] <@Ramaniscenc> Yea

[18:10:24] <@Ramaniscenc> but I couldn't tell that

[18:10:31] <@Ramaniscenc> Until i scanned over all the games about 4 times

[18:10:39] <@Ramaniscenc> And found his name on the list of remixers

[18:10:47] <@Ramaniscenc> How am I supposed to know if he composed that or mixed it?

[18:10:55] <@Ramaniscenc> It was hard for me to figure out

[18:10:59] <@Ramaniscenc> And I doubt I'll be the only one

[18:11:47] <+Bahamut> the only confusion I really had was the ReMixes tab

We'll be sending out an email to ReMixers soliciting photos, updated contact info, birthdate/place info, and cash monies.

Do you think this guy has cash moneys left with bling like THIS:

sgtrama-651.jpg

Sheeeeeit.

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Will there be a way to edit the information on a remixer page? For example, my remixer page currently lists the wrong website address for my official page.

Fixed. And, at least for a good while, no. Links/references on artist pages are designed to be more like encyclopedic, authoritative, controlled sources, and we intend to manage them as such. HOWEVER, once I get forum profiles reintegrated, all the links on your forum profile would show up under that tab, and those you obviously have full control of. Every once in awhile we may run a script to reconcile the two, but for now that's not a huge priority.

We've pretty much decided to do blogs in some form, and along with the forum profile integration, I'd try to get the latest blog posts, maybe even a blog tab, on artist profile pages as well.

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Fixed. And, at least for a good while, no. Links/references on artist pages are designed to be more like encyclopedic, authoritative, controlled sources, and we intend to manage them as such. HOWEVER, once I get forum profiles reintegrated, all the links on your forum profile would show up under that tab, and those you obviously have full control of. Every once in awhile we may run a script to reconcile the two, but for now that's not a huge priority.

We've pretty much decided to do blogs in some form, and along with the forum profile integration, I'd try to get the latest blog posts, maybe even a blog tab, on artist profile pages as well.

Blogs, huh? Hmm. Will we be able to port blog entries from another site - i.e. LiveJournal, MySpace, Facebook, etc. - or do the entries need to be made on this site only?

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http://www.ocremix.org/artist/171/joe-mcdermott

Kind of took me awhile to figure out which songs he composed, and which songs he was a remixer for....

I echo this sentiment. I think the new change is pretty neat, is logical (I've oft chosen "remixer" instead of "remix" and vice-versa) but that perhaps there should be some better way to tell composer work apart from remix work in the "Latest Remixes" thing, especially now that searching in "Artist" results in both composers and remixers. Perhaps by listing the Composer beneath the "date by remixer" thing? (or whatever. i imagine just listing composer would help with the whole not-having-to-write-a-ton-of-new-code problem..)

Edit: not sure if you want bug reporting here, but I found a few issues, not sure if you've noted them and are planning on addressing em already or not but:

It seems the redirection for remixers whose names in the old address format contained hyphens results in 404s

And the 404 page sidebar is not yet up-to-date.

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This is all well and good, I'm sure, but how does this save money, exactly? A smaller database costs less or is it the traffic it generates and the lower amount of traffic that saves money, or...? I'm just curious. It's an improvement even if it doesn't save money.

Right after saying it saved money, he said, "Ok, well it doesn't save money, but..."

Normalization is always a good thing :)

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::shrug:: It doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to me. At least as I understand, remixers and composers are two different entities. I, personally, would want to be able to effectively identify both the remixer and composer and have them in separate categories. I don't know if anyone else feels the same.

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::shrug:: It doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to me. At least as I understand, remixers and composers are two different entities. I, personally, would want to be able to effectively identify both the remixer and composer and have them in separate categories. I don't know if anyone else feels the same.

Compoers that are also remixers then? As long as it's clear what they did when you're on the persons collected profile it's all good. Maybe a sorting options for remixers would make sense so you can see just that?

Also as a video game music database it's generally a good idea to keep all artists in one roster and then credit them for what they did. I hope to see a bunch of remixers being featured on soundtracks and all that and this system makes that easier.

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