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SMW Music Remoderation! + Other Stuff

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Hey, it's me again!

Bringing in the new year, the music section is going to go under a slight remoderation. This has been in the talks for a couple months now, and

There's a few main objectives we're hoping to achieve with this remoderation:
  • Quality control + obsolete songs. Don't worry, it sounds more harsh than it actually is. We want users here to have the best music resources they can possibly have for the section, while trimming the fat of old clutter that might have been good in 2008 but just don't hold up to today's standards. Obsolete songs, on the other hand, are rather cut and dry. It's not a new practice to keep only one or two ports of the same song, and unfortunately there are just clearly inferior versions of some submissions. Obviously, quality can be subjective, so rest assured that between five moderators, I firmly believe we can make fair assessments on these songs.


  • Dissolution of music packs. There are a few music packs in the music section that don't have much reason to be bundled together. This was a user request, and it's a pretty good idea - for organizational purposes, it's better to have these songs separate. This doesn't include soundtracks, though, just packs of songs with little more coherency together than being uploaded by the same author.


  • Converting .bnk sampled ports to use BRRs. This is more of a personal preference thing between a few music mods, but I believe it'd open up the door to more accessible BRRs for the people that like to comb through songs for good samples.


  • Tagging. A quality of life alteration to our existing ports, all this encompasses is applying fitting tags to songs that may come up short on that front, potentially going unnoticed. There's a bit more on the subject of tagging, read further below if you want to know more of that.


  • If something in the remoderation gets removed that you really want access to, don't worry because we've got your back. As with the last remoderation that happened like a billion years ago, each song will be archived in its original format. As soon as remoderation is complete, a .zip archive will be uploaded containing each port that was removed. If a mistake is made and something is mislabeled or omitted, let us know and we'll rectify it ASAP. Additionally, if you feel something was removed in error or you disagree with anything done to your works, let me know and I'll address it.

    In other news, the old SPC thread has been archived after 5 years. A fresh new thread has been launched, with a focus on feedback, especially for newcomers. If you're just starting out porting, don't forget to visit and post there to get feedback!

    Lastly, some slight alterations will be made to upload guidelines in the near future. A rule was recently (albeit, quietly) added to follow the "Game Name - Song Name" format when uploading and titling your songs. Other quality of life changes will come shortly, such as potential alteration of the tag list. If you have any tags you think the section is missing, feel free to suggest some!

    That's about it. Feel free to discuss stuff here, as well as provide any feedback you want to provide. Happy New Year!
    I'm glad the music packs are being separated - that was always something that bugged me. And BNK conversion + super-old-bad-songs removal is very overdue in my opinion. Glad to see these happening!
    Originally posted by Nameless
    If something in the remoderation gets removed that you really want access to, don't worry because we've got your back. As with the last remoderation that happened like a billion years ago, each song will be archived in its original format. As soon as remoderation is complete, a .zip archive will be uploaded containing each port that was removed.

    Thanks a ton. I would consider myself a music junkie.
    Legacy custom music
    A site with a non-useless dislike button
    SMW hacking channel

    A big issue with BNKs is that many songs overwrite vanilla samples which was fine back then but with more ARAM being avilable for the songs, these banks overwriting vanilla samples are simple artifacts and are generally avoided unless necessary even with AMK. Though... didn't Vitor make a BNK2BRR converter?
    This remoderation really was needed. I experienced a perfect example of this only yesterday when I was searching for music for a castle level. There are 3 or so different versions of the NSMB castle theme on this site currently. Each sounding different and with a different quality. A clean up is really welcomed.
                                                                                                                      
                                  
    I personally don't support remoderations overall because they're pretty expensive to do -- really pushes a lot from the staff members and requires some good damn dedication. Hope you guys can go though the ~2.9k songs with a reasonable time.

    I also hope there's no changes in the standards. I think the current standards are good as it is and probably on average our songs are better than the ones hosted in, e.g. VGMTrans (edit: WHAT) VGMusic. Don't forgetting that while we have a somewhat big database, there is no really reason for the urge of removing old songs -- other than quality reasons, since we're not having storage issues here.

    Tagging is always nice. I believe it won't be very costly since we can listen to the SPCs without having to download the zip. The work done is not comparable to actually doing remoderation -- moderating all songs using the standards procedures like if it was submitted today.

    BNK conversion sounds OK. There's the bnk2brr tool done by me which you can download here. Sadly it's so old that I don't have the source anymore, but I think I can recover it though VilelaBot and make some improvements if that help you guys though the process.
    GitHub - Twitter - YouTube - SnesLab Discord
    I'm not totally sold on remoderation either. Even if there is 5 versions of the same song it's up to the user to decide which one they like best. Bnk conversion would be good though, bnks are outdated.
    we are only removing songs that no longer hold up to our standards. if there are 5 versions of a song that are all great ports in their own way, they will most likely stay. the main objective is to take out the trash, not necessarily make things "cleaner" in that regard.(also even if versions of ports get sacked you'll always be able to download the deleted versions if you really want them)

    also note @ vitor : dont worry about us being overworked, this was a mutual agreement and we took this on prepared for the workload :~)
    soundcloud / bandcamp / twitter / buy/stream my EP / buy my touhou music / buy my NEW album!!!
    Some of those old song ports are pretty nostalgic, like I know there's a better version of a song but I like using the older version. For example I may go with this version of DKL's Temple theme, but I'd rather use this version since it reminds me of an older hack that used it.

