One-Synth-Challenge: General discussion thread

[rghvdberg]

Recently I've managed to setup an account for digital distribution for audio.
Songs will be published on iTunes, Spotify, Deezer and other portals.
I'm planning to upload the top 5 of this and forthcoming months.
Of course I'll ask for approval of these persons.

Any revenue (if any )will be put back in the OSC for nice prizes.

This is all new to me and have some investigation to on the required format of the audio.
mp3 and wav are ok, but they need to be in a specific bitrate and samplerate.

Will keep you posted.

[Frostline]

RE: The paid vs free plugins.

By BJP posting the link to this thread I assume we are to discuss it here rather than the monthly one,

As a quick aside, I don't think Synth1 was a good testbed for this experiment. The quality of the synth could have perhaps made up for weaker free effects. I think commercial effects on a weaker synth would have had a clearer impact.

Now, all I am seeing in argument in favor for the use of paid plugs is basically that it makes the task of creating an OSC track easier for those with commercial plugins.

Personally I just don't think that is a valid reason for change.

I say this because that same reason could be applied to many other rules, yet we are not changing those.
This month for example there is a much easier and workflow friendly way for me to fix an issue I am having with my track. Yet, it is against the rules so I have to work around it the best I can. It is just part of the contest.

If a reason is valid to change one rule it should be just as valid to change others, and I just don't think "workflow" cuts it.

Now I can totally see the potential frustration of having this nice expensive effect you use elsewhere all the time and the rule preventing you from using it here. I get it. It would frustrate me badly if I were in that situation too.
But I am equally frustrated where I have one sound that randomly pops or cracks and sampling a good one would quickly fix the issue. Just claiming it makes it easier does not grant me the right to sample my issue away no more than claiming it makes it easier should let your expensive reverb or channel strip slide into your OSC track.

But, with that said I am not totally against commercial plugin use for the OSC and I will provide perhaps a more valid reason in a bit.

I do think it should be either;
A) Once a year
or
B) All the time

The quarterly idea I do not think is practical.
We have some very simple rules in place for each month such as how to name your track, to list the number of FX used and enable SC downloads that many folks (including me) still get wrong from time to time.
Having some odd once a quarter rule is just going to lead to confusion and problems.

Now with the idea of allowing commercial plugins I think there should be a price you should pay for using them in the OSC.

How much is that convenience factor worth to you?

I have been pondering that awhile now, and I think 3-5 points per instance seems fair.
The idea being that each time you reach for a commercial plug it costs you a bit, not a lot but it could affect your choice as to use it or not.
I believe such a point penalty might have changed the tie we ended up with this month.

Finally, what is a good reason to allow commercial plugins to me?

It might entice effect manufactures to pony up a few prizes if they knew their products could be used in future contests and thus getting continued exposure.
Now personally I don't think I'd ever win one, but a HQ commercial effect would make a nice prize for someone.

[Frostline]

I am in need of a rule clarification.

This month the synth HY-Mono has a few issues with pops and clicks.
It has been suggested to use a DC offset plugin to eliminate some of these. This does help, but does not fix all.
I have also found that significant automation of the synth's pan control will also produce horrible pops and clicks. So I have used a plugin to work around that as well.

I still have a couple of clicks that randomly appear on at least one patch that I made. They are quite annoying. And the patch has no pan automation, a gentle attack phase and a decent release and it is played measures apart (so the filters or whatever should be back home and ready to go). I have no other ideas on how to fix it, only possibly to hide it.

If I freeze the track the clicks are always in the same spot, and I froze pre-FX so it is not something else in my FX chain causing the issue. If I re-freeze the clicks may or may not move to a new spot. Again, random.

So is it allowed to completely duck the volume of the spots in the frozen track where the clicks are?

It might be they are past the attack transient and ducking will not help(or I make it sound worse), but if they are right before the attack I think I could duck the volume to hide them.
I have not tried due to concern it would be deemed illegal since I have been told in other discussions that hiding a synth flaw is not to be done.
But the DC offset plugin is to hide a synth flaw and I have not read any mention of that being a problem.

[Eauson]

I am in need of a rule clarification.

This month the synth HY-Mono has a few issues with pops and clicks.
It has been suggested to use a DC offset plugin to eliminate some of these. This does help, but does not fix all.
I have also found that significant automation of the synth's pan control will also produce horrible pops and clicks. So I have used a plugin to work around that as well.

I still have a couple of clicks that randomly appear on at least one patch that I made. .

Have you thought about creating another instance of hy mono and just cutting pasting the offending section to the new instance. This helped me with clicks and pops?
Just depends on the amounts of instances, the main issue for me seemed to be note length, this seemed to create the most clicks, either too long or too short, wereas I wanted goldilocks

[Frostline]

Have you thought about creating another instance of hy mono and just cutting pasting the offending section to the new instance. This helped me with clicks and pops?
Just depends on the amounts of instances, the main issue for me seemed to be note length, this seemed to create the most clicks, either too long or too short, wereas I wanted goldilocks

I had thought of that. I thank you for the suggestion though.
But honestly that sounds even more potentially against the rules than what I wanted to do.
Isn't that basically making a sample?
Is that much different than copying and pasting a good section to a bad spot in the same instance?
Either way, Reaper freeze doesn't seem to allow me to cut a frozen track, so I would have to bounce and re-import which seems like having it exit the DAW, which I think is also against the rules?

I had also considered just running two instances and ducking the bad sections out.

But it more the hiding of the synth fault, not the method that I am most curious about.

