I will be holding a compo this upcoming Friday/Saturday.  I've played around with a few of the song choices that I may put up (just to ensure the remixability is there).  With that said, I'll be giving a good chunk of Friday and to the end of Saturday for the competition.  I may even rip the midi I put together for this one, so you guys have a simple set of tracks to work with.  If you're interested in helping set up this compo with wav samples from the anime, feel free to contact me, I'll be on irc very frequently (though I may be idling).

-Xal

Competitions and Projects
  I've designed a system that will handle Competitions and Projects that will tie songs to each one of these projects more easily.  This way you can see if a song you're downloading got second place in a competition - click on the competition to see the overall results, and then click on the link to view the forum post for the competition.  I'm looking at doing something similar to the way ocremix handled projects with regards to - it has it's own unique site per project.  This really simplifies development and segments out the 'custom project code' from the physical site.  A project recently came in and requires that this is worked on immediately.

This means that projects and competitions will be available on the front page and more of a "big deal" than what it currently is.  Other than what is said in the patch, I want to start having some more competitions, or group projects to create more of a community of remixers.

Which leads me to....


III. Compos

If you remember, we used to have Compos every now and then.  I want to get some feedback on when this week people would be available for an hour or two hour Compo.  If I can get a schedule together, I think we can start doing this on a regular basis.



Anyways it's great to be back - lets start pumpin' out some rhythm!

[21:34] <Xaleph> Last week I had mentioned several changed would take place
[21:35] <Xaleph> I created the Judge title and gave it to two people already
[21:35] <Xaleph> I set up the boards properly and cleaned them up for the Judges
[21:35] <Xaleph> We have 2 submissions right now in the panel, which is great
[21:36] <Xaleph> I had talked about adding a list of hot anime to be released as well as current top anime
[21:36] <Xaleph> And movies in the states to be released
[21:37] <Xaleph> I held a simpsons movie competition and I contacted someone who is currently in the anime industry to give me some advice on where she goes for news
[21:38] <Xaleph> I'm trying to figure out how to go about putting this list up, I initially said I would create a remixer forum, but tbh that's what we wanted to get away from in the first place
[21:38] <Xaleph> having a ton of sub forums
[21:39] <Xaleph> So I was thinking of either putting into one of the current forums and/or using a front page section to list them
[21:40] <Xaleph> anyways those were some of the main points and the actions associated to them
[21:41] <Xaleph> I was also able to write a remix for the site and complete it, hopefully you'll see it soon =P

Suggestions from those that attended:
1) Poll for hottest anime of the season
2) Have a forum to discuss anime and suggest most memorable theme

Attendance:
Xaleph (Lead & Notes)
Avaris
Chaz

TRIM(LEADING '0' FROM SUBSTRING_INDEX(p.subject, ' ', 1))

I think AR needs a damn good logo.  One that's good enough to keep forever, as I intend to do with OCR's.  One that there'd be no reason to ever abandon, and that - even if you keep site theming support intact, which I'm still against - will remain consistent regardless of the site's design.

There's several ways to handle this:

-> I could do several prototypes and it could be "all me" (i.e. I'm volunteering to do it if no one else wants to or Carb thinks that's the best idea.)
-> A few of us here could do prototypes and vote on the best.
-> We could open it up to everybody, make posts inviting submissions by X deadline both here and on the OCR forums, and then hold a private vote or a public vote.

Basic guidelines:

-> Should not include copyrighted characters or other copyrighted materials
-> Should be simple enough to not lose legibility when repoduced at smaller resolutions, i.e. not be overly ornate or representational
-> Should not require color to be discernible/coherent i.e. should look fine when reduced to white on black or vice versa
-> Should kick plentiful amounts of ass

Obviously, that last one's a little subjective.  I think a logo's quite important, and lots of large corporations seem to agree with me.  Not that AR is a large corporation, but the goal of presenting a unified front and achieving familiarity and brand recognition are very close in spirit.

