Hey guys, here's my submission. Nal has given me permission to have an extended demo.

-The Neverending (demo)-, by Gloudas Type: SongGenre: Trance

Good luck ya'll!

That's alot cheaper than I imagined it would be. Do you know what the standard cost is for a professionally mastered track?

actually I got my named changed a loooong time ago by PM'ing Tom. Just gotta give it time

If it does end up working, post a video of it. I'd love to see some FL action with an xbox controller :D

Take a music theory class! Definitely music opens up a whole lot once you actually learn how it all fits together. Not that I've really bothered to apply what I've learned to my music, but you might :D

I just bought The Departed, District 9, and Oceans 11 for 5 and half bucks in a store in Nepal!
So fucking awesome. And they're each still wrapped and in official DVD cases and stuff. I don't even know how they have district 9 already, but I'm sure as hell not complaining :D

Got some more stuff for ya.

http://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/2546 45
This is a list by Denvish of various synths/synthesizers. Some of the ones on the list cost money, but plenty are free, and there are some very high quality ones up on that list.

http://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1043 950
This thread is a list of free drum plugins, which will give you tons of different, free, drum samples to work with. Most of the Vsti's on that list are contributed by Sorohanro, because he's a badass. This list should pretty much cover all your drumming needs.

http://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1042 375
This thread is a compilation of free Vst effects. I realize you didn't ask for any Vst's in the thread, but I thought I'd offer this thread up anyway, as it's got some great Vst's which will help any FL user quite a bit.

There are quite a few sounds you can find for free around the internets. You just gotta look, and google is definitely for friend for this. Here are a few I know of:

http://www.theflipsideforum.com/index.ph p?topic=6083.0
This is Timmy Technos free pack of 323 sytrus presets. There's alot of great sounds in there for sytrus, and best of all its FREE!!

http://soundfonts.darkesword.com/
Here's a site with some great soundfonts. I would highly recommend downloading Squidfont Orchestral (the second soundfont in the list), its a great compilation of orchestral instruments.

In terms of drums, I would highly suggest getting Vengeance Essential Clubsounds Volumes 1 or 2. They do cost money, but each are a huge collection of electronic drum samples which are invaluable to electronic music producers.

That's all I got right now. Just use teh googlez

This looks awesome! I'm very excited for this competition, whether I get a spot or not. I have a quick question though. Do you have any idea, approximately, when the final product will be due? As in, how long after the winning demos are picked will the full version be expected?

At 9/24/09 11:59 AM, DSMagnum wrote: This is common sense. Or at least should be. I guess I can't say much since I used to make all my mixes using iPod headphones. This is before I knew what mixing even was though.

obviously I try to avoid doing so as often as possible, but the circumstances have forced it. It sucks having no idea whether or not what you made is actually mixed properly. AH WELL

The reason, I believe, that trance/techno/dance are the reigning genres here is because the audio community consists largely of fledgling audio producers, ones who make electronic music at not quite a professional level. And most of the time, when people start making their own electric music, they will gravitate towards trance and techno, as those genres are easiest and most natural to make when working with a program like FruityLoops. Offbeat IDM or other miscellaneous genres won't flourish here because the vast number of people are looking for the type of music that they know and recognize from their own music-composing experience.

That's just my theory. Fortunately there are plenty of sites where you can upload specific genres.
http://www.idmforums.com/
This is a great site for IDM, ambient and miscellaneous music. You can broadcast music here and generally get some great feedback. I'd suggest checking it out if the response you're getting here is frustrating you.

I learned today that mixing trance with either laptop speakers or ipod headphones sucks alot :D

At 9/22/09 07:02 PM, MICHhimself wrote: I jogged around 2 miles, which was probably a bit too much for a start. But I must say, it made me feel better. Had a good shower afterwards, had a big cup of tea.

Today I jogged 4 miles through rice fields in Kathmandu valley in Nepal. And then afterwords I had a big cup of tea and egg fried rice. I win :D

Think about it this way. The flash author is essentially making revenue off of their product, which is the flash game. Now, if certain components of the product, namely the music, were made by other people, then certain portions of the revenue deserve to be given to the author of the music.

