Ramaniscence Posted January 18, 2019 Share Posted January 18, 2019 Whew boy it's been awhile. We're back with the first (long overdue) update to the VGMix Archive. For anyone who's not familiar: VGMix Archive is a growing archive of songs that were hosted on VGMix, VGMix 2, and VGMix X. The site first launched on April 1st, 2012, over 6 years after VGMix 2 went down, and is comprised of various music donated by users from throughout the community. The original release of VGMix Archive had around 1,700 songs, but this update brings that number up to over 3,500 songs. Where did all these new songs come from? The community has been remarkably helpful at locating a lot of these songs. Over the past few years, a number of individuals have come forward to help out and make contributions from their own music libraries. These members include @Nario , @F4T4L_3RR0R, and @Txai to name a few. Additionally, one of herograw's long-standing buried VGMix archives was added as well. However, by far the biggest contribution came from a user named Bradless, who worked the original VGMix 3, and contacted me via IRC with a huge library of over 12GBs worth of music. The addition of this library has been phenomenal. How do you know what songs are really from VGMix? How do you know what you're missing? The short answer is: We don't know for sure. There are bound to be some songs that may not have been on VGMix, but we trying to make sure that the site is filled with songs that are relevant to VGMix. The best guide we have right now is the last web archive of the songs page of VGMix 2, which is from February 8th, 2006. The site went down less than a month later. Level99/Stevo helped put together a Google Doc of songs missing from the original release, and we've been using it to check up against libraries we've been receiving. This does not contain every song that was on VGMix 2. VGMix 2 was broken up into several "tiers" of music, based on user reviews. Anything below the "Good Stuff" tier was not displayed by default and, incidentally, doesn't seem to have a good record on the web archive. For this reason, we do not reject songs based on their lack of inclusion in this document. We simply use it as a guide to make sure they're in-line with other content that was on the site. Weren't there any full backups of VGMix? As far as VGMix 1 goes, I'm fairly certain that's a "No". VGMix 1 had tons of songs and was basically just an "upload what you'd like" file host with very little in way of sorting or organizing. I've never heard of any real backup of songs besides individual libraries, and verifying songs from VGMix 1 is extremely difficult outside of good faith on the library owner. For VGMix 2? Maybe. At the time VGMix 2 went down it was said that virt did have a full backup of all the songs (and users, and reviews) that were on the site. These were allegedly copied over to a new server to be implemented into VGMix 3, but VGMix 3 never came. When VGMix X launched, the songs were nowhere to be found. It's been nearly 13 years now, and I've been collecting songs for the archive for nearly 7 years (Yes, the time between VGMix 2 and VGMix Archive 1.0 is less than the time between VGMix Archive 1.0 and 2.0. I'm not happy about that, either). If a full backup of VGMix 2 exists somewhere, I've yet to see it. As for VGMix X backups, the libraries I have received thus far have been very small, but I've received some leads that some users out there may have full, or very large, backups. I'm still working on getting in contact with these individuals (fingers crossed). How do I get all the songs? Songs are available for individual stream and download from the site. Right now the site is pretty barebones so it's basically a huge list of over 3000 songs, but it does load very quickly and have an instant search function if you're looking for a specific song. If you want the entire archive there is a torrent available, but as of right now: there is 1 seed. Furthermore, if you had an older torrent of the archive, it may not work very well because there have been large changes to the entire library since the initial release. If you are interested in helping me seed, please contact me directly, and I can give a small number of users a full dump in RAR form. However, my bandwidth is not infinite, so please serious inquiries only. What's next for VGMix Archive? The absolute #1 priorty right now is completed the list of known missing songs. For the "Stuff of Legends" tier, that means 3 songs and for the "Must-Haves" tier that means about 50. We're very close on those 2 fronts and I'm hopeful we can complete them soon. I've reached out to several individuals that may have the songs I'm missing, but I've yet to hear back from anyone. If you or someone you know has any of the songs missing from those 2 categories please let me know. You can check the above Google Doc for reference, but the 3 Stuff of Legends songs are: Water Music. A Suikoden remix by Michael Dover, aka Israfel on OverClocked ReMix. Brain Hill Zone (piano remix) by A Pansy, aka Eric Barker and Nior on OverClocked ReMix. Thanks @Dhsu !! Keep Going [CandyMix] by JH or Jonas Hellsberg. I have reached out to Eric via email and Jonas via twitter, but I do not have any reliable way to contact Michael. The "Good Stuff" tier is the biggest of the 3, so it's taken the longest to verify against the existing library. Many of the songs in that tier may already