Thursday, December 19, 2002
Website Turns 6 Years Old
They Grow Up So Fast!
Today, the Videogame Music Archive turns 6 years old! The past year of this website's existence has had some nice milestones including: being mentioned on TechTV's Screen Savers TV show, as well as in Playstation 2 Official Magazine-UK. Also, 2,500,000+ visitors is simply amazing. On top of that $1,000+ total donations to the site helped us stay afloat during rocky past year. Lastly, special thanks to everyone who has put up a link or banner to our site, which is to a large credit the reason we recently became Google's #1 site listed for "game music" online!
(Mike Newman)Sunday, December 15, 2002
And the winner is...
And the winner is...
After two drawings we have a winner for our Famitsu/SSBM Concert CD contest! First person we contacted failed to reply to confirm their entry. So, congratulations to our "runner up," Andrew of Tustin, California!
Be on the lookout for more contests/giveaways in the coming weeks!
(Benny Hsieh)Sunday, December 8, 2002
Free Stuff is good! - Super Smash Bros Melee Orchestra CD Giveaway
Time is almost up!
Today is the last day that you can enter our Super Smash Bros Melee Orchestra CD Giveaway. The form processor will automatically stop working at midnight tonight.
After the form processor goes offline tonight, we will begin the search for fake and duplicated entries. We have a time budget of several days for this, as we will not be drawing the winning entry until Friday, December 13, 2002.
(Ross Bemrose)Tuesday, November 26, 2002
Free Stuff is good! - Super Smash Bros Melee Orchestra CD Giveaway
Free Stuff is good! - Super Smash Bros Melee Orchestra CD Giveaway
Free? what?! We're giving away something for FREE?! From now to December 8, VGMusic will be hosting a contest to give away a copy of Famitsu Cube + Advance which includes a copy of the Super Smash Bros. DX Orchestral Live Concert CD!
The album includes around sixty-two minutes of music, performed live at a sold-out audience in Tokyo, Japan back in August 27. Includes orchestrated pieces from Metroid, F-Zero, Star Fox, Fire Emblem, and many more.
Title Super Smash Bros. DX Live Concert Date Released 10.21.02 (JPN) Publisher Enterbrain Inc. In Issue Famitsu Cube + Advance (12/02) Price ¥590 Tracks 15 Digital Audio
Super Smash Bros. Melee Live Concert ![Super Smash Bros. Melee Live Concert - Front [Click for a larger image]](images/ssbmdxos-1.jpg)
![Super Smash Bros. Melee Live Concert - Back [Click for a larger image]](images/ssbmdxos-2.jpg)
Track Title Time 1 Planet Corneria (Star Fox) 2:05 2 Jungle Garden (Donkey Kong) 2:57 3 Hyrule Temple - Great Bay (Zelda) 4:14 4 Dr. Mario 4:04 5 Original Medley (SSBM) 5:00 6 Fountain of Dreams (Kirby) 3:35 7 Pokémon Medley 5:42 8 Opening (SSBM) 2:40 9 Planet Venom (Star Fox) 2:19 10 Yoshi's Story 2:43 11 Brinstar Depths (Metroid) 3:41 12 Smash Bros. Grand Medley 14:18 13 Fire Emblem 3:52 14 Green Greens (Kirby) 1:53 15 Rainbow Cruise (Mario) 2:49 Come mid-December, VGMusic will host another contest sponsored by our good friends at CocoeBiz. They'll be giving away additional copies of the Super Smash Bros DX Live Concert CD. However, it does not end there! CocoeBiz will be giving away goods featuring works by award winning music composer, Noriyuki Iwadare, famous for his works on the Lunar and Grandia game series (signed music CDs anyone?
). Be sure to give them a visit and check out the current specials they are offering on various game music CDs!
(Benny Hsieh)
Monday, November 18, 2002
We Reached Our $1,000 Fund-Raising Goal!
Money Doesn't Grow on Trees, But Apples Do
Today we officially surpassed our $1,000 fund-raising goal! Without visitor support, this site would have been in big fiscal trouble since I've been out of work for months.
(Mike Newman)The additional good news is that I have a job lined up, but I won't receive my first paycheck until the end of the year.(Bad news: the job offer was rescinded.) I thank everyone who donated for making it possible for me to sleep at night not having to worry about VGMusic's finances! I plan to update the donation page soon (in a day or so) with more information, especially some nice graphs to give everyone a better idea of the site's finances.Wednesday, November 13, 2002
Here, Link link link...
