TW #43–#45 — the Demonews ratings argument (Light, Trixter / Hornet)

Light of kosmic (an artist, "not a musician") watched two friends fall out on #trax over "the cdrom ratings" and wrote that the five-star system in Demonews and the 00index files makes lesser trackers give up; trixter answered twice for hornet.

Key claims#

• Light (#43): the stars are "an un-definable chart of requirements to what makes good music"; a tune "may not be a five star tune, it can still be a 5 star effort"; his alternative: drop ratings and describe the tune — style, "what happens … like a plot-line".
• Hornet's official position (#44): ratings are "a service", "completely subjective", "not compo ratings"; fewer than 10 songs out of thousands ever got five stars; the reason they exist is volume — "over 30 megabytes of music are uploaded every two weeks, on average", so people with little time can fetch only the ** or *** categories; the raters are "other musicians and composers". Hornet is "the most regular magazine on the demo scene, and have been since 1993" and runs "the world's busiest archive of demos and scene music". Closing line: "Good music is any music that you've learned from or had a good time tracking."
• #45 replies: to C. Ray C.'s claim that theory "lacks any sort of theory about rhythm" and techno is "beyond music theory": Trixter's first theory class "covered rhythm almost immediately (syncopation, uneven time bases like 5/4, etc.)"; techno "is practically governed by it", and "20+ channels of 100% percussion" will not rate well with any critic. Competing rating sources are welcome. To TheFinn's "change your rating of the ratings" — "this pretty much sums it up".
• GUS hardware note (#45): answering Random's "Impulse Tracker Trivia" idea that a GUS could mix "7 times more" channels than an SB16 by uploading several streams: not possible — the data cannot be uploaded fast enough even with DMA, all channels still have to be mixed by the CPU ("not even a Pentium is that fast"), and the GUS MAX's 48 kHz part is a daughterboard that bypasses the GF1 and behaves like a plain stereo DAC.

Notable quotes#

• "MOTHERF--- the ratings" — Light.
• "If you don't like a rating, then simply ignore it." — Hornet.

Relevance#

Explains the star scale that TraxWeekly reviews and the 00index files use, and gives hard numbers on the 1996 upload volume. Pairs with Maelcum's earlier attack on the same reviewers (s-tw025-loops-and-extended-samples).

Pages touched#

hornet, trixter, kosmic, tracker-scene-history, rhythm-and-groove.