April Fool's Day Follow-Up

[Yaginuma]

Time to be serious for another 364 days. The Ranked Listings were generated by putting fake songs from our nusic directory at the top, followed by a random listing of real songs after that, with fake hit statistics. Originally, we were pondering just showing a single listing of the most popular songs, such as this real listing (which represents hits for roughly the first 20 days of March) with the fake songs inserted in, but I thought it would be better to offer the new ranked listing "feature" instead. It was a fun programming task, until I deleted the python script just a few hours before it was going to be used. Sigh... I reprogrammed it in 1 hour fortunately, with multiple backups along the way.

[Horn]

"Nusic directory", ha? Seriously, are those for real? Had no idea there were such a thing on the site.

Good times, anyway. First of April is always a breeze on VGM, hah.

Time to be serious for another 364 days.

Oh, you gotta be screwing with me...

[Merit Celaire]

I still think it would be benefical if the file download hit statistics would be a real feature for each music section of the site. That way, for us MIDI sequences, we can see how well our contributions fared in regards to how many times the file was downloaded.

Just my two cents. =P

[Rexy]

In reality, I don't think it's much of a good idea. If you find a song that you think would be awesome to make a MIDI out of, then you should go for it no matter how popular the game is. No one downloads midis here based on the MIDI transcriber's skill, but more on wanting to listen to videogame music. That's why I rarely ever make MIDIs of songs other people have done before

Happy A.F.D. nonetheless

[Blitz Lunar]

http://www.vgmusic.com/nusic/everything/ if you want all the joke songs in one place

[Laike]

I'm sorry I missed all the fun and didn't throw in my usual terrible MIDI file to add to the craziness. Congratulations to everyone who made my ears bleed, though!

[CtrlAltDestroy]

Holy crap... I didn't notice this prank until the day after. I guess I have to take responsibility for phonesong and SUPERMIX.

Wow... I still have a lot of those midis saved somewhere. Brings back memories.

In reality, I don't think it's much of a good idea. If you find a song that you think would be awesome to make a MIDI out of, then you should go for it no matter how popular the game is. No one downloads midis here based on the MIDI transcriber's skill, but more on wanting to listen to videogame music. That's why I rarely ever make MIDIs of songs other people have done before

I wouldn't say so. Nowadays, the internet has grown big enough, connections are faster, hard drives are bigger, and people can more easily find the actual game music they want, rather than having to rely on midi renditions of it. Heck, if you just want to hear the stuff, it's all on YouTube somewhere. I would say that the role of video game midis has been reduced to cellphone ringtones, tracks to help people make MP3 remixes, and use in fan games. When I load up this site to search for a midi, the quality and accuracy of the midi is a huge factor.

[Rexy]

You've got a point that technology has advanced so much over the past 10 years. But I still think that popularity contests aren't good for any of us. No matter how far the technology would grow, those who generally download MIDIs would STILL mostly go for what has the bigger nostalgic "click" to them anyway, which in turn would affect growth in the sequencer's skill in both directions - fearing that they didn't do well on lesser-known tracks, or sucking without realising while sequencing something significantly more well-known.

If this debate is somehow going to erupt into a forum drama, I'll make a stop here >.>

[Powerlord]

I reprogrammed it in 1 hour fortunately, with multiple backups along the way.

...and this is why all new site development is going to be under version control!

In reality, I don't think it's much of a good idea. If you find a song that you think would be awesome to make a MIDI out of, then you should go for it no matter how popular the game is. No one downloads midis here based on the MIDI transcriber's skill, but more on wanting to listen to videogame music. That's why I rarely ever make MIDIs of songs other people have done before

Would this be a bad time to point out that I rarely listen to MIDIs any more? My computer has 1.7TB of storage space on it... Heck, my MP3 player has 80GB of storage space!

[Yaginuma]

I still think it would be benefical if the file download hit statistics would be a real feature for each music section of the site. That way, for us MIDI sequences, we can see how well our contributions fared in regards to how many times the file was downloaded.

One concern: It would be too easy to cheat and download a song multiple times just to boost rankings.

[BlackJackRatso]

hmm darn, I was to busy with my own shenanigans that I forgot to visit here. Oh well I got some pranks on my end (ever tape the end of sink? and repeat multiple times to a college dorm?)

On the serious note. could you switch to a general vote system (like youtube). Or that add an IP tracker to the hit counter to prevent repeats?

[Blitz Lunar]

"log in to vote" seems the best way to go if it were to be implemented.

[X]

Except that then you'd probably be dealing in a number of bogus shilling accounts that people would use to boost their own ratings. That's not to mention that people could use personal contacts as a means for vote-trading anyway. Any way you slice it, you're gonna end up with problems. As nice as such a feature would be, there are also ways in which it's implementation would be severely lacking or, at the very least, potentially disadvantageous.

[CtrlAltDestroy]

I honestly cannot imagine a midi creator doing that. I think that a person who posts their own midi file to the site would be much more interested in hearing feedback from others rather than inflating their score so that it stays at 5 stars.

Worst case scenario, someone posts a crappy midi, and they know full well it's a crappy midi, so they register 10 accounts (or as many as they can before they get bored) to vote it 5 stars, for the sake of an ego trip. I still don't think that can compete with the 50 other people who will hear the midi, think it's crap, and vote it down to 1.5 stars.

The system has some problems in theory, but in practice I think it could work.

[KDS]

I think we should appoint some judges for specific game MIDIs. In this way no cheating can be there.