GFA Revival is finally a delicious cake

Hello video game music fans,

After over a year of countless delays and kidnappings of our headmaster GFA5 is finally going into open beta stage very soon. And all members of Gamingforce are invited to give this new system a whirl. Our goal this time is more than just providing video game music for download. We wish to provide one of the most reliable game music resources on the internet. Trying to find accurate track lists for your favorite video games? What about sheet music, covers, lyrics and user submitted reviews? Look no further than our extensive database built by members of the community. Our main objective is to create a community oriented database with every VGM album in existence. Yes, that means that registered users will be able to submit albums to the database. A torrent section with soundtrack downloads will come at a later time.

We don’t have a beta launch date just yet. We are working on ironing out a few more bugs before the opening. We are all very excited about this project and can’t wait for it to go live

Feel free to join us in the official IRC channel #gfaudio on irc.xelium.net. We hope to see you there!

-GFA Staff

It's... It's not April fools. And I ain't dreaming... Whoa o__o

Very good news. No, incredibly good news! ;D Fantastic job~

The GFA Development forum got moved out here, so I got all confused when I didn't see it in the bottom of the forum listing.

I finally made the announcement module in the main GFA page start pulling threads from this subforum.

Testing bbcode...

Here are some sample shots:



Search Results
Album Info Page
My Collection
About GFA

Haha everyone has widescreen now

So it's exclusively VGM, then.

Depth over breadth for the moment, yes. I'd love to expand to other categories/genres, but it'd be counterproductive to stretch ourselves thin at this stage.

Originally Posted by Cal

So it's exclusively VGM, then.

We've discusses that, and right now we are focused on VGM. Anime (and other genres) will undoubtedly come at a later date though.

Also, if anybody has any ideas or suggestions, we are completely open minded. Feel free to give us your thoughts at any time.

I thought you were going VGM-only because of tradition and legal reasons.

I wouldn't mind film and classical too, but I wonder how popular you can get before important bodies become solicitor-happy.

What about gamerips? I haven't really followed the discussion about this, but will gamerips be featured too? Or are we just going to have to wait for cubed to finish his project...?

Originally Posted by Killy

What about gamerips? I haven't really followed the discussion about this, but will gamerips be featured too? Or are we just going to have to wait for cubed to finish his project...?

Game rips aren't really suitable for this database, because it covers albums (CDs, tapes, etc,) which is an incompatible classification method.

For GFA, the basic unit is the album. A single album could cover many games, and there can be multiple albums per game.

For a game-rip catalogue, the basic unit is the game. A single game could have multiple game rips, but a game rip won't cover more than one game (except for Dubble's :P ).

So, speaking from a taxonomy point of view, and not from a technical point of view, these are incompatible. The best starting point for a game-rip database would be a database populated with every game ever made, with composer information, and whatever else you'd want. Think Gamefaqs, not GMR or JGML.

With all that said, there could be a companion database, that starts to cataloge game rips, but that's a huge project, and far off.

Double Post:

Originally Posted by Cal

I thought you were going VGM-only because of tradition and legal reasons.

I wouldn't mind film and classical too, but I wonder how popular you can get before important bodies become solicitor-happy.

I'd like to emphasize that the music downloads are a minor part of the GFA project. While my opinion doesn't necessarily reflect that of the entire GFA staff, it is my feeling that this database is going to be such a huge step beyond anything that's ever been done, that it's going to have a major impact. I could even see game-music composers and companies using it for their own research. As such, I believe that we should limit the scope of the downloadable music, perhaps keeping it to older unavailable albums, or rips.

These days, it's easy enough to get whatever you want anyway, with bittorent, DC++, the request forum, and ffshrine. GFA needs to build and maintain a level of respectability, and becoming a mass-download bazaar would undermine that.

As for film and classical music, my vote would be 'no way.' Those guys (particularly the music industry) are aggressive about pursuing infringement.

So then this will be a new project, not like the old GFA? And how are we to be sure this one won't be shut down for the same reasons the old one did?

Originally Posted by Cal

I wouldn't mind film and classical too, but I wonder how popular you can get before important bodies become solicitor-happy.

I agree with SS that there shouldn't be any inclusion of non VGM at the moment, and especially for music that is already readily available in the western hemisphere.

As much as I would like to see another self-made resource on classical music, that is a completely different monster altogether, and there are already several good databases for film and classical music, usually from the record companies themselves and in places like Amazon, where they are sold.

Originally Posted by Antares

So then this will be a new project, not like the old GFA? And how are we to be sure this one won't be shut down for the same reasons the old one did?

By redirecting everyone who's looking for the FF7 OST to, say, ffshrine? =p

GFA 4.6 was terminated due to excessive bandwidth usage. I'm sure we won't be trying to emulate ffshrine anytime soon.

Pretty awesome to hear that GFA is going online soon, even if I wasn't a whole lot of help in terms of web/technical issues. I still remember the chat we had on July 31st.

Can't wait for the release!

Originally Posted by Bigblah

By redirecting everyone who's looking for the FF7 OST to, say, ffshrine? =p

GFA 4.6 was terminated due to excessive bandwidth usage. I'm sure we won't be trying to emulate ffshrine anytime soon.

No FF or Kingdom Hearts soundtracks and I think we'll be golden =P

GALBADIA HOTEL PLZ KTHX.

That looks great!!! I'm waiting to see the final result!!

So am I finally going to be able to get Kirby's Air Ride OST?