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2020-10-31 22:02

Frostbyte

Registered: Aug 2003
Posts: 165

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....

2020-11-30 18:54

Frostbyte

Registered: Aug 2003
Posts: 165

Just a few hours left! GO GO GO GO!

2020-12-01 11:54

Frostbyte

Registered: Aug 2003
Posts: 165

THE COMPO IS OVER! Many thanks for the overwhelming amount of interest and entries! Many super cool loops in the compo. A lot of variety, a lot of imagination put into them. Well done people. :)

Re. voting, I'm preparing the votesheet, but will need a bit of time due to huge number of entries, and also catching a minor cold and being a bit tired. On the other hand, I'm quarantined until covid test results, so plenty of time for C64 shenanigans. :D

2020-12-01 18:42

Frostbyte

Registered: Aug 2003
Posts: 165

Let the voting begin! Votesheet is here: https://forms.gle/Pvjhnth4gAaYka1C8

Please read the instructions in the beginning of the votesheet, and also please let me know if there are any errors, issues or strangenesses.

I set the voting deadline to end of Monday 14th December (CET), but if the voting seems to totally dry up before that, we may bring it forward a bit.

2020-12-01 19:31

F7sus4

Registered: Apr 2013
Posts: 112

Quoting Jojeli

Please read the instructions in the beginning of the votesheet, and also please let me know if there are any errors, issues or strangenesses.

Sorry if it's noticing the obvious, but I hope nobody will confuse 1st-100th rank and 1-100 points scale, since the results would become devastated. ;-)

2020-12-01 19:58

Frostbyte

Registered: Aug 2003
Posts: 165

Probably not. But I'll add a note about it anyway, just in case. :)

2020-12-04 23:17

Frostbyte

Registered: Aug 2003
Posts: 165

A friendly reminder: Whenever you have time, please help us bring the compo to a glorious, graceful end by voting. :)

We had a ton of entries to the compo from many, many different composers, but now we need more voters too. It'd be a shame if the result of the compo would be determined by opinions of just a handful of us who voted (so far)... ;) Make your opinions heard too!

2020-12-07 08:01

Jammer

Registered: Nov 2002
Posts: 1289

Voting done but I must complain. Grading that many entries in scale 1-100 via pulldown menu is kinda putoff ;)

2020-12-07 12:04

Frostbyte

Registered: Aug 2003
Posts: 165

Yeah, agreed. On a hindsight, scale of 1 to 100 was too much (especially for a compo with over 60 entries), and it wasn't really possible to do it with anything else than a dropdown in Google Forms. Going back to it, I would change it to either the usual 1 to 10 rating with radio buttons, or just star rating. I would change a few other things too. Lessons learned for next compo, if there ever will be one. ;)

Thanks for your massive effort @Jammer, and all others who have contributed and/or voted too! Still 7 days to vote...

2020-12-10 16:56

Frostbyte

Registered: Aug 2003
Posts: 165

Four days of voting to go! Every vote counts! :) https://forms.gle/Pvjhnth4gAaYka1C8

2020-12-13 09:11

ChristopherJam

Registered: Aug 2004
Posts: 1370

Whoa, voting done. Now that was a mission and a half.

Jojeli: Thank you for making the scoring so fine grained, and for all the deepsid links. Those two things made voting waaay saner than it would have been otherwise, especially with so many entries.

The only thing I really missed was a way to go away and come back later without relying on my browser remembering the form content. It meant I pretty much had to do it all in one day, or I'd have been paranoid about a browser crash or accidental window closure.

Some excellent entries in there, folks!

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