be on the site or may be sitting on my hard drive with some missing data waiting to be verified. Beyond the songs currently on the site, I still have over 1000 songs waiting to be processed. Most of these are missing some sort of data and need to be verified individually. This means they have empty tags and are missing either the artist or game name. All I know for sure is that the songs missing from the top 2 tiers are not included in that 1000. Additionally, I'd really like to build up the VGMix X library more. So, again, if you or anyone you know has a large number of verified VGMix X songs, please let me know. Finally, in an ideal world we could hopefully "rebuild" VGMix 2. That is: Rebuild a static mirror of the old site, with comments and descriptions of every song. Many of the songs have this information available on the archive, so the ideal plan would be to start scrubbing that data, adding it to a new database, and building out a mirror based on that. This would not be a fully functional site, however. We're still focusing our efforts on the new VG(Re)Mix project for that. Thanks again to all the people who've helped along the way. I truly couldn't have done this without all of your help. Please let me know if you can help improve the archive in anyway! HoboKa 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bundeslang Posted January 18, 2019 Share Posted January 18, 2019 This is huge. Great work and a big thank to everyone who helped to make this huge torrent. I Will check this out. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NovemberRhythm Posted January 19, 2019 Share Posted January 19, 2019 I own several VGMix 1 files that do not exist in VGMixArchive taken from here. But most of the files were incomplete (without artist and source) so I searched the web.archive. After a lot of work, I found the majority, leaving only these here, until I created a help topic to discover the sources (my luck is that those that lacked, all came with the name of the artist included in the file) I discovered the majority through the help of multiple users. @KungFuFurby06Editionhas a complete list archived of your own remixes of VGMix 2 @hogdoghas some remixes from VGMix X on his channel, but he may have up to more. I already got in touch but the same never answered me. Ramaniscence 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ramaniscence Posted January 19, 2019 Author Share Posted January 19, 2019 28 minutes ago, NovemberRhythm said: I own several VGMix 1 files that do not exist in VGMixArchive taken from here. But most of the files were incomplete (without artist and source) so I searched the web.archive. After a lot of work, I found the majority, leaving only these here, until I created a help topic to discover the sources (my luck is that those that lacked, all came with the name of the artist included in the file) I discovered the majority through the help of multiple users. I have the same rip from herograw's site and ran into the same problem as you: There's not a whole lot of data to go on for games and artists. If you're saying you've had a chance go go through and properly ID everything, that would be incredible. 28 minutes ago, NovemberRhythm said: @KungFuFurby06Editionhas a complete list archived of your own remixes of VGMix 2 @hogdoghas some remixes from VGMix X on his channel, but he may have up to more. I already got in touch but the same never answered me. I reached out to Audity on his YouTube channel, as well as the user he said he received the files from. I haven't heard back from either but I'm very interested in the VGMix X dumps. Bradless also located a few hundred VGMix X songs as well so I'll be going through those ASAP. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liontamer Posted January 19, 2019 Share Posted January 19, 2019 Loving this set, Doug, and I've been playing a lot of old favorites last night and this morning while working. Thanks! Just noting I found lot of dupes in the VGMix2/X folder due to minor differences in artist names and mostly game titles (e.g. Final Fantasy 7 vs. Final Fantasy VII). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
noTuX Posted January 19, 2019 Share Posted January 19, 2019 Thank you all for your hard work putting all of this together. I forgot about a lot of these old remixes that I did way back in the day. I definitely came a long way musically. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ramaniscence Posted January 19, 2019 Author Share Posted January 19, 2019 2 hours ago, Liontamer said: Loving this set, Doug, and I've been playing a lot of old favorites last night and this morning while working. Thanks! Just noting I found lot of dupes in the VGMix2/X folder due to minor differences in artist names and mostly game titles (e.g. Final Fantasy 7 vs. Final Fantasy VII). Yea, I have a program that's supposed to look for similarities in MP3s properties (Time, author, etc) and ID dupes and it got a lot of them but clearly, some have squeezed through. I've been trying to spot check as well. The next step will be to make sure the game tags are standardized (Zelda and Final Fantasies, come to mind) and the artists are all in line (several artists changed their name a few times across VGMix's history, it looks like). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bundeslang Posted January 22, 2019 Share Posted January 22, 2019 I'm gonna set up a file with all the missing songs from the doc which I have (don't know which ones are send and which one not). Link comes up soon. EDIT: https://ufile.io/8zme3 Djbritt - Happy Little Ninjas Djbritt - Move It Out DJ Siamey - Realization kMax - Party Ninja kwix - Volitation Mas9dj - Hard Working Dudes MSL - Racing on the Rainbow Road Nesper - Recapture RushJet1 - Mysterious Star Spunodi - The Other Side Strike911 - A 3D Character in the World Strike911 - Dreamtrance Barbie Tranceparent - Sign of Evil These are the songs in the archive and I didn't see in the torrent (if I looked correctly). Hope it helps. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ramaniscence Posted January 23, 2019 Author Share Posted January 23, 2019 16 hours ago, Bundeslang said: I'm gonna set up a file with all the missing songs from the doc which I have (don't know which ones are send and which one not). Link comes up soon. 1 I have tried a few times to download the link, but it keeps coming up as a corrupt RAR. The size is also only 12.7MB every time, which doesn't seem quite large enough for that many files. Quote Quote @hogdoghas some remixes from VGMix X on his channel, but he may have up to more. I already got in touch but the same never answered me. I reached out to Audity on his YouTube channel, as well as the user he said he received the files from. I haven't heard back from either but I'm very interested in the VGMix X dumps. Bradless also located a few hundred VGMix X songs as well so I'll be going through those ASAP. Update regarding this: I have been able to contact Audity and get his collection of over 800 VGMix X songs! NovemberRhythm 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NovemberRhythm Posted January 23, 2019 Share Posted January 23, 2019 I have a suggestion: Split between new and old remixes when uploading. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ramaniscence Posted January 23, 2019 Author Share Posted January 23, 2019 7 hours ago, NovemberRhythm said: I have a suggestion: Split between new and old remixes when uploading. Why when uploading? Unless you mean torrent twise, because I plan on making an "update" torrent that will leave the existing torrent unchanged for now. What IS clear now is I'm going to have to do at this point is I'm going to have to split the collections. A single site of 5000 songs is too much. My next goal after I finish sorting this update will be to create separate template sites for the 3 collections, make 3 separate torrents for the collections, and probably one more site/torrent with everything. The issue with this is I'd have to split the tags from what they are right now. Since the original VGMix X collection was so small the 2 and X collection was combined (I think there's maybe 5 X songs right now). I'm going to have to retag the songs, which will disrupt the torrent. Not that it matters too much because I'm still the only seed, but it's a bit of a hassle. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bundeslang Posted January 23, 2019 Share Posted January 23, 2019 15 hours ago, Ramaniscence said: I have tried a few times to download the link, but it keeps coming up as a corrupt RAR. The size is also only 12.7MB every time, which doesn't seem quite large enough for that many files. Update regarding this: I have been able to contact Audity and get his collection of over 800 VGMix X songs! Strange. I'll try again. File should be around 62.5MB. https://ufile.io/4tgft Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ramaniscence Posted January 23, 2019 Author Share Posted January 23, 2019 4 minutes ago, Bundeslang said: Strange. I'll try again. File should be around 62.5MB. https://ufile.io/4tgft That one worked! Thanks again. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bundeslang Posted January 23, 2019 Share Posted January 23, 2019 In the following link I have a list of my full VG Archive, also non VGmix https://sites.google.com/site/bambombim/VG Songs.xlsx?attredirects=0&d=1 Those are all VG Songs (and songs related to a VG Remixer) I have, not only from VGmix. Some of them may have a VGmix history and are not in the torrent/missing list. There are also other VG Remixes, like Ocremixes, PRC and ORC songs etc etc. If anyone is interested I can put up a download link. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
StarDragonJP Posted March 3, 2019 Share Posted March 3, 2019 Here's a few of the dupes I noticed to help you out. Dragon Punch by Ailsean - Difference, VGMix 1 & VGMix 2/X, also the 2/X one capitalized all of punch Jamaican Soul by DCT - Difference, Super Street Fighter II & Super Street Fighter II The New Challengers A Song for the Ladies by Kadmium - Difference, Super Street Fighter II & Super Street Fighter II The New Challengers Fei Longer by Star Salzman - Difference, Super Street Fighter 2 & Super Street Fighter II The New Challengers, also the New Challengers one has his name as StarBLaSt The KEN Song by jdproject - Difference, Super Street Fighter II & Super Street Fighter II The New Challengers Cammy by Night by mv - Difference, Super Street Fighter II & Super Street Fighter II The New Challengers Ramaniscence 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nase Posted March 6, 2019 Share Posted March 6, 2019 well, i found 2 really old long lost mixes of mine. thanks! Ramaniscence 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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