[S2E11] The Heart Carol

[Renard]

...is still missing. :D

Anyone?

[Profpatsch]

On it.

Wow, Composer needs a serious workflow overhaul.
What about time-stretching and bpm integration, or even more basic: space as shortcut for play?!

[Profpatsch]

And done.

Man, that editor. Really needs a simple quantization, that would make things A LOT easier.
The program screwed up some note transitions, but that shouldn't be to big an influence.

Video is in, only thing missing is a background image and a cover.

I have one problem though: I forgot to manually change the bpm in the txt-file in the beginning (actually I didn't know you have to do this) and now the song is at 180bpm instead of 120. If someone knows how to fix that without asynching everything I would be really glad.

Only some hard songs left. Oh, and I noticed some rather big melodical mistakes in finished songs.

[Renard]

I'm surprised that the FLAC version you uploaded doesn't take such a lot of space. Unfortunately, we can't use either OGG or FLAC because of compatibility issues with some software, so I'll have to replace that with a CBR MP3 (yeah, even VBR can be an issue for some).

Don't worry, I got these files stored on my hard drive. At home. I'll replace them eventually.

Composer sets the BPM to a default 180. That's not a huge issue, because BPM is kinda irrelevant in that file - all we really need is a timing, whatever it is, and with enough granularity so that a single time unit is small enough to fit the song. I'm not sure USDX & co can handle BPM changes within a song anyway.

If you noticed errors in the finished files, feel free to fix them but
- only in the "vocals" folder, not the "instrumental" ones (they're copied from the Vocals one anyway)
- not by using Composer, which adds clutter to the file, and that requires a lot of cleaning up. YASS is easy to use for that, you may want to try that
- Post in the corresponding thread that you've updated the song

Thanks!

[Smilley]

I did a bit of tinkering with the song.
Good job, for a first try. The pitches were all correct, though the pacing was off at a few places.
BPM is mostly for your convenience rather than the program setting it in stone. I doubled it for this song, so I could fine-tune some syllables.
Note that some notes were overlapping. You can't sing two pitches at once.  ;)
I added a few linebreaks were lines got a bit too long.
Doublecheck your spelling. You had a few words without spaces between them. On that note, you should put the space before the word, not afterwards (so " see" and not "see "). That makes manual editing in .txt easier.
When you have changing pitches within a syllable, like in the line "We are a circle of pony friends", you should either double the syllable like I did (pony-y friends) or add a ~ (pony~ friends).
Also, I favor the USDX editor. You can check single pitches and syllables better there. It takes a bit to get used to the controls, but they are very precise once you do.

[Renard]

Overlapping notes is a Composer issue, too. :/

[Profpatsch]

Wow, it looks like the Ultrastar Editor is way better than Composer. I'll give it a try.

[Profpatsch]

Hm, now that I looked at your timing corrections, I have to say you miscorrected some of them (German: ,,verschlimmbessert"). Since it's a very flowing song some notes aren't quite on beat, but you want to sing them as the choir does.

The editor you use works like a charm, so thank you very much for that.
One thing: You said the editor from the tutorial is very outdated, but the 1.1 one lacks a lot of features I've seen there. Which one do you use?

Ah, and one last thing: The author tags I put in are gone. Like you said, it's very nice to be credited for the work you do. Or is there another way you manage these?

[Profpatsch]

Now it's really done.
As I said, cover and background image are still missing.

[Smilley]

I have to say I didn't look at the .txt before editing it, and haven't knowingly removed anything. Probably USDX being over-eager, but it hasn't happened before. I guessed Renard will just use our standard tags, which will of course include credits to you.
As for the pacing correction: now that you have a competent program, you can redo them. I fixed them by my personal taste, and my 9890 points gave me some measure of proof that I'm on the right path. Also, I think the OGG-file uses VBR, which makes editing single notes a bit iffy in USDX, anyway. We'll see how it sounds with CBR MP3 and you can make corrections, then.

The main reason I don't use USDX CMD is mainly because it doesn't allow for special characters, like "é", therefore it kicked Becoming Popular off for the line "I'm the créme de la créme", among others. And I don't like the player's interface, but that's just me.
The main features the standard editor lacks over the CMD one are fluent changes of BPM (you can double the count with Shift+M, though) and displaying the hotkeys (which becomes obsolete after you've done more than 2 songs).
The biggest flaw in both the normal and CMD versions is the lack of mouse support, but one can learn to live without that.

[Profpatsch]

Ah, ok. Mouse is overrated anyway.
Seriously.

[Renard]

Woops. Forgot to add a cover and background to this one - fixed.