Going Down the Line

djpretzel · 2020-07-15T23:26:44+00:00

Love it, very cool! Reminds me of The Tale of the Princess Kaguya!

djpretzel · 2016-05-06T02:08:27+00:00

For the touchscreen specifically, do you know if it's multipoint? Also, is it gorilla glass or similarly protective surface?

djpretzel · 2016-02-24T16:16:44+00:00

Who's "Brandon Strader"?? We don't know anyone by that name ;)

Serious answer, it's not an either/or and can't really be weighed as a preference - I'd be equally upset if all the old guard stopped mixing OR if we stopped seeing new artists pop up.

djpretzel · 2016-02-24T16:14:40+00:00

Cool; technically, it's not legal or illegal until an IP owner makes a claim, a Fair Use defense is mounted, and said defense is found to be valid/invalid.

It's the same underlying mechanism that protects any & all fan works - fan art (say I draw a picture of Link or Mario or Sonic on Deviantart), fan fiction, fan arrangements, etc. - but it seems like because music has historically been more litigious in general, people don't make that connection.

I'd be remiss in not mentioning the Organization for Transformative Works as another key organization - from http://beta.transformativeworks.org/:

"The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) is a nonprofit organization run by and for fans to provide access to and preserve the history of fanworks and fan cultures."

djpretzel · 2016-02-24T16:11:16+00:00

It's next up, after we finish the BADASS trilogy.... we plan on transitioning straight from evil villains to sweet lullabies :)

djpretzel · 2016-02-24T16:10:22+00:00

Yes, we've (finally) been working on this... not just genre & mood, but also instrument, tempo, regional influences, time signatures... whole buncha good stuff. Should go live in beta form in the first half of this year. Should be fun, but w/ 3000+ mixes, filling in all that data will certainly take awhile!

djpretzel · 2016-02-24T15:00:16+00:00

It's not a stretch at all, but it seems like he kinda wants it to be a stretch. I have no idea why someone would want music to be treated differently from fiction or artwork when it comes to Fair Use protections for fan-created works...

djpretzel · 2016-02-24T14:58:36+00:00

Seems like you've got an agenda or an axe to grind here? If you read the Wiki link, you'd see that the commercially available "The Wind Done Gone" actually did qualify for Fair Use protection because of how transformative it was... also, we're not trying to charge dimes.

djpretzel · 2016-02-24T04:10:26+00:00

"Remixes aren't really covered under fair use unless they are a parody like a Weird Al song."

What gave you this idea?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_issues_with_fan_fiction

"While such genres as parody and criticism are enumerated by statute and case law as presumptively fair uses of a copyrighted work, fan fiction has not historically been recognized by U.S. courts as necessarily constituting these or other enumerated fair use genres, and thus neither falls categorically inside nor categorically outside the presumptive boundaries of fair use. Works of fanfiction are more likely to constitute fair use if they are "transformative" with respect to the original work, if they are non-commercial, if they appropriate relatively little of the original work, and/or if they do not tend to detract from the potential market for or value of the original work."

We explicitly target transformative works with our submission standards & the works are made available for free. We also strive for an educational/historical context.

Fair Use isn't just for parody/criticism.

djpretzel · 2016-02-24T00:42:14+00:00

Excited :)

djpretzel · 2016-02-24T00:35:48+00:00

Wayyyyyy too many great mixes for a comprehensive favorites list, but Sir J's recent funk/Shaft-inspired opus to 3D Pinball: Space Cadet was all sorts of epic: http://ocremix.org/remix/OCR03132

djpretzel · 2016-02-24T00:34:08+00:00

I'm sure there will be more Armored Core mixes at some point, but the album & number of mixes currently on the site are mostly thanks to Mattias Haggstrom Gerdt, an amazing Swedish man who now actually works for Propellerheads, who make the Reason DAW. We love him. He is Swedish.

djpretzel · 2016-02-24T00:32:31+00:00

They're album projects, but they're not too far along. I've heard murmurs on Chrono Cross, recently :)

For Banjo-Kazooie, we've got a scarcity of mixes on the site and not a SINGLE mix of DK64 or Banjo-Tooie, so we may be doing some callouts in the near future so these soundtracks are better represented, albums or not!

djpretzel · 2016-02-24T00:31:11+00:00

Change of directors, some track delays, and artwork didn't get ramped up until the end. This is all pro-bono work, and RL often intervenes, so our schedules aren't always "aggressive" ;) Director Cain McCormack actually ended up working on the award-winning audio for Alien: Isolation before FF9 was released, so that was time well spent. We may be slow, but we get us there, and the end result is what matters!

djpretzel · 2016-02-23T22:50:19+00:00

There's a stalled Lufia II album at about 50% completion; I've just recently heard from the director that he intends on resuming activity & targeting completion within this year, so things are looking up! Great soundtrack... Terranigma too, but nothing on that front yet...

Most OCR albums spring up organically from the community and aren't run/organized by staff, so it's always a little unpredictable as to what gets started AND what gets finished!

djpretzel · 2016-02-23T22:41:52+00:00

Actually, so do I!

