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2020-10-31 22:02

Frostbyte

Registered: Aug 2003
Posts: 166

Event id #3001 : 2020 Short Music Loop Competition

Let'em few seconds shine! Finally a compo to publish those sweet, sweet patterns that never evolved into complete tunes!

RULES:

1) Original, previously unreleased work. No covers, no remakes or parts of composer's own (released) tunes, or anyone's tunes, from C64 or other platforms.

2) No graphics or effects of any kind. I know this rule isn't going to be everyone's favourite, but this is a music competition, not a demo/graphics competition, and fx & gfx do affect people's ratings.
Black screen with the following static, undecorated single colour text (using standard unmodified PETSCII) in the upper left corner:

[Loop Name] by [Composer Name]
(C) 2020 [Group Name]
[SID type, e.g. 8580] / [Tune Speed, e.g. 4x]

For example:
'Short, thank Cthulhu' by Jojeli
(C) 2020 Artline Designs
8580 / 4x

No transition or screen wipe effects, replacing standard characters with PETSCII's graphical symbols, or other sneaky ways to add effects or to decorate the player.

3) Single SID at standard $D400. In other words, the loop must be playable on an unmodified C64 with either 6581 or 8580 SID.

4) No samples in any form. We don't want this to become a "best sample loop" competition. Otherwise, anything you can do with a SID goes, and you can use as little or as much rastertime as you want.

5) No lower limit for the length of the loop. Yes, even very short but interesting loops are allowed, even encouraged. :)

6) Upper limit for the length of the loop is around 15 seconds. However this is a flexible limit, depending on the tempo of the loop. For example 8 bars in 4/4 time signature @ 120BPM (16 seconds) is perfectly okay. So no, you don't have to cut your loop one bar short just to meet the length requirement. :) For arrhythmic loops, stick to the max 15 second limit.

7) Loop must be immutable: Every time the loop is played it should sound the same, and it shouldn't evolve in any way. No trickery or utilising SID's ADSR bugs etc. to add random note skippings or other variation to the loop. Think of a loop sampler playing the same loop over and over again - that's the goal here.
However, as an exception to this rule, a tiny overlap of the end and beginning of the loop is allowed. For example letting an instrument on a channel play from end of the loop until the first note in the beginning of the loop on that same channel. But this must be within reason, for up to 1-2 secs. Any longer than that is considered to be an evolvement of the loop, which again isn't allowed.

8) Up to three entries per composer, with permission to replace one of already submitted three entries with a fourth one. It is preferable to stick to the entries already submitted. However if you just made a fourth loop and it is an absolute killer, one of the three entries already submitted must be moved outside compo. This can be done only once.

9) Because many SID players would play the loop only once until progressing to the next tune, please lengthen the playtime by manually copying the loop until the length of the tune is at least a minute, and then jump back to the beginning (for infinite looping on C64 and such players).

... 40 posts hidden. Click here to view all posts....

2020-11-01 00:07

Frostbyte

Registered: Aug 2003
Posts: 166

Quote: I cannot even imagine the flood that's gonna happen :O Mini PETSCII was nothing compared to this :D

:D I reckon it may be a popular compo... Not sure if as popular as tiny PETSCII compo, though. That was insane.

2020-11-01 00:37

iAN CooG

Registered: May 2002
Posts: 3132

Quoting Jojeli

Quote:

What detects the looping? Is there an automatic tool to determine the song length that then gets added to the Songlength DB?

Yes, a tool developed by Wilfred Bos/HVSC which actually plays the tunes (very fast, without actual audio output) for the equivalent of 20 minutes (or more when needed, hardly) and detects the point of repetition - or if it goes silent for a while, if it doesn't loop - by analyzing the whole data emitted. It's not even a 100% success guaranteed method as many tunes don't even have the same values emitted on loop or some channel goes out of sync on loop etc, so there are many in an exceptions list that have to be adjusted manually. The sldb even has errors due to this, it's nearly impossible to verify every tune and subtunes in a lifetime, but they gets fixed after a wrong timing gets reported to us.
It's one of the lengthy processes we need to do when we close the update, and gets longer each release, not surprisingly.

I see that while writing this the first entry just got added, let's check it out

C:\temp>sldetect.exe 200mph_24_7.sid
Processing...
; /200mph_24_7.sid
36ace184cdf1eb8e5fa1b69e5c092885=0:15.323

Total time: 00:00:09 (+659 milliseconds)

nice one, and seems detected correctly.

Quote:

If the song lengths of 1:00 or more could be manually added to the songlength DB

Not happening, no. =)

2020-11-01 01:12

Frostbyte

Registered: Aug 2003
Posts: 166

Well, that kind of sucks. What you are saying is that there is no way the song lengths could be different from the actual loop length? That means that the loops will be totally "unusable" as songs in e.g. DeepSID playlists, which'd be especially true for short loops of up to a few seconds.

I'd be happy to manually create (or adjust) the song lengths for the compo entries before the next HVSC release, if I'm allowed to do that. Seems to be just MD5 hash and length key-value pairs? It'd be a shame if these loops would not enjoy the same amount of playability as longer tunes in modern, non-looping sid players.

2020-11-01 07:18

ChristopherJam

Registered: Aug 2004
Posts: 1378

Nice idea!

I must admit, after several weeks exploring tunes with short loops over at deepsid.chordian.net I was starting to consider running a 256 frame (5.1s) music compo - but this will do quite nicely :)

Quoting Jojeli

6) Upper limit for the length of the loop is around 15 seconds. However this is a flexible limit, depending on the tempo of the loop. For example 8 bars in 4/4 time signature @ 120BPM (16 seconds) is perfectly okay. So no, you don't have to cut your loop one bar short just to meet the length requirement. :) For arrhythmic loops, stick to the max 15 second limit.