It's as simple as that. No matter how well designed a game is, if music is used, then the game's success is partially a result of that song. To suggest that a flash author deserves all the money when an outside song has helped contribute to the success of the game is just absurd.

I've been a reg on the audio forum for a year and a half, checking the forums almost every day, and while I don't post that often, I still read the vast majority of the posts that go through this forum. While yes, the forum can at times seem unkempt, I think that in no way is it in a state of alarm or disarray. I've always loved the mix of intelligent threads and complete bullshit in this forum: every day I can expect to see some new post about a fresh music mixing technique or a new contest that someone's throwing, and at the same time see 2 or 3 threads bitching about zerobombing and/or music not getting approved. But that mix of crap and value is what I love about this place. I enjoy a good talk about a new VST for FL as much as the next guy, but really, what fun would the forum be without some idiotic discussion coming in and breaking up the seriousness? If mods were patrolling and locking constantly, those bits of nonsense that we get to have here would almost never occur, and really, what would be the fun of having this community then? It made me glad to read that rucklo and the other mods actively allow some unnecessary threads to live, because it is in the sheer ridiculousness of many of those threads that the real character and fun of the people here is revealed.

I would just consider before you bash on the mods, that maybe a bit of laxity adds some zest to a sometimes inactive forum.

That sucks, alot. I very much admired him as an artist, and I'm sad to hear he's gone.

The reason I discovered he took his stuff down was because I was looking to download Everlasting Times, one of his songs, which happens to be one of my all-time favorite songs ever. Does anyone have the mp3 that they could email to me?

Did maestrorage get banned or something? His songs aren't up

There's a cool way to modify a crash or ride cymbal to give it a unique ringing sound. Drill holes every few inches around the edge of the cymbal. Then put a metal nail, point down, in the hole. Assuming the hole is big enough to comfortably hold the nail, it will allow the nail to jingle on the top of the cymbal anytime you hit it. If you do this with a lot of nails, it almost sounds like a rain stick. It's like having reverb for your crash hits :D

Gah! The more apps I see the more I want an iphone. Gotta wait till verizon starts carrying it though :P

GO BEARS

nuff said

At 7/29/09 03:30 PM, MICHhimself wrote: Make sure that in the playlist the 'step' option in that left pane is off.

That was simple. Thanks muchly

I just installed FL8 on my new computer, and I'm having a problem with the automation envelopes.

Usually, when you're editing an automation envelope, the right click creates a checkpoint within the envelope, and the left click allows you to move around those checkpoints and change the angle between the checkpoints.

However, the problem I'm having right now is that when I right click anywhere within the envelope, nothing happens, and when I left click, it creates a checkpoint. Since the right click is virtually worthless and the left click only creates the checkpoints, I can't move anything around or really edit the envelopes efficiently. Anyone know whats going on? Seems like the key bindings got messed up or something, I'm not sure. Help much appreciated

The nomination idea is actually pretty good. Like you said, it makes it so that only positive feedback matters. However, the flaw I see with it is that it would then make your chances depend largely on the number of listens you have.

Say, cornandbeans, that you submitted a song here and it got 30 listens and of those listeners, got 25 nominations. That would be a fantastic ratio. However, no matter how great your song was, if F777 submitted a song, which usually gets 800 listens in a short period of time, he would easily get more nominations than you, even if his song was subpar. I believe that a nomination system would rely too heavily on the number of listens you got, and it would just make it hard for small-name artists to get enough nominations to stand a chance.

At 7/26/09 10:33 PM, Back-From-Purgatory wrote: All I'm saying is that there are A LOT of loop holes in this idea... some you can fix, some you can't.

Ah, I understand where you're coming from a bit more now. And yes, I agree with you. There definitely is a crowd that will always be there to make unhelpful and biased votes, based off things like, as you said, genre and whatnot. And yes, I don't believe that the system I'm proposing will do anything to better the voting habits of these individuals. However, I think that this Judgment system would help to alleviate the problems that occur when people are trying to manipulate scores for personal gain. Such a system will in no way prevent people from going around voting 0's on anything they dislike, but it will make it harder for such voting to result in personal gain.