                Welcome to the first collection of awesome 
                  anime chips! Hopefully public interest
                     will push us to make another one.
                       Feel free to send me requests!
                  For this chipdisk I decided to cover OP
                     themes from the most popular anime,
                           though Tenemis wanted his 
                       Azuki-chan ending to be used. 
                              This is okay!
                 If another anime chipdisk is created, I
                    may focus on BGM or ending themes.

                You may notice some of the songs are a lot
                  different than the original. Especially
                those awful OverCoat tracks! Well, changes
                happen when you compress something down to
                 4 channels. There are also some things I
                just can't track. At least the melody is
                                 still intact.

                     Don't forget to turn looping on :)
                      a lot of the songs take advantage
                        of song looping, and will flow
                            better if this is on.

Copied and pasted for your ease.

Thanks soc!

There are quite a few bugs at this time, so I apologize in advance.

I have this next week off on vacation at this one resort. It DOES have internet access and I will be developing down there to resolve everything I can asap.

images

New images will be loaded from what soc and mduo14 (previously 13) has compiled. The database will need to be updated with the new file names in order to display them on the front page. I'll try to get this done today.

broken sections

There are some broken sections on the site, including the display link, anime-search, and requests. These will be worked on and at least have a filler page till something has been developed.

logo

We'll start a competition soon on an official AR logo. Please stay tuned if you are artistic and want to have a shot at it. If you do send me a logo that I fall in love with, I may just cancel the competition and go with that =P. I'm a pretty easy going guy.

There are a few other bugs on the site that we will resolve - I appreciate your patience as we update the site.

I know many remixers here have songs invested in the site.  Because of this, I have invested much of my time in developing an xml based backend structure to make maintenance and development easier and cleaner.  I personally feel that the site is somewhat lacking, but because of the new architecture, it will be much easier to add the sections I have planned and some programmed on my dev computer.

I hope you enjoy the site, much work has been put into this, with the help of our dev team (RasutoIbuki, djcubez, djpretzel), test/debug team (too many to mention link here), as well as others who helped design, plan, and provide new images, including mduo and soc.  I couldn't do it by myself and I want to give credit where it's due.

----Talking Forums----
News - Place for site news, mainly for Carbunk1e.
Site Discussion - Place for questions, suggested improvements, and general ideas about the site. (Possibly removed or made mod viewable only)
General Discussion - Place to chat, keep it PG-13 please.
Media Reviews - Place for reviews on books, manga, movies, music, and anime.

----Remixing Forums----
General Music Discussion - Post your WIPs, Projects, Compos, and Questions here. Sort of a Musicians Town square. (Thinking about merging requests here. Will put in a tagging system. IE: REQUEST - Excel Saga, PROJECT - FMA Project.)
Submissions - Post your submissions to the site here.
Requests - Post your requests here.
Remix Reviews - Post reviews of remixes on the site here.

Just putting forth a development plan at this point:

1) Finish Schema changes (it's done as far as I can see, just want to review the changes one more time).

2) Migrate queries and database calls to the new schema

3) Finish the 'add new remix to the site' system (half of it is complete - just stopped working on it to focus on the schema).

4) Add Anime Section - where the songs will be organized by anime. I may also create an 'ocremix' style look for this, where the picture of the anime is there, and all the items underneath. In fact, I may make this the alphabet quick links where a drop down of the remixers and other items that begin with the letter appear. Just a thought (let me know what you guys think)

5) Debugging the moderate, major, and critical errors submitted by the debuggers.


After Deployment of the site:

i) Add Judge section (tentatitve, will release the site before this is done as I could just easily put this in the forums)
ii) Admin features - for judge/adding management, not a bad idea to start it a bit before deployment so I have some basic functions.
iii) Fun stuff, like the russian roulette - possibly some 'quick skin designer' where you'd change like 4-5 colors and 4-5 images to create a quick skin. Just something for fun.

We finally worked out some of the kinks in the schema and I'm now migrating data.  The XML re-structuring (backend php work) is complete.

I'm not sure what's going on with the Forums - but I'll go ahead and make the changes that Rasuto suggested if he doesn't do it before the 15th of May.

quotes

we have bold
we have bold
we have underline

And loads of other things

like we can start paragraphs and stuff

and add      lots of spaces         

These are just tests do display on the front page in Anime Remix 3.0