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okkie: You got a point; graphics compos have two practical advantages tho:

- they are way shorter than music compos despite having more entries
- they don't annoy the living shit out of people who aren't interested (unlike music compos which do funny things with coders desperately trying to finish their demos before the deadline ;)

Fair enough, one can reason then that being a musician is 'tough luck' with one compo less.

Then again, music compos usually are dreadfully long and nobody gives a shit about the results in the end anyway. I mean, can anyone tell me, without looking it up, who won 2nd place in the mp3 compo of BP06?

^_^

just make people using standard demoscene trackers
accept *only* fileformats that actually CAN be used on intros/demos by replay-routines like fmod/bass/etc
.it/.mod/.s3m/.xm that is

i.e.: renoise won't save xm files, only .rns which are totally useless because you won't put it into a demoscene production

Okkie:
Again, discussing music compos soon becomes discussing taste, which CAN be discussed, but it's pointless.

What you CAN agree on is that OF COURSE there should be music compos, since music is a big part of the scene.

You just have to suck it up and accept the fact that there are people out there (myself included) who look forward to the music compos and who looks back with great pride on the results they so painstakingly have achieved over the years.

No, I cannot tell you who came 2nd last year at BP, but I cannot tell you who came 2nd in the graphics compos either - hell, I can't even tell you who won the graphics compos, but that doesn't mean I think they're pointless, tasteless and boring - although I do think a LOT of entries in graphics compos are utterly lame and should REALLY have been eliminated by a jury, since the "artist" himself hadn't got the decency to do it.....

I want compos for executable music, executable grafics and executable videos.

executable video -> demo

i second nutman (oh, and jco as well)

and looking at the results from last years bp it seems like people were more interested in the tracked music compo than in the exe music compos.

but. what you are saying is that people who think that the tracked music compos is one of the highlights should either compose a really good/big/high class tune for the streaming compo or a very small one + get someone to make it an .exe for the exe music compo? that feels a bit "strange" imo.

and correcting: there are a lot of guys who spend shitloads of time making a tune for bp and they tend to make some brilliant pieces of music.

and talking of which. orgas: i would like to be in the pre-selection jury for one/some of the music compos this year.

Nutman: I'm a musician aswell, and I also like to participate in the compos. But I do agree with the fact of KB that music compos are long and loud. And i'm not even discussing taste in musical style, yet :)

There are now 3 music compos from which one is pretty specific for oldschoolers, one is pretty much coder candy and one is a real 'musicians' compo. It's a bit sour, but I can understand this choice, even as a muscian.

Is there some kind of renting monitor service? (provided by the organizers or maybe the sponsors) It's done in parties like Euskal Party etc and is quite interesting if you are a foreigner.

Traveling by plane you usually and up with crushed equipment so I'd like to carry an A1200+scandoubler with me and rent a monitor at the place.

I guess the answer is "no" but I had to ask :-P

Madenmann has the right idea. And I fully support it.

crumb: just ask about 2-4 weeks before the party in a breakpoint related forum or irc channel. It's usually not easy for organizers to provide working monitors in a larger number, but sometimes there are visitors who have some free space in their cars.

I agree that nobody cares about the music compos anyway, but I really hate that "musicians brought this on themselves" attitude. It's such a nasty thing to say. You keep ramping up the filesize limit, allowing new formats because you want the compo to represent the bleeding edge of digital music technology or whatever, always arguing that easing the restrictions promotes creativity and technical excellence.

And then those who disagree can, what, turn to the C64 or learn to code their music in 32k or less? Is that fair?

You might suggest there's no relationship between the fact that music compos used to be interesting and the fact that there used to be size and format restrictions. And maybe you'd be right, but aren't there enough reasonable arguments to the contrary to make you consider trying out a 1990s tracked music compo for a few years? Maybe 4-8 channels, 350 kB, MOD/XM/S3M/IT.

Thing is composing, arranging, inventing and creating all have nothing to do with mixing quality. Granted, it can all become too limiting, and the sound can become too horrible (forgive me C64 scene, my ears have had what they can take ;) but can you honestly say scene musicians of the 90s were too held-back by tracked music to produce anything interesting?

