I was also happy to see in the forums that the music is enjoyed by some of the players =)

Recently I bumped in to an independent musician (in real life.) He, along with a friend, had just released a new album and it so happens to be in the “Spacesynth” genre. I bought the album, I listened to it, and I also wrote a review of “Triumphant Return” by MindXpander.

I really liked the sound, the melodies, the composition, the atmosphere, and everything about the music. I kept referring to it as “mod music” (with parallels to some classic mods like Space Debris by Captain.) I suspect this may have frustrated MindXpander a bit since a lot of the mods aren’t really that good… But what I meant by this comparison is that it contained the same type of cheerful sound that many of the great mods from the 90s did. As it turns out, the Spacesynth genre is older than the mods I referred to and it’s just a case of the mods that I liked being in the spacesynth genre =) Oh well, at least I learned something.

Following this revelation, I searched for some Spacesynth music through Spotify. I found some real gems (such as Polaris Spectrum) and I will again (incorrectly) describe them as sounding like awesome remakes of old mods!

This was about as far as I could go without launching Cubase. A simple spacesynth inspired beat with kick, snares, hihats, and toms… A snappy bass line alternating notes split by an octave… Some cheerful brass chords… The Ayla patch in VanGuard by ReFX with added portamento and vibrato acted as the perfect spacesynth lead… I was on my way composing my first Spacesynth track.

You can listen to the end result here:

Low Poly Universe by Imphenzia

When I formed/created/founded (or whatever you call it) Imphenzia, I started out by making Goa-inspired music. My favorite artist at the time was Astral Projection. Following the release of my debut album, Sector, my music became more mellow and floated towards trance. I also started to make slowed down “chillout” remixes of my so called trance music. Without too much hesitation I even went as far as to make acoustic piano versions of my tracks.

Despite such a variety in genres, I’m not sure whether or not to release this, or any future, Spacesynth tracks under the artist name Imphenzia or if I should use an alternative name… Any suggestions?

Update 2012-03-17

I released it as Imphenzia today after all. The more I thought about it the more it made sense to do so. I’ve already released a large variety of genres as Imphenzia and I’ve never really been to bothered what genre a particular track is as long as I like it =)

It would also require a lot of work to create and promote another artist name. It’s taken me about 15 years to build up Imphenzia and a single track by an unknown artist might as well be left unreleased.

Following delivery of HTTP headers, Apache starts off the content by telling a browser how many bytes the content contain whereas Lightspeed did not provide such a figure. The internet highscore feature wasn’t expecting the content length so it interpreted the number as an error message instead. I should have intepreted HTTP response better from the start, but you live and learn.

Anyhow, moving on to the topic of this post. Less than a week following the release of Beat Ball 2 (v 1.2.1) a friend of mine spotted it in a 0-day warez release. I haven’t put a lot of effort into protecting the game because I suspect it would get cracked regardless of what length I go to in order to prevent it.

Here is part of the Crude .NFO for the warez release:

          ÜÛÛßß             C.R.U.D.E               ßßÛÛÜ
         ÞÛÛÝ°    P.R.O.U.D.L.Y   P.R.E.S.E.N.T.S    °Þ²ÛÝ
          ²ÛÛÜ     Ü                           Ü     ܲÛÛ
           ßßÛÛÛÜÛß                             ßÛÜÛÛÛßß 

                        Beat Ball 2 v1.2.1  

            Ü  ßÜ                                 Üß  Ü
           ß²ß  ²Ý  RLS.DATE.........2012/03/07  Þ²  ß²ß
              ÜÛß   RLS.SIZE..........06x5.00MB    ßÛÜ
         ÜÜßßß                                       ßßßÜÜ
      ÜÛß   Ü       RLS.TYPE..............Crack       Ü   ßÛ
      ²Ý°    ßßÜ    PROTECTION......Serial+Auth    Üßß    °ÞÝ
       ßÜÜ    °Þ²                                 ²Ý°    ÜÜß
          ßß  ÜÛß   PLATFORM.............WinAll   ßÛÜ  ßß

I’m not too bothered about it because I think that those that really enjoy the game support the development by registering a legit copy. If someone downloads the cracked version, I doubt they would have ever considered to buying the game in the first place.

On the other hand, one feature the crackers won’t be able to solve. The Internet Highscores will never work on the cracked release =) This is because it requires part of a registered key (that must exist on the web server that hosts the internet highscores) in order for any highscores to be registered. With a cracked version you don’t have the key to post the highscores.

              ÝÛÛÞ  NOTE: Remember to turn off www hiscores  ÝÛÛÞ
              ÝÛÛÞ  from options and block app from the      ÝÛÛÞ
              ÝÛÛÞ  internet with traditional way if needed  ÝÛÛÞ

For competitive individuals, like myself, the world wide highscore system is a big part of what makes games fun so it’s still worth getting the real deal.

