I found an issue with the 50% ratio.

[Draconiator]

Just thought I'd drop by to let you know of an issue I found regarding the 50% requirement for a song to dominate the majority of a remix.  I was listening to game soundtracks on YouTube when I came across one of my favorite tracks. (note this may apply to others as well)

The main theme of this is 42 seconds long.  Now here's the Link Between Worlds version.

There's an extra little bit in this one that goes from 0:42 to 1:05, which is 23 seconds long.  Here's where the problem comes in.  You can completely omit the extra part of the latter, and still be over the 50%, since 42 seconds dominates the majority of 65 seconds, or somewhere around 66%.  So in this case, judgewise, which is a remix of which?  as stated this effect may be there in other songs too.

[Jorito]

AFAIK, the 50% is more a guideline than a hard rule, and mostly to rule out either too liberal arrangements (ie. originals) or too conservative arrangements (1:1 covers). I have had arrangements posted that were quite liberal (maybe not even making the 50% if you'd stopwatch it very strictly) so I am talking from experience here.

As for your question... well, when you submit a track, you also need to list the source track. So I guess that answers it?

[Gario]

Oh, a judge rules question! Here's where we'd come down on it:

At the moment, there seems to be a misunderstanding of the rules built into the question (which means we should perhaps clarify on the submission requirements page). When we look for source in an arrangement (rule of thumb: at least 50% of the arrangement should reference the source), what we're looking for is the arrangement/ReMix to be referencing the source at least 50% of the time, not for the arrangement to reference at least 50% of the source. As long as it's identifiable as the source, one could theoretically make a remix that only references 25% (or even less) of the source and it would still qualify for OCR as long as the arrangement was referencing that source for a significant period of time (again, rule of thumb is 50% of the arrangement). It would be odd leaving out so much source (and people might get upset that their favorite parts were left out!), but that's not technically a Judging requirement.

Concerning your actual question, though, which source would we give credit to in this case? Very likely, in this case it would be whichever source the artist claims to have been arranging since it's not technically wrong to call the arrangement a "Link Between Worlds" arrangement, even when it's similar/identical to the Link to the Past source. In the past I've sourced Dracula X's Stage 6 track for my submission (which is itself an arrangement of the Castlevania 3 "Beginnings" track), so I have some personal experience on that front to help come up with that conclusion. Forcing people to use "official" versions of the source would, I imagine, cause the staff quite a bit of headache figuring out which source is the "actual" source, which otherwise we'll only do if the VG track is in fact an arrangment of a well known non-VG track (like, say, one of Michael Jackson's songs used in his "Moonwalker" game - can't ReMix "Smooth Criminal" just because it's in his game, folks!).

Hopefully that answers your question!

Edited June 17, 2019 by Gario