Mix Challenge - Gossip and Discussion

[folderol]

The principle issue for me is time.
Those that know me will have seen that I rarely post new music in the cafe anymore, and seldom join the cafe contest, whereas I used to be a regular in both. As well as the usual RL stuff, and trying to keep my head above water musically, I am now in the middle of a massive refactoring of the Yoshimi soft-synth.
Sorry, but the mix challenge is over the horizon

[Uncle E]

I think it wouldn't be a problem to not have the author be involved. For that matter, if the author isn't involved and isn't actually looking to make use of the final mix, then the whole second round of mixing won't be necessary.

[Compyfox]

The principle issue for me is time.
...
Sorry, but the mix challenge is over the horizon

Then you have a personal reason why you can't join. This is understandable. But it's not understandable why your personal reason is an issue for others.

Like I said, it's not like we ask for a song, and then abandon the song providers in the process. Previous providers can (hopefully) confirm that we care.



Also - I mainly revived the thread because of this post:
http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic ... 0#p6524290

Please don't forget to read and comment.
Thanks in advance.

[harryupbabble]

In an effort to look for solutions and to help out, I ask... will it be too much work to monitor the social media(s) for phrases like "vote for me at the mix challenge so I can win" and then reprimand or even prevent that rule-breaking mixer participant from participating again in the Mix Challenge? Surely a program can be written to do the monitoring of social medias for phrases, like, as mentioned before "mix challenge", "vote for me", or whatever else, etc.

I was surprised at the idea that people would actually try to rig the results at the Mix Challenge, but I guess it's possible. People try and do rig elections so why not at the Mix Challenge too. But are you sure it was happening at the MC?

I really want to participate by being a song submitter (if not song then tune) and you are probably right that people who want to submit for the first time should at least try it once and see what happens and see if it is such a hassle being a judge of who should win. But I'm still reluctant. Scrabble eats a lot of my time already. It's not just a hobby for me like music-making is at the moment. It flips flop.

But if community voting still existed, I wouldn't mind participating as a voter among many if it is done anonymously. I could maybe find the time for that because it would be leisurely and voting is not the same as interacting, in terms of time requirement. But if you say that community voting didn't work in the past then does that mean that there are no further ways to make the community voting idea work and stick with it? Community voting seems to be the norm in everything else, like politics. What is their "rig prevention"?

But if community voting did exist in the past then the idea that the song submitter should NOT do the judging was okay and it was only because "rigging" was suspected and the community was too small at that time so the idea of community voting was abandoned?

Am I being naive and misunderstanding your point of view? Anyways, it's just my input. But of course, if my input is rubbish then it can always be discarded. But I hope the Mix Challenge thrives. When I first became aware of it I thought "hey that's one good idea".

PS: is KVR's PM system the only one you use to communicate with tune submitters? It seems to be not working in my case.

[Compyfox]

Once again - just as pressing are questions in this post:
http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic ... 0#p6524290

In an effort to look for solutions and to help out, I ask... will it be too much work to monitor the social media(s) for phrases like "vote for me at the mix challenge so I can win" and then reprimand or even prevent that rule-breaking mixer participant from participating again in the Mix Challenge? Surely a program can be written to do the monitoring of social medias for phrases, like, as mentioned before "mix challenge", "vote for me", or whatever else, etc.

We're not programmers (at least I am not), and such a task would involve somebody that regularly monitors social media and does nothing else. The Mix Challenge staff currently exists of three people, unpaid. Uncle E (who is the original initiator, also sponsor), satyatunes (did our designs and handles the won licenses) and me (I do everything technical and currently keep the challenge running).

Long story short - yes, it would be too much extra work.

I was surprised at the idea that people would actually try to rig the results at the Mix Challenge, but I guess it's possible. People try and do rig elections so why not at the Mix Challenge too. But are you sure it was happening at the MC?

Happens all the time on challenge communities where outside sources can do votes for popularity. This can go both ways: a) promotion, b) fans totally destroying the competition. The more known you are, the bigger the impact. I call that an unfair advantage.

It was NOT happening in the early Mix Challenges, since only the participants, the hosts and the song provider were allowed to vote. But this caused a lot of negative flack from song providers who felt "overvoted" with mixes that were better than the popular one.

Which is why we took over for a month, and then ultimately switched to "client evaluation". And it worked without any further negative criticism since.