The price of $10 for registering Beat Ball 2 is quite cheap for hours worth of fun as well. About a year ago I added the feature to count the duration of games played. At the time of writing this post the total number of seconds played is 13’222’416 which equals 3673 hours which also equals a 153 straight days and nights.

I just released a new calm track with 4 additional loop variations. You can listen to all variations in full length on the Discovery of Planet X page for Imphenzia Soundtrack.

If you are into developing games, especially indie games, my library of royalty free music may be of interest to you. I continuously add new tracks to the library and they are very competitively priced (range is usually $5 – $50 and remember – royalty free.)

Until July 1st 2012 you can also use the discount coupon code IMPHENZIABLOG and get 20% off all the prices. To save you from looking you can use this link to get straight to where you enter the coupon code. Prices will update in real time to reflect the discount.

Oh – and about Discovery of Planet X in particular: It is a relaxing space theme featuring a spacious intro with layers of pads. A beautiful melody builds up in layers until it reaches a climax with piano and an electric guitar lead.

It may be suitable for space games, adventures, puzzles, real time strategy (RTS) games for uneventful early buildup stages, or for game over / credits / menu / highscores music for any game genre.

Hope you enjoy the new release.

I am bound to three months notice and renewal is this month so it won’t be until next year that I leave but I’ll summarize the frustrations that are starting to build up here:

1. Long publishing times

• I uploaded Time Travel to Ubetoo for distribution on December 22 2011
• Ubetoo reviewed and accepted the submission on January 2nd  2012
• Today, 3rd March 2012 (72 days later) the track is still not on Spotify

Time Travel Ubetoo Distribution

Meanwhile a friend of mine released his first track through RouteNote.com on 6-Feb-2012 and that appeared on Spotify a few days ago (about 20-25 days.)

That brings me to another issue. In a digital world I seriously question why it has to take days, weeks, and months to release digital music – especially to Spotify. How hard can it be? Copy the file, encode it, insert meta data to the database. It should be automated and apparently Bob is definitely NOT their uncle. They even “outsource” all the hard work to aggregators who take care of the upload interface. Lousy. Poor. Pathetic.

2. Kontor New Media

Not long ago I wrote a post on Kontor New Media detecting my music on YouTube allegedly infringed on copyright belonging to a company named Kontor New Media.

I disputed this to YouTube and I haven’t heard anything since then. Today I discovered that Ubetoo is the mastermind behind this.

I quote from the Ubetoo FAQ:

If you receive copyright claims when you try to upload your own music to e.g. YouTube, that means our security system works!

You might receive copyright claims from a company called Kontor New Media (KNM). That’s normal.
They are our digital distribution service. If you’re trying to upload your own music and receive copyright claims, just ignore them.

Thing is; I don’t want to “just ignore them” because the result is that my YouTube videos get ugly overlaying adverts. I want my videos to be advert free but if I did want adverts on them – atleast I’d want the earnings to go to me and not Kontor New Media.

3. Poor Statistics

The statistics presented by Ubetoo for their distribution service has a lot to wish for. Some are easy to identify, e.g. iTUNES – but in general the list is filled with odd names and no specification to what any amounts are based on.

Ubetoo Distribution Statistics Example

4. Scam-like Non-automated Payout Process

Final frustration with Ubetoo is their payout process. Every quarter they collect the income from the digital stores and unless I log on to Ubetoo and manually check a tick box to withdraw my funds to PayPal in time Ubetoo get to take the money from you.

I call this a “scam-like” payout process because it relies on the hope that someone will miss to withdraw the funds in time making it Ubetoo’s money instead. The moral solution would be allow artists to activate automatic payouts to their PayPal accounts.

High interest loan companies use this method as well. They rarely have automated billing features because a manual process means someone may miss a payment and then there are hefty additional interest and penalty fees involved so they can make up the money.

5. Ubetoo logo on album art

When I released most of my albums Ubetoo required that their logo had to be illustrated on the cover art. Considering they were the cheapest alternative at the time I was okay with that.

A few months following releasing my albums Ubetoo dropped the requirement so the logo was optional. Great I thought.

Well, great if you can be bothered to withdraw all your releases from all 500 digital stores and re-release them again.

This for switching an album image. Let me remind you of frustration #1 – it takes months for the releases to appear again if I were to to this.

Conclusion

As the frustrations listed above build up – and if things continue in the same direction – I will not be renewing my Ubetoo distribution for next year. I will withdraw my releases and go with another aggregator.

I will do a trial release through RouteNote – but one thing I’m unhappy with there is that they only allow MP3 files. Digital services will re-encode tracks and it’s never good to re-encode a file that’s been compressed using a lossy compression format. Maybe they will allow Wav/Flac by the time I do the switch – unless I find a better aggregator.

End of depressing text.

The reason why I decide to “look the other way” is for two reasons. First of all, I’m happy that someone likes my music enough to use it… and second, it promotes my artist name in my quest for some very welcome fans.