So that's my suggestion. You seem so keen on changing the rules anyway that you'll turn the PC demo compo into a freestyle, anything-goes-as-long-as-it's-executable "art" compo, so why not try something really progressive by trying to restore the tracked compo to what it was once? You'd make a lot of musicians really happy, and, in the end, I'm totally convinced the audience would thank you for it. What's the worst that could happen?

doom: you can always organize an unnoficial tracked music compo and present the entries at the bonfire. im personally glad that they're cutting down on music compos, was a pain to hear through all of that stuff, people always complaining their track didnt get played, always usual namevoting galore, *insert preselection anti-pop mysoginy flamewar rant here*, so good ridance to them.

Doom: Yes, an "oldschool" module competition indeed might be an interesting thing to have.

Remember that this is not what got dropped - we dropped the multichannel competition, and during the last years the main complaints we got about that was "why don't you allow this cool next-generation tracker xy in the compo?" kind of stuff, not the other way round. The multichannel compo was becoming a clone of the streaming music compo due to exactly this.

It's bad we didn't have the time to do a survey on things like that this year - but if there is some backup for this in the scene, the compo team possibly might consider adding a "limited" oldschool tracking compo - after all, for many of us this indeed is an important part of scene history, which BP07 is about.

Thoughts?

Yeah, and see PS - you can always do unofficial compos - the second stage is used for that a lot already. And as you can see on the ANSI/ASCII compo, we encourage and support such unofficial compos a lot.

Crumb: See Madenmann's reply - just ask around a few days before the party if someone who's trip to BP is short can bring another monitor. It'll work.

Well, the idea presented by Evil and others is actually kinda cool. An 'oldschool format' compo. Only allowing .MOD, .XM, .S3M and .IT. Max filesize 1024kb or even better, 512kb, for old GUS sake!

Ofcourse, show the trackerscreens on the bigscreen to show off the tracking wizardry (and unmask any looping!!)

okkie: to make it more interesting you can only use samples provided by speckdrum megaphone. special bonus points for whomever emulates tetris on the viewer. ;)

1024k would be way too much. Think OLDsk00l! Actually think A500 chipram ;) But yeah, showing the song playing in the tracker would be great.

prm, great! just come to the infodesk on the party (the earlier the better), say you want to help with preselection and we'll pencil you in :)

doom: werent you saying just a while ago that there should a middle term between oldskool and state of the art? now you want full oldskool again?

i think in the name of all things fair we should have a tracking compo that only allows jeskola buzz formats with no samples. ;)

Now wait... when has a democompo NOT been about this exactly? (And just let's take a broad definition of "art" here which also includes cga register hackery :)

Personal opinion, not related to official bp standpoint, blahyadda coming up:
All this "it has always been that way" zealotry can be described with one word: BULLSHIT. Sadly it's several metric tons of them. Whenever a big party tries to change things, innnovate or tweak the rules more than the usual 10%, you can be sure that there'll always be a heap of vocal dissenters with few more arguments than "tradition" or "just for the fuck of it". No miracle most good compo ideas stem from smaller, <200ppl parties as those aren't under the insufferable pressure of people's expectations.

What's really overseen here is that compo rules and the exact choice of compos etc. haven't emanated from thin air in the long forgotten mysterious golden days when the scene was still alive. No. As shocking as it is, these rules were made by actual humans which thought about how to hold a competition. And each and any of those rules had a _sense_.

Taking eg. the music competitions: The first separation between compos was Amiga vs. C64 because of their radically different approach and sound. That was almost understandable. But IMHO even the separation into "4 channel" and "multichannel" compos was a mistake, as it didn't even divide by platform or other technical merits but simply by choice of tools and was introduced mostly because of a bunch of whining and bitching Amiga-AMIIIGAAAAAAA-and-using-Octalyzer-is-cheating diehards. Same with tracked vs everything-that-comes-later nowadays.

