Entry tags:

music

it's that time of the season again, folks!
It's Famicompo Mini season!
http://midr2.under.jp/compo/vol3/

I absolutely love this year's annual 8-bit NES music competition. Even though there's quite a few entries that use extra sound chips (which stray away from the pure NES tones and noises -- although the originals section is almost completely devoid of extra soundchips... YAY!), there's no denying that a lot of blood, sweat, and tears have been poured in the making of a lot of these tunes!

There's a lot more entries (54 in all, up by 11 from last year!), as the newfound presence of FamiTracker has attracted a plethora of fresh competitors to join the fight (mostly european, specifically the nation of Sweden! ;D ). Let's hope this competition becomes internationally known in every corner!

The voting system has changed quite a bit since last year. You now get to vote on four categories: Technique, Sense, Idea, and Lovin'. The higher the number, the better.

"Technique" is pretty much the ranking of technical complexity of the tune. Did it sound like there was a lot of audio engineering prowess wrenched in? Did the author make good use of echoing or audio trickery? Or was the tune just slapped together with flat instruments that weren't fiddled into more desireable settings?

"Sense" is how artistic and well-thought out the music itself is. Are the melodies catchy and interesting enough that you'll constantly itch to hum it happily afterwards? Or was music theory thrown out of the window into utter chaos? For covers, this can also mean how well the melodies made their point across (which doesn't always have to be faithful to the original song!).

"Idea" is how inventive the song is. Did it break new ground unexpectedly as far as NES music goes? Or was it just simply a rehashed style that everyone else has heard before?

"Lovin'" is your own subjective slant to the tune. Regardless of how well-made or badly composed a song is, does it still appeal to your love of the subject matter? Or do you hate the song simply because it's a genre you don't like (even if the song itself was beautifully composed)? Especially for covers, this can mean that you possibly love the song "just because it's THAT favorite song of yours".


P.S. to hopefully spread the love to NES music to everyone (and to ease the pain of having to preemptively render the songs for your portable music player of choice), I compiled all of them into 96kbps mono MP3 files (which the quality should be relatively comparable to a 192kbps stereo file).

Feel free to get them here, I'm certain my bandwidth will bear it for the time being! LISTEN TO THEM. NOW. SO MY EFFORTS ARE MADE WORTHWHILE! :D
(Update 8/4/2006: Author's names are now included in the ID3 tags)

• Originals: fcm3_mp3_originals.zip (85MB)
  
• Covers: fcm3_mp3_covers.zip (66MB)

They were all rendered in the May 5 2006 version of NSFplug, using a "New Famicom" setting with the quality settings to its max. All of them are normalized, although there WILL be some variance of volume (since I didn't bother to use a compressor/limiter). Most of the looped songs fade around 4 to 5 minutes, since I'm into that kind of timeframe. :)

Feel free to comment about the music here, but please don't mention any artists' names! This is meant to be an anonymous competition, so I don't know who's entries they are, I don't know what MY entries were, and YOU will certainly not know yet, either (nor will you try to guess)! :)

In any case, have fun listening and voting!