Unfortunately, the voting habits of many of Newgrounds' visitors will take more than a simple feature to change :P

At 7/26/09 08:15 PM, Back-From-Purgatory wrote: A lot of people just 0 bomb because they're mean spirited, and I honestly don't know how this would stop them. Putting songs into the public eye, in my opinion, would do nothing but increase 0 bombing of good songs.

I don't believe for an instant the idea that half of the audio portal consists raving idiots who spend their time zero-bombing for the hell of it. I've never heard anything so idiotic.

Let's consider for a moment that you're right, that most zerobombers just do it for fun, that they're in fact just mean spirited and like spreading misery. Well if that were the case (which it's not), then they would be zerobombing ALL of the 15 songs, lowering ALL of their scores, and thus not make the slightest difference in the end, as the actual difference in scores would not be affected. Problem solved.

At 7/26/09 08:05 PM, loansindi wrote: This system assumes that a large portion of the audio portal listeners will listen, and vote, during your 24 hour period. They'll be voting against any zero/fiving that has happened in the past six days. If a spam track has been upvoted and a good track has been downvoted, then it's going to be hard for those tracks to equalize and be 'fixed' in the course of one day, won't it?

You'd be surprised. You can see with a song like Autotune Flowers how quickly the score drops once it's hit the front page. That song hit #1 of the week this week with a score above 4.40, but within 12 hours the score was close to a 3.0. It's a good example of how quickly the community can show what they think of a song.

Some songs, yes, will have many votes and will be hard to change in that time period. However, most songs that make best of the week currently do so with only 20-40 votes, and such a small number of votes is what allows them to manipulate the score in the first place. Even though it is only 24 hours, with the entire portal voting each song could easily get over 200 votes in the voting period. Regardless of whether the author has 5 hack accounts or 50, there will simply be too many legitimate votes flooding in during that period to allow a crappy song to sustain a high score.

people who zerobomb themselves into recognition are getting paid for it

how much? I've spoken to artists who get large volumes of traffic, and not one of them has made any noticeable sum from their music.

Admittedly it's a small sum of money. However I'd still prefer to prevent them from having it if they didn't deserve it in the first place.

This problem will still be evident during some sort of last minute voting, because people using unscrupulous methods are, in my eyes, more likely to be ready to vote in that critical last day.

That is precisely my point, and the reason for this feature: with the Day of Judgment, zerobombing won't matter.
Imagine it like this: If there are only 30 votes on a song, and a guy comes along and uses hack accounts to give the song 5 zeroes, the score will drop immensely. This is what happens currently. However, if there are 150 votes on a song, and a guy comes along and zerobombs it, the 5 zeroes will have almost no effect, and the score will much more closely resemble what the 150 votes want it to be.

Cheat voting only works because so few people look at each individual song. Once you have hundreds of people looking at a song, zerobombing is nullified, for one or two zeros can no longer have the significant effect that it did.

At 7/26/09 07:55 PM, EmperorCharlemagne wrote: I think the idea has a lot of merit behind it, but would it only be the 15 highest-rated songs of the week that get chosen? Am I understanding that correctly?

Yes. The reason I decided upon 15 was because it's big enough to include at some of the best songs that were submitted that week, but also small enough that each of the 15 songs gets a good amount of exposure and votes. If the number of songs considered was, say, 50, then each individual song would not get enough notice/scores to negate the effects of zerobombing.

If so, the only problem I would see because of that would be that people 0-vote before the 15 are picked in order to insure their own spot.

Yes, I mentioned that. Admittedly people will manage to zerobomb themselves into the 15 considered positions, just as they do now. However, the judgment will prevent them from going any farther than that, as their song will actually be put under scrutiny, preventing them from manipulating the score.

At 7/26/09 08:00 PM, la-yinn wrote: I suggest that this system disables the ad revenue for the 15 songs on the Day of Judgment.

I think this would make it a bit too complicated. Realistically the most listens they'll get in 24 hours is a few hundred, which is such an insignificant amount of ad revenue money that disabling it wouldn't be worth the effort.