Which, frankly, doesn't make any sense. If you're really confident that only Protracker 2 on Amiga makes you a good musician, you're simply too afraid or not good enough to cope with the increased possibilities (on the freaking _same machine_ mostly). And don't hide behind that "but tracking skills are teh rockz0rz and your lame midi pluginz makes shitty techno with one button press". Bullshit. C64 guys said the same about the lame one-ripped-sample-after-each-other Amiga mods in the late 80s and compared to C64 music editors trackers allow for much more dirty tricks.

In the graphics world there was the same dispute aka "1337" pixelled vs. "lame photoshop and lightwave crap you uncreative twits" freestyle graphics compo.

Yeah right. Like, if technology progresses and you're too stuck to catch up, it's of course not YOUR fault but the rest of the world has to stop revolving. Uh-huh.

To emphasize the strangeness of all this again: It's not PC vs Amiga vs C64. It's not freestyle vs. limiting yourself. All this is about is a choice of _tools_ and _file formats_ with the interesting detail that most of the original tools don't even RUN anymore on any equipment out there (ppl with 486s/GUS/SB16 notwithstanding of course).

Now please somebody stand up and say that demoscene spirit always was about what particular program you use to express yourself. Please. I need a laugh.

Dear tracker musicians, if you're so full of fear that your carefully handcrafted eight channels horribly stereo separated detuned each-note-gets-cut-before-the-next stuff with the carefully preprocessed lines and pre-filtered sounds that nowadays mostly come from modern music tools anyway won't stand a chance against the obvious "let's throw three loops together and then turn them leet knobs of them leet pluginzorz for five minutes crap" that is routinely winning music compos and is so lame, predictable and redundant that even its creators quit the scene in shame, or if you are too lazy/fearsome/dumb/used-to-trackers to try out even Renoise or Buzz ... how about dumping the single channels, loading them into a hd recorder app of your choice and apply the knobturnery afterwards? You're obviously considering yourself good musicians, so it shouldn't be such a problem, huh?

stuff that could almost be an official bp org opinion, only that i haven't asked the others coming up:

Getting back to the original problem: As party organizer you have to think about the compo rules every year. Leaving everything as-is is the easy way out, but due to relativity a standstill in time equals going backwards :). So every rule change, every new compo and every compo we throw away has to be carefully tested against a) current trends within the scene and b) compatibility to the often summoned "scene spirit".

The hard part now is to define that spirit, what sets the demoscene apart, and how to preserve this uniqueness while not getting stuck.

I can say that our particular definition is not "uses this and that file format" which is about the only justification for keeping a tracked music compo. Trackers have had their time when demos needed music that was 1MB at max and was able to be played in realtime without requiring 50% of a Pentium CPU, and when getting a 5MB file from wherever was so prohibitively expensive and time-consuming and pro music gear was so out of reach that trading a few hundred K of almost-good-quality songs was a perspective that of course spawned a big scene around it. Trackers allowed many of us kids in their rooms to make music that wouldn't have been doable otherwise, and we should all be incredibly grateful for that.

Those times are over though. Nobody now ever starts composing using FT2 or IT, and having small files isn't of any importance either to most people now that downloading an MP3 from the net takes only 1/30th the time you need to listen to it. And on today's PCs, an MP3 decoder can't even be properly measured in percent of CPU performance anymore.

Thus the decision to drop the tracked music compo. Trackers are an important part of scene history, but apart from a small and quantitively as well as qualitively (sorry) declining fraction of the scene they aren't a big part of a demoscener's life anymore except perhaps on a few embedded platforms. Heck, even Amiga demos use rather shoddy sounding ADPCM tracks nowadays.

I could now rant about as much about the 64MB limit and "wtf were size limits for anyway?" but i'll leave it to the reader to translate my points :)

Having read all which was written while i tried to type down my post: Yeah, an "oldschool tracked" compo wouldn't be such a bad idea if it really applied 90s rules, eg. 512MB, no loops and severe punishments for IT users ;)

... And if nobody afterwards claims that tracked 4chan stuff is generally better than all other music anyway. Please :)

i second kb on his personal opinion. well said kebby!

512MB modules sounds rather lame tho, better just use mp3 then.