Lost HQ versions of old remixes

[foxyshadis]

So I've been concerned about this for a while, but I just barely decided to make a thread on it. Lots of remix comment threads had links to higher quality versions back in the old days, when 128kbps was considered decent quality and some official OCR submissions were even 96kbps. I'd like to reach out to people to see if anyone still has any of those. Sadly, I used to have quite a few, and lost them all in a hard drive failure years back. It's really too bad OCR didn't swap out old songs for the HQ versions when it went to torrents.

Examples:

(No link in that thread, but I remember Matt Newman posting a HQ ogg of the above, as well as several other CotMM mixes.)

This is just a start off the top of my head, if anyone remembers other editions of other mixes, or has any idea where to find these old gems, please post!

[drake7707]

I have put the expanded version of Zebesian Midnight on my dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com/s/6hrz2vq1ay94hco/Vigilante - Super Metroid - Zebesian Midnight (Full OC ReMix).ogg?dl=1

[orlouge82]

Concerned about this as well, actually.  I remember back when 128kbps was the standard, and after recently listening to a song encoded at that rate, I realized how much it sounds like crap.

 

Also, artists generally aren't fully aware of how much their works are valued by listeners, so they may not always consider maintaining higher bitrate or lossless versions of their songs (nor may they be as diligent as they should about making backups).  

[djpretzel]

@Liontamer Has a bunch, and we HAVE done outreach to try and get WAV/FLAC from which to re-encode.

In addition, when we made the big 2014 torrent update, we upgraded quite a few: http://ocremix.org/info/Torrent_Update_v20141015#Files_with_Increased_Bitrate.2FEncoding_.2851.29

Our plan is to eventually host FLACs, but they may be for registered users only (there'd still be a torrent that was open) & our Patreon backers will get advance access since they're making it possible.

First things first, we need to update the site for better mobile/responsive experience, but this IS on the roadmap, for featured mixes!

[Liontamer]

18 hours ago, foxyshadis said:

It's really too bad OCR didn't swap out old songs for the HQ versions when it went to torrents.

That would be too bad, but we actually did what you're talking about. I did the torrent updates in 2012 and 2014, and we upgraded the encodings/bitrates of more than 500 ReMixes. Some of the stuff you linked to were artists creating new or expanded versions of their tracks, which we wouldn't replace the posted ReMixes with, but perhaps djp would be open to hosting alternate versions in a non-featured way. It's never a bad time to reach out to artists again, but I'll clarify that I already did do this work before from 2009-2014, through a mass email to all ReMixers, and a forum thread where some fans also provided better encodings that they'd saved.