No, you aren't saving the princess this time.
I rewrote the commands that we use to block external linking. I'm not even sure that people realize that external linking to midi files is prohibited in our Terms of Service page AND mentioned at the bottom of our main page. Seriously folks, we're pushing over 10GB a day now.
To that effect, I'm now logging http referrer values from the link block page. This allows me to tell exactly where these links are coming from. Most seem to be from message boards, oddly enough, but there's a few Neopets shops showing up as well... as well as several websites using them in bgsound tags.
Of course, there's only 627 entries so far...
(Ross Bemrose)Monday, November 11, 2002
Levels of Sound
Converting Microsoft Word DOC to Standardized HTML is Fun!
I've been happy to see that Matt Belinkie's video game music article, hosted on our website, has been a popular resource by scholars and journalists alike. Following in his footsteps, Eric Pidkameny has allowed us to similarly publish online his paper Levels of Sound. The paper is an extensive look at video game music in different genres, its history, case studies, notable composers, and the attitudes of composers and listeners to the music. This blurb does not do justice to the wealth of information contained in the paper, which is very well referenced (links galore!).
(Mike Newman)Tuesday, October 29, 2002
Freak Outage
What happened?
For some reason, Rackshack's entire network (6 Gigabit Ethernet lines, 1 OC3, and 1 DS3) went out for about 10-15 minutes.
You can see what I mean on their Bandwidth Graphs.
(Ross Bemrose)Wednesday, October 23, 2002
What happened to Gamingforce Audio?
I know the answer!
It seems that the question on everyone's tongue is "What happened to Gamingforce Audio?"
At this point, I defer to someone who knows more about the situation... namely, one of Gamingforce's staff, Drex:
"Audio is gone; it will never again be as it was. We might bring it back up with music reviews, sheet music, and stuff like that, but never again will you get 40 albums of MP3s for free download. It just isn't prudent. Unless someone's out there who wishes to pay an ever-expanding bill every month starting at $41,000, forget it."
Even though Gamingforce Audio is currently gone, the Gamingforce Forums are still operational.
(Ross Bemrose)Tuesday, October 22, 2002
New-files under 500!
We've finally reached our goal!
Thanks to the combined efforts of all the update staff, I'm proud to say that the new-files is now down to under 500 files. Considering that it was at over 2000 earlier this year, that's pretty amazing. But don't think that we're going to stop here. My new goal is to get it down to under 200 files!
(Pongball)Monday, October 21, 2002
Slowdown
Web Server now has Boots of Speed
A lot of people probably noticed that the web server was slow today. I found out why... the switch that our server connects to was a 100Mbps Full-Duplex switch. Unfortunately, auto-negotiation between our network card and the switch, so we manually set our card to 100Mbps Full-Duplex. Full Duplex means that that data can be sent out and received at the same time.
Earlier today, the switch was changed to a 100Mbps Half-Duplex switch. Our server can't detect that change (see above), so it thought that the switch could still receive and send data at the same time... needless to say, this caused many lost packets.
Of course, that's fixed now, and has been for an hour or two (what can I say, I got distracted while writing this).
(Ross Bemrose)Monday, October 14, 2002
TechTV Video Clip Available Online
Its all about the bandwidth
TechTV was kind enough to make available a streaming video clip of "The Screen Savers" segment that mentioned our site last Tuesday. See the publicity that gained us an additional 15,000 visitors last week!
(Mike Newman)Tuesday, October 8, 2002
VGMusic.com scheduled to be on TechTV
Website to make its small-screen debut. Hollywood next?
The TechTV show "The Screen Savers" told us in advance that they will be mentioning VGMusic.com on their show tonight. Check your local listings for time and availibility. A potential slowdown of the site may start around 7pm ET, but I'm hopeful that our dedicated server will be able to handle the increased load.
(Mike Newman)I wonder what it'll do to our bandwidth
I'll be at work when we're on TechTV, but everyone can keep an eye on our Router's Bandwidth statitics (this is from the Router's point of view, so In = Outgoing from the Server, Out = Incoming to the Server).
(Ross Bemrose)Friday, September 20, 2002
Make it slow
...looking into it.
I rebooted our server earlier today after noticing that most of our sites pages were slow. Some of you may have seen the two messages to the Emergency Mailing List about our server not rebooting correctly (apparently it needs an extended file system check). Well, after it came back online, the pages were doing the same thing.
