Bracket 2 - Rating and Discussion

[BLueSS]

Three comments to hellrazor:
There is no cut anywhere in the song. There's some megamix cruft scraped off the end, but this is the song in its entirety, so there's no way there can be a "bad cut." But apparently Mr. Champion didn't want to be consistent with his song.

If my BPM is off, no, you're absolutely NOT required to fix that - only to adjust the gap.

Side note, somewhere along the line I picked up the idea that OGGs are more consistent, but I can't back this up with evidence, so it might be all in my head.

Regarding sync:
I used autosync to try to line up the steps, and when I got a good score I assumed it was lined up okay. The BPM must have wavered, and autosync must have lined it up only to the end. That's what I get for rushing it - that and naïvely assuming that a trance song would have a consistent BPM. Playing Blind/Dark - as I usually do, and skipped - does confirm everyone else's diagnosis. *facepalm*

In a fit of embarassment, I'd like to withdraw. I'll try to fix the sync and get updated numbers up for everyone, and have any further comments directed at the steps as they would be were they synched properly.

But hey, if you play on AutoSync, it'll work! :p

OFFICIAL RULING: The Party - File anonymously withdrawn at request of the author. Comments on the steps (with auto-sync) would still be appreciated by the author.

[Sir.Rendr]

That's 2 files now withdrawn by the author.

Any more we should know about?

[Valex]

Presentation: 4.5/5: The banner seemed to be a cut of the background with the artist put on. Also your readme says:

I wanted these to match the combined fusion between the track's color plus its furry,

Uhh...

As far as I'm concerned, the banner is not a cut-n-paste of the background - while they're fairly similar, I did apply several differences in the banner to make it fit better and I don't think calling it a rip-off is a valid deduction.

As for the quote in the readme, I think I meant "fury" if that typo made it seem weird, but what I was really trying to point out was that the song is both different + unique (color) and energetic (fury) at once. Sorry if you don't understand my way of putting things.

I didn't see any differences. Can you give me some examples so that I can look and fix it?

And I didn't take points off for the typo, I just thought it was funny.

And to the guy who did Dry the River: I have NO idea what happened to it, because I just checked the file again on a different computer and it was there. Sorry! I upped your presentation rating to reflect it.

[Oni-91]

That's 2 files now withdrawn by the author.

Any more we should know about?

Wait, what's the other file?

[Sir.Rendr]

Loveline.

Well, not exactly. Sort of. No?

I don't know. The author said to let things run it's course and if it gets in, then fine. But, otherwise, I think he withdrew...

[BLueSS]

I didn't see any differences. Can you give me some examples so that I can look and fix it?

Oh yes, the spheres are closer together in the banner because it made more sense imo, the title text is resized particularly to fit the image, and the backdrop images were moved and used slightly different color effects to give just the right amount of balance. Point is, I put in plenty of effort to make the banner as slick as possible - far better than what a cut'n'paste job would've done. It's not meant to be dramatically different, but some work must be done to put the old materials into better use for the banner image.

And I didn't take points off for the typo, I just thought it was funny.

Heh, that's quite a nitpick. Hopefully the short explanation I gave you earlier should help. It's pretty silly for the song to have "furry", though!

[hellrazor]

Now maybe you didn't even cut the song, and that's possible, but that doesn't change the FACT that the beats skip around (maybe someone else cut the file, either way there are serious sync issues that you missed).

Yes, I quoted myself. I've worked on a song that I got directly from a CD (soundtrack of Little Shop of Horrors) the Dentist song. I clipped the front and end but nothing in the middle, yet there were two significant song-cuts that I had to account for. I could further verify they were song-cuts since at those two points the audio file did not match the movie version of the same song. I believe you have a steady BPM for this song, just two song-cuts to account for (or whatever you want to call them). You can handle the first one by adding in a stop of ~13ms, and the second one will require a brief speed-up. Good luck with that.

Regarding sync:
I used autosync to try to line up the steps

That's pretty obvious since your last section is fairly on-sync, what happened with auto-sync is that it kept adjusting the GAP and when you got to the end, the last section was the final GAP.

[Valex]

I didn't see any differences. Can you give me some examples so that I can look and fix it?

Oh yes, the spheres are closer together in the banner because it made more sense imo, the title text is resized particularly to fit the image, and the backdrop images were moved and used slightly different color effects to give just the right amount of balance. Point is, I put in plenty of effort to make the banner as slick as possible - far better than what a cut'n'paste job would've done. It's not meant to be dramatically different, but some work must be done to put the old materials into better use for the banner image.

And I didn't take points off for the typo, I just thought it was funny.

Heh, that's quite a nitpick. Hopefully the short explanation I gave you earlier should help. It's pretty silly for the song to have "furry", though!

OK, thanks, I'll put your presentation rating to 5 then; I really do think your file was well-presented, but I didn't care for the steps.

Let's just hope any more of your songs don't have furry

[BLueSS]

I finally got around to fixing up The Party. I actually did what I should have done the first time - went into Audacity and lined up the times in SM with the actual beats.

For the SM:
#OFFSET:-6.592;
#BPMS:0.000=145.900,48.000=146.200,52.000=145.900,112.000=147.000,118.000=145.900;

For the DWI:
#GAP:6592;
#BPM:145.900;
#CHANGEBPM:192.000=146.200,208.000=145.900,448.000=147.000,472.000=145.900;

So the nominal BPM is 145.9, but there were two bad cuts made by the remixer where some time was lost (as noted by others). So it's probably a good idea not to assume a constant BPM, even in the most electronic of songs.

I compared this to a baseline file that was considered "on-sync" in a somewhat recent tournament. I got the following results there:
Normal: 16:1
Blind+Dark: 10.5:1
Blind+Dark:Hidden: 7:1 with some non-perfects

And for the resync of The Party:
Normal: 27:1
Blind+Dark: 15.5:1
Blind+Dark+Hidden: 11.5:1 with some non-perfects

So while it's still not perfect, it's much improved, and probably pretty good compared to other tournament-quality files.

Good luck to everyone else still in the tournament.

Updated files: LINK