I really want to participate by being a song submitter (if not song then tune) and you are probably right that people who want to submit for the first time should at least try it once and see what happens and see if it is such a hassle being a judge of who should win. But I'm still reluctant. Scrabble eats a lot of my time already. It's not just a hobby for me like music-making is at the moment. It flips flop.

I did not mean to start as "song provider", but as regular mix participant. See how the system works, how the interaction is.

I'm the CTO of the challenge - only those I worked with (read: the song providers) can give feedback how things work according to their own experience. If we as hosts did a good job, if they felt left out or something. But what I read so far behind the scenes, is that the response was generally positive.

But if community voting did exist in the past then the idea that the song submitter should NOT do the judging was okay and it was only because "rigging" was suspected and the community was too small at that time so the idea of community voting was abandoned?

Again, this is no songwriting or remix competition, where the "popular vote" has the final word. We simulate a client/business situation on a way more relaxed scale. As written earlier, we do need certain rules and restrictions, else things would go too much awry.

We only step in if we don't hear from the song provider after a certain amount of time while the challenge was running. This happened twice so far, though in the latter case we got a life sign eventually and the song provider finished the challenge.

But I hope the Mix Challenge thrives. When I first became aware of it I thought "hey that's one good idea".

This is ultimately my hope as well.
But the challenge can't continue, if we don't get new content to mix.

Which brings me back to this post on top of regularly bumping the "Campaign Thread" in the Music Cafe (we didn't know where else to putit):
http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic ... 0#p6524290

PS: is KVR's PM system the only one you use to communicate with tune submitters? It seems to be not working in my case.

We don't have an official contact mail yet, but I can think of two possible solutions:
a) if you're on Twitter, contact @MixChallenge
b) if you can at least RECEIVE PM's, then I'll throw you a contact mail and we can go from there

I worked with a couple of clients via mail in the last 2 years.

[Jorgeelalto]

IMO:

1. I don't think you should release the schedule to the public, just because those are plans that you might change in those months. I think the feedback thing is great, but not enough.

2. The webpage is a good idea, the FTP is better, and the dedicated forum isn't. The thing is that here in KVR, this contest has more views than it would have in its forum. I knew about it just because I browsed KVR.

3. The donation stuff could be set up, and you could see whether the people donates or not. Setting up a "Donate" PayPal button is easy, I think, it doesn't require any maintenance.

4. I don't have a clear opinion about the prizes since I haven't participated in here yet

[Compyfox]

1) Could you elaborate a bit? What feedback type would you prefer? You've been a song provider in the past (thanks once again), so... how could the interaction improve? What if we don't need to shuffle things around, would a public schedule still be a bad move?

2) thanks for the feedback so far

3) I'd like to see some general opinion on donations first before we may be kicking something along those lines off.

4) Not as mix participant, no.

[Jorgeelalto]

The thing is... I do have a schedule of the upcoming tracks (not only to not get confused myself). With names, song providers and the genre. My question to you as song providers, participants and fans of the challenge would be:

Should I release that schedule to the public?

OK, so the short answer to that is: No.

The long one:

I do have a couple of concerns about that however:
1) fan-bases might form around certain tracks, which might result in a lot of participation for one track, and no participation for another - this would hurt the most

That's so true I think it's the main reason not to release your schedule. Getting less participants to MC is one of the worst things that can happen now.

2) it takes away from the suspense of "what track will we see next?"

Yes. And that's a good reason to keep checking this subforum once a month, at least. I usually do

3) some song providers might be ticked off like "why am I so late in the queue"; even though we do work "first in, first out" and only shuffle around the order if one provider really can't tackle a certain month, or is unresponsive to PMs - this could drastically backfire

I don't think that's very important, but just because I can't understand people being so stupid (I mean, getting upset about "being late in the queue") -- On the other hand, since doing the work as the "client" is somehow "time-consuming" (not at all compared to your work, Compyfox ), "clients" seeing the schedule could organize their months according to when they have to evaluate and listen to the mixes. Changing their plans (the month in which they are featured) may be worse than just telling them their assigned month just when you are sure it'll take place.

4) chances are that the schedule will be shuffled around on short notice, making this even more problematic

That's the thing I wanted to express some lines before

This is including us walking the song providers through every concern behind the scenes btw.