At first thought, I figured that maybe it was rackshack's network being slow. After a few experiments, I noticed that I could grab large files quickly via FTP.
Update: After making a few changes, I noticed that ONLY certain web pages were afflicted with this problem, most notably the main page itself. I checked it in Mozilla... it stopped displaying right where the HitBox image normally shows, so... Thank you, HitBox, for being down!
Incidently, it doesn't seem to affect the music pages as much, most likely because hitbox is close to the bottom of it.
(Ross Bemrose)Wednesday, September 18, 2002
More additions to the Upload Rules
Howto - Naming a file
We've added some naming information on what to title a song name to the upload script. This is to make it easier to find things (especially Remixes and Arrangements) by using a common naming scheme.
These were actually added to the Upload Rules page on Friday, September 13th, but apparently I forgot to post an announcement about them here on the main page.
(Ross Bemrose)Monday, September 16, 2002
File Indexing problems
...speaking of temporary
We're having some minor issues with our indexing system at the moment. I'll be working on fixing it tonight.
Update: I've finished fixing the files in the NES and SNES sections that were causing the problems. Apparently some files lost their newlines during editing. The indexing scripts uses newlines to separate the information into logical blocks.
(Ross Bemrose)Thursday, September 12, 2002
Well, so much for temporary...
Suds becomes a permanent fixture.
We just couldn't turn her down. She did so much hard work for the site in so little time that we decided to snip the "temporary" off her job title. Congratulations, Suds!
(Pongball)Tuesday, September 10, 2002
New-Files Became Missing-Files
404 Fears About Missing Files All Put to Rest
Due to some behind-the-scenes testing of an experimental script which had an error, the new-files directory was temporarly moved to a non-accessable part of the webserver. The directory is now 100% restored. Sorry for the inconvience.
(Mike Newman)Tuesday, September 3, 2002
Temporary Update Staff
Who's that new face?
Those who have checked the Archive Updates page recently may have noticed a mysterious updater. Susan Carriere, also known as Suds, is a tempory staff member. She had some spare time on her hands and offered to help update our site. Believe it or not, we get offers like that a lot, and we already have enough update staff, but being one of the few qualified people who's ever offered to help, we decided to hire her temporarily to help us deal with the massive new-files directory. We'd like to thank her for all the hard work she's been putting in over the last few days.
(Pongball)Sunday, September 1, 2002
Election 2002
Finale.
It's that time again. There comes a time in a video game character's existence that he/she/it must stand up for the issues and fight by all digital means possible for what is right/good/just/fun. On this eve of the Final vote of The Great GameFAQs Character Battle, we ask you to support the candidate that will lead the video gaming world to the 128-bit century. We ask you to support a brother, a plumber, the man with the mustache: Mario! No other character in the history of video games has been as compassionate, caring, and efficient at stomping the competition. Mushrooms and stars alone cannot help Mario get to the top. He needs your support to win this important battle. Vote now for Mario, the man with the red hat, at GameFAQs. (Voting ends at midnight CDT.)
(This political advertisement sponsored by the VUOMAPFWDF: VGMusic-Usage-Of-Mario-As-Puppet-For-World-Domination Fund)Friday, August 30, 2002
Election 2002
Vote for what we think is right... I mean what you think is right.
It's that time again. There comes a time in a video game character's existence that he/she/it must stand up for the issues and fight by all digital means possible for what is right/good/just/fun. On this eve of the first Semifinal of The Great GameFAQs Character Battle, we ask you to support the candidate that will lead the video gaming world to the 128-bit century. We ask you to support a brother, a plumber, the man with the mustache: Mario! No other character in the history of video games has been as compassionate, caring, and efficient at stomping the competition. Mushrooms and stars alone cannot help Mario get to the top. He needs your support to win this important battle. Vote now for Mario, the man with the red hat, at GameFAQs. (Voting ends at midnight CDT.)
(This political advertisement sponsored by the VUOMAPFWDF: VGMusic-Usage-Of-Mario-As-Puppet-For-World-Domination Fund)Monday, August 26, 2002
Election 2002
Whoever said "voting doesn't count" never voted here
There comes a time in a video game character's existence that he/she/it must stand up for the issues and fight by all digital means possible for what is right/good/just/fun. On this eve of the North Division Final of The Great GameFAQs Character Battle, we ask you to support the candidate that will lead the video gaming world to the 128-bit century. We ask you to support a brother, a plumber, the man with the mustache: Mario! No other character in the history of video games has been as compassionate, caring, and efficient at stomping the competition. Mushrooms and stars alone cannot help Mario get to the top. He needs your support to win this important battle. Vote now for Mario, the man with the red hat, at GameFAQs. (Voting ends at midnight, although I'm not sure what timezone.)