    But then again I suppose newer versions of said tracks gives you more appreciation for the track itself from it's original source, plus newer players won't get the reference. Idk, either way we'll be getting the old versions anyway so there's no problems really. I'm all in for bnk to brr conversions!
    Want progress on 100 Rooms of Enemies: The Nightmare Edition? Go here to see.

    (rip my other userbars momentarily)

    I think it's pointless to remove songs that are already accepted on this site because they are publicly available now and it would make the music section more

    The old songs are already in the Legacy folder.
    If there's two versions of a song made by the same author, I'd agree that the better one should stay, but if there's a version made by a different author, but the quality isn't very much different, it can still stay. This port is a remarkable example of something that would sound good in 2008, but not today, and needs to be removed. And this one is slightly lower quality than the newer version and has a bigger size. This port sounds as if the waiting version of the song obsoletes it so it may be rejected as well.

    I'm all in for BNK to BRR conversions as well!
    I have a Discord server as well! (by joining, you agree to the rules)
    -----
    Basically, I believe in peace and bashing two bricks together.

    The music section consists of a large chunk to go through, and there are a lot of good beats to sift through. I'm interested in the line that's being drawn.

    Originally posted by Emerald Shell
    If there's two versions of a song made by the same author, I'd agree that the better one should stay, but if there's a version made by a different author, but the quality isn't very much different, it can still stay. This port is a remarkable example of something that would sound good in 2008, but not today, and needs to be removed. And this one is slightly lower quality than the newer version and has a bigger size. This port sounds as if the waiting version of the song obsoletes it so it may be rejected as well.

    I'm all in for BNK to BRR conversions as well!


    I agree with the first example. The 2nd example is kinda fringy but I can see the reasoning behind it, though I highly doubt the last one is being dropped. The first one, I wholeheartedly agree with all the way. The second one, I feel is still decent even today, though it'd kind of be redundant to have 2 similarly-sounding tracks with one barely being bigger than another. As for the third one, I still use it in my hack today, and still intend to, which I feel is a testament to how good it actually is. I think overtime we may see a line that can be drawn as to what is acceptable today and what isn't, but I don't see it being a thinly-veiled line.

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    STELLA!
    Originally posted by Falaflame
    As for the third one, I still use it in my hack today, and still intend to, which I feel is a testament to how good it actually is.

    I said 'may', not 'should'. I meant to leave to others' decision whether to leave it or not.
    I have a Discord server as well! (by joining, you agree to the rules)
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    Basically, I believe in peace and bashing two bricks together.

    I agree with Daizo about the nostalgia thing. When making certain levels or hacks, I will sometimes use an old port on purpose to fit a certain feel.

    Let's say someone wants to make an all-vanilla simple hack. They are probably gonna want to use the unsampled version of every port they use for consistency. Another example is a glitch/joke hack like YUMP, a hack that mimics old Japanese hacks by using lower quality ports, etc.

    From purely a level design perspective, the best song is simply the song that fits the level best. 95% of that time, that song will also be the highest quality. However, for that 5% of the time, we need to make sure there is easy access to old ports. Which brings me to my next point:

    Originally posted by Nameless
    If something in the remoderation gets removed that you really want access to, don't worry because we've got your back. As with the last remoderation that happened like a billion years ago, each song will be archived in its original format. As soon as remoderation is complete, a .zip archive will be uploaded containing each port that was removed. If a mistake is made and something is mislabeled or omitted, let us know and we'll rectify it ASAP. Additionally, if you feel something was removed in error or you disagree with anything done to your works, let me know and I'll address it.


    I would like to mention that the sprite remoderation's solution to this issue was quite bad. Several sprites were missing on that archive, and a few sprites were named after the zip file that was submitted, so some important sprites were named "ghsjjfhhsjjfj" or "hhhhhhhh", which is extremely un-useful and made finding a couple sprites miserable (I literally downloaded every single sprite with a jibberish name to look for the right one). I know that this would mean extra work, but I'd really like to see the old songs named properly on the archive and that the archive is complete.

    Also happy new year :D
    Some of you may have noticed that we've started to tackle some submissions in the SMW music sections over the past few days.

    Feel free to let us know if you've spotted any duplicate submissions, submissions that use BNK files, or submissions that have invalid tags.
    Twitter
    Originally posted by Giftshaven

    Feel free to let us know if you've spotted any duplicate submissions, submissions that use BNK files, or submissions that have invalid tags.


    Is that something that we could do here, or should we just pm you or another music moderator?

    If the former is the case, Draven's Valley Pass is something I can say has an unnecessary duplicate right off the top of my head.


    Other Submissions of mine!

    Here's a duplicate of this song: Corneria from Star Fox
    "Glauben Sie nicht alles, was Sie im Internet lesen." - Karl Marx
    Originally posted by Deeke
    Is that something that we could do here, or should we just pm you or another music moderator?

    Either way is fine really, though I do prefer PMs. Just as long as we notice it, we'll be able to take note of it.
    Twitter
    To make things easier, we've addded a list of duplicate submissions that we have decided to keep here.
    Twitter
    There are actually a lot of outdated/misleading information in the pre-AddMusicK port file, like "mode.bin required", "overworld music header", etc. Personally I think that should be removed in order to not confuse newcomers, but I understand that would be a HUGE work, so... 😒
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