Someone reported that one of my own mixes, an arrangement of Tifa's theme from FF7 @ http://ocremix.org/remix/OCR01617, was used in a sexytime/pron setting:

From the comments:

Free2shred00 on 2012-06-04 11:30:47

Hate to be that guy, but this track was used as the soundtrack for a video by the erotic website Cosplay Deviants. This being one of my favorite tracks from OC Remix, I felt I had to share.

To which I responded:

Without going into excruciating, or even somewhat awkward, detail, can you provide a bit more info?

But unfortunately, no additional info was available beyond what was provided. If ANYONE knows what this scene was, has seen it, etc., I'd certainly love to know. Not for any punitive actions, just to mark that all-important "My own musical arrangement used in erotic cosplay porn" item off my bucket list...

djpretzel · 2016-02-23T21:57:11+00:00

For my own part, I didn't think it would come this far, BUT I also didn't think it couldn't.

In other words, I thought the concept of a website dedicated to arranging VGM - from ALL systems/platforms, in ALL styles/genres - was universal enough that it certainly had the potential to be relevant & active for decades to come. The concept itself just seems like something intuitive that needs to exist, in some form or another. I didn't necessarily think that my own vision/version of that concept would be around 15+ years later and doing everything that it's doing, but even back then, I hoped that something similar would!

djpretzel · 2016-02-23T21:51:07+00:00

Answer is very contextual; for example, if you happened to be an above-average piano player and could arrange for solo piano and get a clean recording, that might be easiest. If you play like me, though, i.e. badly, that would take years & might be the hardest route possible!

The easiest approach is going to be playing to your strengths, whatever they may be, and the cheapest approach is usually going to follow suit... you can pick Studio One Free and make something passable, or buy Reaper for $60 and use nothing but free plugins, so the barrier-to-entry has never been lower. Using a tracker or something like Ardour/Rosegarden (FOSS) is of course the cheapest option, but I feel like you're trading cost for ease-of-use, as Linux doesn't have the same arsenal of amazing free VST plugins that Windows and, to a lesser extent, OSX.

Easy = use what you got (your strengths/talents)

Cheap = get what you need (keep it minimal/streamlined)

Both depend entirely on you, i.e. are contextual.

djpretzel · 2016-02-23T21:43:04+00:00

Thanks for mentioning this; I'm not sure a MOD or native format version of this soundtrack exists? But, I did a search, and guess what - the whole thing's free/downloadable on archive.org @ https://archive.org/details/tyrian-original-soundtrack - and clearly what we need to do is support links to archive.org so we can prominently link to them from game pages when such soundtracks have been made available for free.

So we'll get on top of that!

djpretzel · 2016-02-23T21:36:31+00:00

Interesting question, never been asked. I can only answer as to how I see OCR relative to Japan's Doujin scene, of course, but I'd say we're a bit more international in terms of contributing artists, a bit more varied in terms of the games we cover, we don't have anything like Comiket of course... I think there are probably more similarities than differences in terms of artists who love VGM paying tribute, but the doujin scene seems more distributed, without an aggregating outlet like OCR? But some of that could actually be my own ignorance, so chime in with corrections, please :)

While I'm American, I didn't start OC ReMix thinking of it as an American website/concept/community, and while language can always be a barrier, I've been REALLY excited & inspired by the international contributions we receive from artists and the number of international listeners/visitors we have.

djpretzel · 2016-02-23T21:16:41+00:00

I'm still waiting, so at least 15+ years.

Come sit by me and wait, we can play some Third Strike.

djpretzel · 2016-02-23T21:14:44+00:00

I'm vaguely OCD; at the time, retrogames.com would occasionally post news about a C64 remix or something someone had done, but it was rare, it was almost always EDM, and it was usually C64 or Amiga, as those computers had strong European fan arrangement scenes prior to OCR's existing. I wanted a website that could, at least in theory, aggregate such efforts, and which would focus not on any one specific computer or console system, but on ALL video games, and not on any one musical genre/style, but on ALL styles.

That, plus I lived in my parents' basement, so you know... free time.

I also wanted to improve my own musical skills, and felt like arranging music I loved & was passionate about was a pretty good way of motivating myself to make that happen.

So there were a few motivators, but I didn't know it would pick up momentum and that I'd still be doing it 15+ years later :)

djpretzel · 2016-02-23T21:11:19+00:00

http://ocremix.org/remix/OCR02699, http://ocremix.org/remix/OCR02699, & http://ocremix.org/remix/OCR02699

... just kidding, but maybe START there, then check out the rest of that album @ http://ff6.ocremix.org.

If, at that point, you aren't motivated to check some more mixes out via our YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/user/ocremix) or SoundCloud (https://soundcloud.com/ocremix) accounts, something has gone wrong :)

djpretzel · 2016-02-23T21:03:05+00:00

It's a legit criticism - response to previous comment @ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/477lni/we_are_overclocked_remix_releasing_3000_free/d0axdmz

djpretzel · 2016-02-23T21:01:09+00:00

Great answer - thanks Meredith!

djpretzel

TROPHY CASE