Update 08/27: Mario won!! See results at this link.
(This political advertisement sponsored by the VUOMAPFWDF: VGMusic-Usage-Of-Mario-As-Puppet-For-World-Domination Fund)Spam-a-Thon
Monty Python's laughing their heads off
Thanks to Powerlord's skills in virus detection, I now get five to ten virus notifications a day instead of actual viruses (usually Klez). Some of them have my return address, which means that someone with me in their address book is infected, not me, so please don't tell me I have a virus (I checked, anyhow). To cut down on your own Spam, here's a hint:
(ForteBlast)
A lot of Spam has an "unsubscribe" or similar link at the bottom. Don't click it. All you're doing is assuring the sender that your e-mail address exists and it'll just send you more garbage, in addition to dumping a few cookies on your computer, no doubt. I used a dummy e-mail account to test this and within days I was receiving double the Spam I was before. Trust me on this one. If you get Spam, just delete it.AOL Parental Controls issue
Gotta love 'em
There have been at least two occasions where AOL users haven't been able to sign up for the Forums because of AOL Parental Controls. Keep in mind that when you register, the e-mail issuing your temporary password is sent from VGMusic.com; if your parents have disallowed mail from addresses other than AOL addresses, then you won't get your password and we won't be able to easily to respond to e-mails complaining to us, either. I'd rather stick a fork in my brain than have to log on to my antiquated AOL address again to write back, so please ask your parents about it before telling us that you haven't gotten your password in a few days.
(ForteBlast)Friday, August 16, 2002
Anti-virus mayhem
...and it scans email, too!
I installed a new anti-virus on the server and scanned the entire site. Here's the statistics:
Scanned directories: 1057
Scanned files: 54503
Infected files: 0
Data scanned: 2094.20 Mb
2GB of data... this includes several site backups (which were not expanded) and all zip files on our site (which were expanded and all their files scanned).
I also installed a front end to make the virus scanner interface with our SMTP mail server. That means I no longer get 5+ copied of Klez a day! The system sends out three email messages per email virus detected:
One to the sender
One to the receiver
One to the postmaster (Me)
Unfortunately, that means I receive two email messages every time I get a virus sent to me and one each time someone else on this system gets one.
Lets Squaredance
A-day has come and gone.
Well, better late than never, but the preorders for KFSS Studios
(Ross Bemrose)have been going on for about 2-3 days already. Last I checked, they only have around 200 left to pre-order.
Sunday, August 11, 2002
Trackname Madness
Oops
When looking through some information files in the new-files directory, I noticed that in the uploads since the Upload Script was last upgraded had Tracknames listed as "Sequence Names" and Text listed as "Tracknames". I just now fixed that.
(Ross Bemrose)Friday, July 19, 2002
Virus Warning
Norton Antivirus 2002 didn't catch it
Norton automatically updated my virus definitions this afternoon. When I checked my email a few minutes later, I received two email messages from email addresses that I do not recognize.
Update: The file did have a virus, W32.Yaha.F@mm. No indication of why Norton didn't catch it, however.