Time-consuming in your case (and I suppose in everybody's case), since you help us so much It really creates a good experience for the people who participate as "clients", really.

But this is where your feedback comes in. You can say "okay, this sounds like a cool plan", or "nah, I'm not liking that, because...". I try to offer a bit more interaction between the challenge hosts, the song providers and the audience. But I don't know if this would seriously backfire. My hope is, that this results in a "these tracks are interesting - I want to submit something as well", rather than a "ugh... my track would be so late, it doesn't make any sense".

I think the "tracks interesting, want to submit sth" could already happen. They just have to be able to look for all submitted tracks in one place -- the webpage could be great for this. A Blogger page could do the trick, seriously.

The "my track would be late" thing is scary, for sure.

Just my opinion, I hope I got myself understood.

[Compyfox]

I understood you fine. Thanks for that. And I hope your commentary is not the only one (again: link to the questions: viewtopic.php?p=6524290#p6524290 )


Regarding finding the tracks in one place, this is why I maintain the "rules and guidelines" thread. The last two posts link to all challenges and the provided songs so far. Sometimes people can find (a day or two early) which track will be next. Depends on how much time I have to keep up with the updates:
viewtopic.php?f=62&t=415154

[an-electric-heart]

I'm not asking for anything for myself, I'm genuinely telling you how it is and trying to help out.

Here goes (we'll see if people from the past agree): Basically, being a song provider isn't fun, it's a lot of work. I think there needs to be more incentive than just "exposure", throw some of those prizes in the song providers direction, I can guarantee you'll get more people wanting to contribute.

[Compyfox]

Interesting feedback so far. I'm curious what the other song providers can add to that.

[camsr]

More incentive for song providers will get this thing kicking off.

Also, I preferred how voting was handled from the beginning. Only participants may vote. But that wasn't good enough, appearantly, so I suggest amending the rules to let the song provider cast a "supervote" since it's their song.

This is how voting should work:
Participants (mixers) get 3 votes and must vote for 3 entries.
Each vote is counted by 5 for 1st, 4 for 2nd, and 2 for 3rd, as that gives the best vote a lead based on the total.
The provider gets a supervote which counts maybe 2 or 3 times the points of participants. This way the "quality judgement" is democratized and may help reveal a clearly better mix, if more participants vote for different songs than the provider.

[Compyfox]

More incentive for song providers will get this thing kicking off.

I'd still like to know "what" that incentive would be. Or how people think it "should be".

To me, it does feel like bribing (in a very bad way) people into helping, just to keep this going rather than be like "Hey, you get excellent mixes for free, what you'd usually pay hundreds of <insert currency here> pay for - your only investment - a bit of your sparetime".

We had clients that really wanted a different spin on their mixes and were glad to be part of the Challenge. We had clients that we're like "I'm totally lost, please help me" and they were happy that they eventually got that help on top of learning new tricks. And then we also had clients like Bjulin (MC22) who was like "I do this for sh*ts and giggles - because I like games like that" and after his Challenge was over, he was like "surprise bonus gift, thanks for your work, have a freebie".

Nobody is ultimately loosing here.

Also, I preferred how voting was handled from the beginning. Only participants may vote. But that wasn't good enough, appearantly, so I suggest amending the rules to let the song provider cast a "supervote" since it's their song.

This is how voting should work:

Honestly - why is there such a fix on a voting system? I really don't get it!

It didn't work out in early days. And we did have an override system for the hosts/headmasters and song provider back in the days. I still remember the backlash clearly. Getting a comment thrown at your head like "you people know jack about music and proper mixing - this challenge sucks", or complaints via PM, is exactly why we introduced the change. IIRC, you were among those people constantly criticizing the challenge since day 1, yet you never really joined any consecutive challenges. In fact, I kind of expected to see you in here with your opinion how things should "ideally work". And here you are...


I can only emphasize on the followings: the Mix Challenge is not the "One Synth Challenge" or the "Music Cafe Songwriting Competition". Here voting does work - since it's all individual tracks made out of thin air. Nothing that utilizes the same source of content (a finished production) that somebody created and ultimately says "I like that, but I don't like that!". The focus is completely different - sound design and songwriting skills for the OSC, general songwriting skills for the MCSC, mixing according to given tracks with a "basic road map" for the MC.