I was told that simply re-freezing a track to hide a synth issue was grounds for disqualification. So I don't understand where the line is where one synth fault hiding is bad and another synth fault hiding is fine. Which is why I am asking if hiding this particular fault is within the rules.

[Eauson]

Have you thought about creating another instance of hy mono and just cutting pasting the offending section to the new instance. This helped me with clicks and pops?
Just depends on the amounts of instances, the main issue for me seemed to be note length, this seemed to create the most clicks, either too long or too short, wereas I wanted goldilocks

I had thought of that. I thank you for the suggestion though.
But honestly that sounds even more potentially against the rules than what I wanted to do.
Isn't that basically making a sample?
Is that much different than copying and pasting a good section to a bad spot in the same instance?
Either way, Reaper freeze doesn't seem to allow me to cut a frozen track, so I would have to bounce and re-import which seems like having it exit the DAW, which I think is also against the rules?

I had also considered just running two instances and ducking the bad sections out.

But it more the hiding of the synth fault, not the method that I am most curious about.

I was told that simply re-freezing a track to hide a synth issue was grounds for disqualification. So I don't understand where the line is where one synth fault hiding is bad and another synth fault hiding is fine. Which is why I am asking if hiding this particular fault is within the rules.

I meant to say, cut the midi section not a sample and create a new instanceof hy mono.
If you are freezing things you must be using a lot of instances, the shortening/lengthening of midi note really can help.

[574X]

Oh! And I just assumed the hy-mono clicks were my ol' computer having the ol' buffer problems...

There's also that crazy metallic phasing it does when it's duplicated, but upon reloading the project it's gone so if I've designed something using that tone, I have to manually duplicate it again every time I open the the file

[rghvdberg]

FYI: KVR One Synth Challenge is now on Spotify an iTunes
https://play.spotify.com/artist/6tlJ1ZvOtBAB7F3X3s9pvf

Spotify_123.jpg

I don't know the url for but I found it in the iTunes app

iTunes_122.png

[Auplant]

hey was wondering if any of you guys want to share your skype

[rghvdberg]

don't have skype
but you can always join our slack channel if you wanna hang out
pretty cool
I now one can start a google hangout from within slack, maybe skype can work too

[Compyfox]

FYI: KVR One Synth Challenge is now on Spotify an iTunes

Just to get this right... "somebody" is making global money off of entries from the OSC, and the original entrants "agreed" to that "money collection" without seeing a dime?

[rghvdberg]

That somebody would be me.

Me and bjporter have discussed this.
Any money made will be put back in the osc for prizes. Think t-shirts, coffee mugs or something like that.
Off course I will only publish the songs if you agree to it.
I can retract a song at any time too if someone wants that.

FYI I do this in my free time. I don't charge anything for publishing the songs. I've setup an account especially for the osc with the publisher boep.nl.
Setting up an album for digital distribution, as it is called, takes more than an hour. Downloading the songs, uploading via ftp, filling in numerous forms with meta data, checking song lengths, total album length etc. Also had to re-encode the tracks because of bitrates.
All in all, quit a lot of work. Not as automatic as I hoped.
It's a labor of love.

Now stream the hell out of these songs.

[Compyfox]

Sorry to "burst your bubble of positive vibe", and sorry for being a thorn in your side for a bit, but were the musicians in question even informed of this beforehand?

Where is this written on the OSC pages, that you can "buy the music, and therefore further fund the Challenge"?
Was this addressed in the rule set of the OSC, that your tracks "will be uploaded and be monetized", and is there an off-hand known "opt out" for the participants?
Is this where the recently added Cash Price comes from in the first place (which in turn gathers more interest of course, since... "money!"?

I'm not an OSC regular (I'm just not good at sound design), so I'm taking an outside view on this whole topic. But if I'd be in the position to join the OSC (since I have confidence in myself), I'd be hesitant just because of this.



And if I'd find somebody pull this with the Mix Challenge without asking the initiators first (read: contact one of my fellows or me directly), I'd be more than ticked off.

So to me - this is not about "spreading the word" and "having fun", at least not in the matter you claim it would be. This is turning into a bigger business at this point.



I mean... it's not like you pay "streaming fees" from this income at SoundCloud, or webserver fees - since the OSC page is on a Google Server. Unless I'm wrong with that notion and I just don't see the bigger picture.

[Auplant]

Just wanted to say that it would be cool if each entry track was labelled with a genre like "experimental" or "dnb", I know most of the entries are usually experimental but I think it would still be nice to see the genre for each entry because usually I might only want to hear one genre and dislike hearing too much experimental music (sorry), Just a suggestion..

[zarf]

Regarding the iTunes/Spotify posting of the OSC winners tracks

I am a fairly new participant (only the last 14 months) and I've never made it into the winning 5 yet, so just another opinion here

Compyfox, I first had some feelings quite like those you expressed in your post - I certainly feel I understand where you are coming from. I was at first surprised that this was just going ahead without a big debate (for example, compared to all the talk about paid plugins or voting rules etc!).

I have thought about it more though, and now I just feel grateful to rghvdberg (Rob ?) -with agreement from BJ - for going ahead and putting in the time and effort to set this up . Here is why I appreciate it and I don't think it is a problem myself:

1) Any winner can ask to have their track taken out and it will not be published
2) I believe in good faith that if there is any money raised it will go back to OSC
3) I think it is unlikely to be very much money, because all the tracks are freely available to the world anyway, according to the existing terms of the OSC, and
4) It is good promotion for the competition and the winning artists (who wish it) to be visible on these big platforms at all

So I would like to say: thank you Compyfox for looking after the spirit of the OSC, and thank you rghvdberg for doing this for the good of the community

Just my 2c