Best Doujin Contest Discussion

Originally Posted by wvlfpvp

For real? We're going to have 4 choice matchups next round TOO?

No, just 2 per matchup in the next round.

Reiterating opinions on vote extensions to hopefully nudge the status to an "overwhelming consensus." I'll still be able to listen to bracket D and such and vote, but time to catch up on further brackets would be nice, especially considering the inevitable busyness of tomorrow and Tuesday.

I've extended Bracket D to the 27th. That should give some breathing room. I'll likely go push back other brackets later.

Thanks, Crash. Timelines that seem reasonable in the abstract don't make quite as much sense when they're actually put into practice, especially in December

Were brackets E and F (and the others) supposed to be pushed back? D was pushed back to the 27th, so I thought the others would be ending after that, but E apparently ended already.

Polls in Bracket E have been reopened and extended.

Bracket F has been extended also.

G and H are pending.

If I have the time, some time next week I'll at least attempt to consolidate all my OCR and other songs that have been nommed (that I have in mp3 form somewhere) into one folder and upload a good portion of nominations in non-mp3gained format, if y'all'd like.

Brackets G and H still need to be extended; otherwise, G will be ending today.

Ok. Every remaining bracket is now extended.

Phew. Thanks for the further extensions. I definitely plan to vote on everything, but the past few days have been killer in terms of work. I'll try to get to everything.

Bah. About to be 12/30, but I'm gonna post brief choices for all of Bracket F anyway; so much material; hopefully my F votes can be counted.

Additional Spam:
Alright, I voted on everything. And don't be a hater on Bracket F being closed; y'all better count those votes too, I highlighted all my votes in Bracket F in red bold.

If it's a vBulletin limitation, that's understood, but for the next round, I'd say give a nice lengthy voting period without staggering the bracket closing times. That was definitely too hard to keep track of.

I could edit the poll if it was given an okay - whether that's a general consensus or from Orion as the organizer, I'm not sure - but it should be noted that the only results your vote directly effects would be tying up 161 Red Wings Over Baron and 096 Cerebral Rose Jam for second in F04. BTW, I can change the tally but if I did, your name wouldn't display in the public results.

Liontamer's request here is the closest we've come to a mistaken vote, there's been no requests to change votes this contest so far. It's been kinda nice.

Now that the last brackets are finishing up, I've a request:

For the subsequent rounds, could the original tracks be reuploaded without mp3gaining? As much as I tried, I just couldn't get past the diminished sound. I like to hear things nice and loud so that I can focus upon different layers and I had difficulty doing that for some tracks. It affected my willingness to vote, as I wasn't sure if a song sounded muffled due to mp3gaining or by its own flaws.

There's also the point that if I really like a track, I'll right-click and save. I'm certain others do this too. I'd rather not save a track that's going to have volume issues.

Well, gaining is nice to get all the tracks to roughly the same perceived volume so that you don't have to turn the sound up or down after every track and none has a specific advantage just by being mastered louder. Of course, it is rather a bit of a nuisance when that target volume is so freakin' low, but I don't see any reason why turning the system volume up isn't an adequate solution. I never had to max out the volume for contest tracks, even the ones that demanded blasting.

Then again, I had to turn the volume of the incoming message sound in my IM client down so that I could listen to the music cranked without bursting my eardrums whenever someone sent me something. So that's a downside.

If you want to remove the gaining from any tracks you have, you should be able to use the program yourself, assuming you're running Windows. The Mac GUI version of the program oddly doesn't support undoing, so you have to command line it.

Yeah, it's not difficult to ungain everything, I'm just lazy, just select "Undo gain changes".

so we can completely undo even without having the originals?

Yep. Just drag them all into MP3Gain and choose "Undo Gain changes" (or something like that).

Also, I ended up not getting around to listening and voting in the majority of this first round. Four songs in each matchup (particularly while visiting relatives and not having good access to the computer/speakers) was just too much. I'll definitely take part starting with the next round, though; two songs will be much easier.

Originally Posted by Drakken

Yep. Just drag them all into MP3Gain and choose "Undo Gain changes" (or something like that).

So what you're saying is that I need to install a program so that I can undo everything that program does?

That's the most fucking retarded thing I've heard in weeks.

My idea is better: don't mp3gain the tracks in the first place. I'd rather fiddle with my own volume knob than suffer because the median volume turned out to be far below optimal.

The thing about MP3Gain is that it works in both directions. It lowers the volumes of tracks that are louder than the target volume, but it also raises the volumes of ones that are softer. I see benefit in making sure all the tracks are at roughly the same volume for music contests (loudness war, etc.), but I also see benefit in giving everyone the tracks unaltered. :|

However, when the target volume is lower than the volume of every single track by a good degree, you have a serious problem.

Originally Posted by wvlfpvp

so we can completely undo even without having the originals?

MP3Gain stores the gain information in special APE tags, so as long as the tags are still in the file, the changes should be completely undoable.