We split the workload early on so that everyone gets their fair share of work. You can't expect that we as hosts do all the legwork (song acquiring, integrity checks, hosting, communication, promotion, license acquiring, even more promotion) - then doing song backups, judging/voting, etc, while the mix participants try to get their mix done in time as good as possible (read: put a lot of effort into it), and in the end the client is ticked off by the results of the "public vote" for basically doing nothing. This just doesn't work - this was the very reason the voting system failed, and why we switched it for our current "song provider does the evaluation" method.

And you know what?

It was taken well, it's working most of the time. In fact, I'm sometimes even asked BTS "hey, here is my feedback - is this judging fair and okay this way?!". Even then, I don't let the people hanging. I read every PM, even give suggestions to improve things.



I get that providing new content is work, especially if you've never created a "mix package" (again, I/we walk you through the process! And I'm really patient with users behind the scenes - I constantly get a "thank you, I did learn a lot" in return - things are not done within one PM). I also get that judging and writing feedback takes time (as you probably remember, I did this a couple of times for the challenge - and those that follow my general writing here on KVR, know how much I pay attention to detail and/or try to dumb things down).

But this is all part of the deal!

It's not like we exceeded hundreds of submissions per challenge, where a public vote might dramatically change the involved workload! In fact, there is an internal unwritten rule for the current evaluation concept, where only the top 15-20 tracks should be ideally judged if that is to ever happen (still with 5-7 particpants for Round 2, yet recently mostly only barely 5 are selected). However, we don't have the status of big challenges yet (even after 2 years, and I we are far from inactive in terms of drumming up noise!), where there are usually 3-10 judges sitting down on material for 1-2 weeks, doing nothing more for 8 hours a day. Or like with IndabaMusic where there is a "public vote" system that can be rigged via outside influence. I mentioned it before: "hey, vote for my track!" - the more popular you are, the better your chances to win, which poses an unfair advantage over other users who maybe had BETTER productions!

In fact, this was the main reason why we went away from the voting system.

How do you think this would go if you find a mix engineer, that you provide your song with, yet you neither give them a certain direction regarding a mix, but also no feedback after the first mixdown. Then in the end you're annoyed that it didn't work out as you hoped and you lost a lot of money. In this case, it's ultimately only you to blame due to lack of communication/interaction. Since you said "I'm sorry - this is just too much work for me".


The only work you really invest as song provider in this challenge:
- is providing the RAW files (which is really easy for certain hosts these days, and again we walk you through, we invest the time for the communication, check the files for mistakes, etc)
- answering questions in the thread (if there even are any!)
- listening to all mixes after the challenge, give feedback (which can only be bullet points!) and declare the next mix round (sadly, recently a lot of providers ignore the "5-7 participant" recommendation and only go for bar minimum)
- then repeat that again after 5 days of the second mix round and select the Winners Podium

In between, you always have 3-5 days for judging, and most of the time we're not pointing our fingers on to a clock and be like "you're there yet?!".

You basically only lose out on time for waiting until your track is up. And then essentially 3-5 days for intensive listening/evaluation. That isn't much compared to what the mix participants (cleaning up/fixing broken tracks, mixing, checking that things are flawless prior to submitting since mistakes are a reason for disqualification), or we as hosts do (promotion, hosting, everything technical, communication with the song providers, communication with sponsors, interaction of forums and social media, etc)

Again - I get the commentary. I know the workload - I've been there.



But would a return to the "voting system" (which didn't work in the long run) or "bribes to get more source material to mix" really be the ultimate solution to everything? I honestly don't think so.





These discussions are important, no doubt. However even then, it's constantly like "you're doing it wrong - no wonder that it doesn't work out - you should do it like this..." while watching from the side of the field, and if things go awry, it's "told you so!".

That is IMO really counter productive.




So could we please go away from the topic "voting system" and take a look at the more pressing matters?

Like: new song material (my biggest concern for over a year at this point! And every other thread in the Music Cafe is like "I need help" or "feedback please", not counting the Production Techniques threads on "How to do this/that"), homepage and general presentation/interaction, possible donations for the workload we put into, are the sponsors still adequate/interesting, ...

That has a higher priority IMO than trying to "fix" something that is not broken, only "cumbersome" to some.

[camsr]

I'm okay with the provider-choice system. Everyone gets every version of the mix to listen to. In fact there's plenty of prizes to win also!

[Compyfox]

Not sure if...



Seriously... what? I'm kind of confused right now.