Hmm, why not just make it a hard 16 second (802 frame) limit to avoid any doubt or quibbles?

Closest most SID editors get to 120bpm is 24 frames per quarter anyway, which translates to 125.3bpm - that gets you 15.32s or 768 frames for the example given.

Quote:

9) Because many SID players would play the loop only once until progressing to the next tune, please lengthen the playtime by manually copying the loop until the length of the tune is at least a minute, and then jump back to the beginning (for infinite looping on C64 and such players).

As iAN's already pointed out, there's no real benefit to this. No current players would be affected by it, and it's really down to SID player implementers to add a feature like "don't skip to next track until at least a minute's worth of repeats of current track" if that's what you want.

The rest of the rules are excellent - I particularly like the hard ban on any kind of graphical accompaniment beyond static text in standard font.

2020-11-01 11:45

Krill

Registered: Apr 2002
Posts: 2839

Quoting Jojeli

So @Krill, your idea of writing to SID only on init breaches the length rule #6.

Alright, no problem. Might run my own compo then at some point. =)

Quoting iAN CooG

Music must contain melody and rhythm. But if John Cage's 4'33" is music to you then, anything counts, even silence, so why even bother, a single RTS counts as a sid =)

There is a vast spectrum between "melody and rhythm" and silence. :)

"The creation, performance, significance, and even the definition of music vary according to culture and social context. Indeed, throughout history, some new forms or styles of music have been criticized as "not being music", including Beethoven's Grosse Fuge string quartet in 1825,[3] early jazz in the beginning of the 1900s[4] and hardcore punk in the 1980s.[5]"

(To me, any kind of structured sound can count as music.)

2020-11-01 11:55

Frostbyte

Registered: Aug 2003
Posts: 166

Quote:

Hmm, why not just make it a hard 16 second (802 frame) limit to avoid any doubt or quibbles?

I didn't want to (too much) limit the tempos people can use in their loops, but on the other hand I didn't want to push the upper limit too high either. The main idea of the flexible upper limit is to promote shorter loops.

E.g. if someone makes a 110bpm acid house loop, 8 bars would be 17.5 secs and be still a "natural" length for a loop without becoming a composition, i.e. in this case the length would be fine. But then for the loop to adhere to the rules, the hard limit would need to be set to 17.5 secs. If we'd do that, that would also enable longer loops with faster tempos, longer loops with time signatures other than 4/4, longer arrhythmic loops etc, again increasing the "risk" of them becoming short compositions rather than just loops.

So rather than setting a hard limit for the length (which I think would be an arbitrary rule), in my opinion it is more fruitful to set a guideline that promotes shorter loops, but also doesn't limit some special cases like the aforementioned.

Hope this makes sense? It sure is difficult to write down one's train of thought, especially in a foreign language. :D

Quote:

As iAN's already pointed out, there's no real benefit to this. No current players would be affected by it, and it's really down to SID player implementers to add a feature like "don't skip to next track until at least a minute's worth of repeats of current track" if that's what you want.

That's exactly what I was after. It would of course be possible to (manually) set the song length in the Songlength DB to something else than the length of a single iteration of the loop, and that would "fix" the issue for all players that use the DB (which are probably all that use the full HVSC collection), but it is another question if HVSC should provide a workaround to this issue introduced by this compo. Thinking about it for a while, I'm leaning towards "no". Logically this would be the easiest solution. However, from data point of view, the song length in database would then become an abstract value, rather than a value that represents what the length of the SID data actually is.

The "play for at least X seconds or until silence" option implemented in the SID players themselves would be a very nice solution indeed. I hope Jens is following this discussion. ;)

2020-11-01 12:03

JCH

Registered: Aug 2008
Posts: 193

In the DeepSID settings, where it already have options like e.g. "auto-progress should automatically skip songs and sub tunes that lasts less than ten seconds," there could be another option that makes a loop play longer.

For example, either playing it X times or for X seconds/minutes before moving on. Maybe with an additional logic added that it only does this if the song length is less than Y seconds/minutes.

2020-11-01 15:46

Frostbyte

Registered: Aug 2003
Posts: 166

That'd be great! Something along the lines of "play a looping song with length of <X from beginning to the end for at least Y seconds" would add some flexibility to listening to short loops.

For example if X would be 25 and Y 30:
- A 17 sec loop would play twice (i.e. 34 secs)
- A 2.7 sec loop would play 12 times (i.e. 32.4 secs)
- A 28 sec loop would play only once (i.e. 28 secs)

Anyway, drifting away from the context of this competition now. :)

2020-11-01 15:49

Frostbyte

Registered: Aug 2003
Posts: 166

Due to popular demand (and the rule being redundant now when I know how the song lengths in HVSC are determined), rule #9 is now dropped. No need to copy the loop over anymore to increase total song length, as this wouldn't work as I thought it would.

Just make sure your loop still loops. :)

2020-11-01 16:59

Frostbyte

Registered: Aug 2003
Posts: 166

Would everyone be okay with a slight change to the visuals rule #2: Okay to change border colour to visualise rastertime used? (no trickery allowed with this one either to generate any rasterbar effects, of course - just alternating between black and a single colour of one's choice when out or in the music play routine).

EDIT: What the heck, let's allow this. Only three entries in the compo so far. Flotsam, JCH and The Syndrom are allowed to update their entries to show the rastertime used, if they really wish to do so. Not a big, game-ghanging rule change anyway. :)

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