Here's the first message (with a * in place of a certain letter in the email address):
Subject: Fw: war Against Loneliness Attached one Gift for u.. arjendj ----- Original Message ----- From: "checkfriends" < f*cker@shakinglove.org > To: < arjendj@hotmail.com > Sent: Fri,19 Jul 2002 16:17:17 PM Subject: war Againest Loneliness !! This e-mail is never sent unsolicited. If you need to unsubscribe, follow the instructions at the bottom of the message. *********************************************************** Enjoy this friendship Screen Saver and Check ur friends circle... Send this screensaver from www.shakinglove.org to everyone you consider a FRIEND, even if it means sending it back to the person who sent it to you. If it comes back to you, then you'll know you have a circle of friends. * To remove yourself from this mailing list, point your browser to: http://shakinglove.org/remove?freescreensaver * Enter your email address (arjendj@hotmail.com) in the field provided and click "Unsubscribe". OR... * Reply to this message with the word "REMOVE" in the subject line. This message was sent to address arjendj@hotmail.com X-PMG-Recipient: arjendj@hotmail.com <<<>>> <<<>>> <<<>>> <<<>>> <<<>>> <<<>>> <<<>>> <<<>>> <<<>>> <<<>>>...and the second:
Subject: Fw: Shake it Baby ! Hi Check the Attachement .. dbouwsma ----- Original Message ----- From: "truelovers" < loversgang@lovers.com > To: < dbouwsma@hotmail.com > Sent: Fri,19 Jul 2002 12:04:32 PM Subject: Shake it baby ! This e-mail is never sent unsolicited. If you need to unsubscribe, follow the instructions at the bottom of the message. *********************************************************** Enjoy this friendship Screen Saver and Check ur friends circle... Send this screensaver from www.lovers.com to everyone you consider a FRIEND, even if it means sending it back to the person who sent it to you. If it comes back to you, then you'll know you have a circle of friends. * To remove yourself from this mailing list, point your browser to: http://lovers.com/remove?freescreensaver * Enter your email address (dbouwsma@hotmail.com) in the field provided and click "Unsubscribe". OR... * Reply to this message with the word "REMOVE" in the subject line. This message was sent to address dbouwsma@hotmail.com X-PMG-Recipient: dbouwsma@hotmail.com <<<>>> <<<>>> <<<>>> <<<>>> <<<>>> <<<>>> <<<>>> <<<>>> <<<>>> <<<>>>As you can see, these two messages are very closely related. If my email program didn't block .scr files, I'd forward the attachment, shakingfriendship.scr, to Symantec.
...and no, I'm not infected. I won't open attachments if I don't know who they're from.
(Ross Bemrose)Recompile, recompile
Watch out for falling bits
I recompiled Apache and PHP to make a few module changes. If you see any odd behavior, please contact me about it.
(Ross Bemrose)Sunday, July 14, 2002
More about Uploads
This is the Videogame Music Archive
A quick note: This site is for video game music. Other music, Enya for example, shouldn't be uploaded here.
If we catch a person uploading music that doesn't belong, or has been proven as being plagiarized, there is a good chance that we will remove all that persons files that currently exist in the Newly Submitted Files section, and restrict them from uploading anything else.
Update: July 17, 2002: The date listed that was listed above was incorrect. It was listed as being the July 12, when instead it was posted July 14. I also added a new bug fix to the next post.
(Ross Bemrose)Friday, July 12, 2002
Uploads, uploads, uploads...
Watch for creeping bugs
For those of you who haven't noticed, our upload script has changed. Its new incarnation should take care of some of the technical problems we've had in the past: people uploading wav files with a .mid extension, defaulting to Nintendo for the game system, and 0 byte files to name a few.
It also incorporates the MIDI Information Analyzer as opposed to the old TrackName Analyzer. This means that the .txt Information files will include more information about a given file than they used to.
As with any new scripts, there are bound to be some bugs. If you see any with the upload script, please report them to me.
Bugs Fixed since script was brought online:
(Ross Bemrose)
- 07/12: Slashes were being added to form data. PHP does this automatically, and I hadn't taken it into account when writing the script.
- 07/17: Modified script to only allow "word" characters (A-Z, 0-9, and _). This is because our current indexing system doesn't understand punctuation characters.
Tuesday, July 2, 2002
New People
Welcome us or suffer.
Hello. Most of you probably know me for the massive collection of godly MIDI's I've sequenced. I am now Quality Control for the site. All sub-godly MIDI's will soon perish. Say goodbye to all Final Fantasy MIDI's! Okay, seriously, though, nZero (new updater and fellow godly sequencer) and myself have joined the site. Fear us. Now.
And for those of you who can't tell, I'm not nearly so arrogant. A little sarcasm never hurt anyone.
(JILost)Monday, July 1, 2002
PMM site redesigned
A brand new look, a brand new project
As was foretold, the KFSS Studios/Project Majestic Mix site launched their new design today. In addition, they officially announced their newest project, in collaboration with OneUp Studios, called
(Ross Bemrose)
![Famitsu Cube + Advance (12/02) [Click for a larger image]](images/fam1202l.jpg)
![Super Smash Bros. Melee Live Concert - Front [Click for a larger image]](images/ssbmdxol-1.jpg)
![Super Smash Bros. Melee Live Concert - Back [Click for a larger image]](images/ssbmdxol-2.jpg)