I believe

in god

Hey guys, this is an idea for the Audio Portal I've been thinking about for a while, and I was hoping for your opinions/criticisms of it:

This new feature would be called the Day of Judgment. The basic idea is that 24 hours before the Top 5 songs of the week are decided, the highest-ranking 15 songs of that week are put into a list, which is visible from the front page of the audio portal. These songs would ideally be some of the best songs submitted that week, and also some that are quite bad, and were merely zerobombed up there. During the next 24 hours, anyone can vote on any of the 15 songs. As this pool of music would be exposed to the entire community, the higher-caliber songs would stand out by the end of the voting period, and after 24 hours the 5 songs with the highest score would be given the 5 spots of Best of the Week. The following week, 24 hours before the next Top 5 are decided, the process would start over, ensuring that 5 new and quality songs take the previous ones' place.

What is the benefit of this feature? Firstly and most prominently, this feature would allow for the Top 5 of the Week to truly reflect what the audio community wants to hear. Currently, one can only get a spot on the Top 5 through sheer luck, or more often, zerobombing the hell out of everyone else's submissions. What this often creates is a set a five songs that nowhere near represents the quality of music that the Audio Portal can put out. You've all seen terrible songs on the best of the week, and felt that anger when you knew a more deserving song should have its place. The Day of Judgment would help to solve this problem. In the 24 hour voting period, it would be up to the community to decide which of the 15 songs of that week were worthy of being recognized, and which ones had no place being recognized at all. Naturally, people would find ways to cheat themselves onto the 15 spots, but with the eyes of the entire Audio Portal on them, their song would get voted down, and receive no Top 5 spot. After all, the only reason zero bombing is a problem is because individual songs generally do not get much attention, and their scores can be easily manipulated by just 1 or 2 zeroes. However, once the 15 songs that are being considered for Top 5 are shown to the whole of Newgrounds, there will be enough legitimate voting to negate any zerobombing that might continue. Essentially, this process would be a filter, ensuring that songs that have no place representing the Audio Portal are taken out of the running for the Top 5 positions.

A system along these lines is more important, I believe, now than ever, for with the introduction of the Ad Revenue system, people who zerobomb themselves into recognition are getting paid for it. With such monetary reward, there is now more and more incentive to cheat one's song into a spot on the Top 5. Hopefully, the Day of Judgment would nullify such cheating. No matter how hard people worked to get their undeserving song exposure, they would ultimately be stopped during the day of judgment, during which the Audio Community would ensure that their song would not be one of the 5 moving on.

An ideal scenario I imagine would be thus: The Day of Judgment begins, and the 15 highest scored songs of the week are put into the pool on the front page of the AP. One of them is an incredibly high-quality piece of music whose score was lower than it should be. Another is (just as an example, as its score is currently so low) Autotune Flowers, which only had such a high score due to zerobombing. Now, during the next 24 hours the entire Audio Portal would listen to both these songs, and Autotuned Flowers's score would slowly drop, as the high-quality piece's would rise. By the end of the 24 hours, the good song, assuming that it was indeed a song that the community respected and found worthy of exposure, would have a much higher score and be given one of the Top 5 spots, while Autotuned Flowers, it's score lowered, would receive none of the recognition that it tried to steal away from the better song. But again, just an example.

I think the Day of Judgment feature could be a great addition to the portal, and could ensure that what gets put on the Best of the Week truly is the best music of that week, and not merely a product of score manipulation. HOWEVER, I am not naive enough to believe that this idea is perfect, and I believe that it could use improvement and critique. So, now I ask you, what do you think of this idea? Would it a great addition, or only further muddle an already complicated system? I ask because I hope to make this idea into the best one it can be before submitting into the Audio Portal improvements thread, and I want to make sure it can stand up to any criticisms when that day comes. So criticize away

(Rucklo has given me permission to post this thread, and he would like to remind everyone that this is an exception to the normal rules, so don't go posting all your ideas and incurring his wrath on me)

Thanks for reading, tell me what you think

cool, that simplifies things considerably. thanks for the input