Searching today was different. A few more results appeared and as I browsed through them I saw now credit to Imphenzia, but I did notice that YouTube finally does audio recognition on my tracks and very kindly link to the track on iTunes. That’s awesome.

If you like my music and if you want to use it in a video; please consider getting the full access to download all my tracks so you can use a high quality version for your music. You can also find individual songs on iTunes – but they take most of the cake so I always smile when someone uses the feature on my site. Which is very rare in today’s society where music is ually free.

Anyway; to the point of this post. As I browsed through the search results, I found one video in particular that caught my attention. YouTube had correctly detected that the music was Spirit Within You (Piano), composed by me. The cheeky part is that as I read through the description it was supposedly created by “djlovesong“. Not only did it say so in the description, it was also included in the video.

I think, and hope, that the video will be removed (or at least changed with proper credits), so the link above may not work. If this happens; I have captured it into a permanent memory as screenshot:

Oh well, I’ll come back and modify this post with the outcome of this little theft case.  We’ll see what it leads to. I haven’t contacted YouTube, yet, I just added a comment to the video for now.

Update 2 March 2012:

The user removed the video without any comments or message to me. I suspect that most other songs are not performed by her either, but mission accomplished for me anyway =)

The game features 18 cars which can be tuned between races by purchasing parts such as turbos, performance chips, intercoolers, suspension, tires, etc.

Cars will take damage upon collision affecting both the visual look of the car as well as performance. If you don’t visit the pit lane for repairs before it’s too late you risk blowing up for a DNF result.

Play it as a single player against up to 7 AI controlled computer cars or two players locally using split screen with up to 6 AI controlled computer cars.

12 different circuits ranging from small sand tracks to large race tracks allow for a lot of fun and tight racing. The track design was inspired by the 90 degree angles of Supercars on the Amiga. Some tracks also features hazards such as trains that I suggest you either beat to the train crossing – or stop until they have passed unless you want your car to be permanently destroyed.

The long story

I originally started developing the game following a motocross accident where I broke my collar bone back in 2001. Initial progress was great and I had a lot of energy and passion for the game. It was one of my first attempts to make a game and I learned a lot of useful stuff in the process.

I still have a lot of passion for the game genre (top down racers) but I feel that it is not worth to put any additional efforts into this particular game any more due to a number of reasons.

First of all, the game uses non-accelerated 2D graphics and it was designed for computers made in the mid to late 1990s. Modern computers of today have awesome performance, but the 2D engine in Blitz Basic (the language used to develop the game) don’t take any advantage of this new performance unless you re-code the game to use 3D accelerated 2D graphics – and that requires a fairly large rewrite due to how Performa Cars was designed.

Secondly, I always wanted Performa Cars to be a multiplayer game playable across the internet and LANs. Unfortunately I went deep into development without first researching multiplayer gaming and by the time I nearly had a finished game it turned out that it just wasn’t possible to make it into a networkable game.

Why you may ask? Well… As I mentioned above, I was new to game development at the time and I based the logic updates on the assumption that the game would run at a constant frame rate of 60FPS. As it turned out, of course, computers run at different refresh rates which then meant the game would run at different speeds on different computer. That’s NOT good =)

Another problem basing the logic engine on the screen refresh rate was that the game would not only run at different speeds on different computers, the cars also behave differently – skid more on some machines – a lot of grip on another machine.

I tried to fix the problem by analyzing the refresh rate by calculating a multiplier value for the game logic. That sort of works, but that’s not how you do it =)

Today I know better. Keep the game engine running at a set frequency, say 100Hz, and tween the graphics to make it smooth. Making that happen for Perofma Cars would mean a large re-write again.

All this in mind; I decided to release the game as a freeware for everyone to enjoy despite the glitches being an alpha version.

I will now be focusing on AstroFighter.net – a game where I avoid all the pitfalls I learned about during Performa Cars. It runs with a separate logic engine and 3D accelerated 2D-style top down graphics and, most importantly, I had it running in multiplayer from the very beginning to ensure the entire game is developed for that purpose.

My plan is to develop AstroFighter.net with a clear conscious that Performa Cars at least is available as a freeware for everyone rather than aging year in and year out on my hard drive.

If all goes well – I will also take my knowledge from AstroFighter.net and reboot my passion for top down racers and make a modern version of Performa Cars designing it the right way from the start.

But for now – enjoy Performa Cars =)

http://www.astrofighter.net/making-of/

I decided to call the song “Leaving The Outpost” and I imagine a peaceful and relaxing space scene, maybe in an adventure, RTS, or MMORPG. The song features two sections. First a mellow melodic section with soft synth leads playing a beautiful melody and layers of filtered pads. The second part is more of an ambient soundscape with sweeping pads and scifi sounds.

http://soundtrack.imphenzia.com/non-exclusive-music/leaving-the-outpost/

The track is available as a full length track (with a start and a finish) and a perfectly seamless loop. License it for your indie space game today =)