In case it’s not glaringly obvious I didn’t manage to get the pack sorted and uploaded before having to leave for work. I will do so asap, hopefully that will be before I start work tomorrow at any rate.
Far too tired last night!!!
Anyway pack is sorted and uploaded. Sadly only three entries to choose between, thought there would be a few more. Well there was kinda a fourth but I was only sent a dead link for Soundcloud so not only was there no xrns project file but I couldn’t even download the audio file anyway. I did notify the user to the fact when downloading entries yesterday morning and it hasn’t been rectified in the subsequent 24hours so going to have to go ahead without it.
Anyway get your pack below. I will update the first post and decide on a closing date for voting from work later.
OK so voting will run until Friday 11th May and I will get the next round off the ground on Thursday 17th May (or at least try to as I’m at work until 6pm that day.)
Good luck all! 
for the future maybe, next to the official rules, we should add a few links to free online spaces, like dropbox, mediafire, or mixturecloud, or…whatever, renoisers could create their own free accounts, and then, easily share their mp3+xrns files, just an idea
You think adding links to free upload sites with the rounds would help people get entries in as they would know where to upload? Think most people know or can work out somewhere these days…
Think a bit of spamming by myself in the IRC channel plus a post on the FB and Twitter pages may help some though.
To be honest I’m finding it harder and harder to find the time, with the shifts of my new job not being as regular a pattern as my old one, I’m starting to wonder if I’m going to be able to continue doing this indefinitely… 
Same thing for me. I’ve got an odd / unpredictable daily job activity, randomly dispatched between 07:00 am and 11:00pm… When it’s finished and I’m back to home, lots of other things to do, I realise that I’ve just 3, 4 hours maximum for anything left in my life including music. I try to organise myself to get a full evening free before the deadline, but it’s not always possible. Sometimes I couldn’t participate last weeks, and also was in the need to sleep more, and make a pause with computers. The DDRC threads are the most visited ones in this forum, lots of users are curious to get a look on it. When votes are released, participants get a potential visibility and promotional boost. The weekly competition concept has worked well and is still working, although it’s seems to be harder to find new attractive “rules” each time. But maybe, like everybody perhaps you simply need to make a pause.
I would be sad to see the end of the DDRC, but i fully understand that it’s a bit of a burden to have this hanging over your shoulder every week.
Maybe there is something we could do to keep it alive forever? By making the whole thing automated? If someone with programming skills could make a small program of some sorts?
I don’t have a clue how it could be done, but it looks very good inside my head. 
It’ll be uneasy.
(1) * the DDRC organisation probably need first several human contacts via PM with the previous winner what takes some time and can’t be written in LUA
(2) * then the sample selection process probably takes lots of time, even if it’s a semi random thing according to what kazakore allready said, samples need to be in correlation with the last rules and need to be checked to see if they’ll allow variable results, indeed this phase requires a human brain and musical sense (not scriptable for now in LUA).
(3) * after that comes the sample pack preparation & upload, rules explanations, constant forum survey & participations
(4) * when entries are released by particpants, they need to be downloaded in time, deeply checked (played), cleaned, repacked, reuploaded so that they do not infringe the specific rules
(5) * a poll has to be inserted and when the winner is declared everything starts again, and again
The only thing that could help kazakore, should be to let the last winner create the full samplepack & upload it on anything, like dropbox, or mediafire…, then what could help a bit in the final phase : participants would have to cleanse their .xrns from anything that could give voters a sign of their own identity, comments, colors, track names, labels. All this could help. We can probably precise and expand rules, in such a way that kazakore wouldn’t have to take too much time.
If we have a dedicated server that runs a dedicated program there could be an upload feature for sample packs with a comment field where you write the rules.
If each one has their own account with a password, the program would only allow the winner to upload a sample pack and write a rule that week, but if it’s not done in time, the other will have their chance untill someone has done it.
I don’t see what you mean? I think if you’re creative enough you can make gold out of gravel. There could be a bank of samples where all kicks go in the kicks category, all chips go in the chips category, farts in the fart category and so on. Then the program will choose a random set based on a few preset categories.
This in addition to the sample pack uploader would be more than good enough for me.
I know it couldn’t work exclusively in the Renoise forum, but we could still make links and discussions about the rounds here.
I don’t think this is necessary, there could be a flag option where contestants can disqualify someone if they break the rules.
All we need is another uploader, maybe one for xrns and one for mp3, of course with a file size limit.
The program shuffles and anonymizes the files and starts a poll, then sends an email (which you used to register the account) to the winner.
I’m sure that somebody with a fair level of php (or similar) programming ability could knock up a page/site which could do most of it. Initially I’ll comment on the points below as to how it’s done currently by hand.
True, especially as there is usually some discussion and clarification of rules, or possibly asking for examples if it is a genre based round. Still an online form accessible by the previous winner with a section for each of the Rules sections could cover most of it, with options such as adding the example media section if Genre is specified or not providing sample pack if the option is set to None.
Actually very little thought goes into most sample packs. I use one of the tools from the php scripts package to randomly select a certain amount from different folders in my library then give them a once over preview within Renoise to try and make sure there is no glaring omissions (such as no kick or snare or break to cut one out of.)
Much of that is comminity run anyway and rule explanations are best come from the previous winner, although I do often field them to the best of my ability myself. My home computer is very rarely switched off so shouldn’t even be too much trouble to write some kind of script which would generate a generic pack and upload to my site via ftp (although when I last tried using my site I was having a lot of difficulties with ftp uploads hanging before completion and haven’t tried again in ages.)
This would probably need at least some human interaction, in the checking the entries against the rules. Either that or you could include all and trust people to try and take into account any that may have broken the rules when voting… Removing mp3 tags I wouldn’t imagine is hard with a script and a LUA tool to remove Song Comments, Unused Samples/Instruments (and possibly other formatting I currently do not bother with) should also be possible.
If it was done on an external site (which I do have) this may in some ways be easier, as people would have to register there and it would be auto-creating a thread of here mainly for publicity and conversation.
That is all far beyond my personal skills though!!
Another option may be to run them slightly more sporadically but I fear that will just cut down entrants even more, if the rounds are run on an even less regular basis for people to know when to expect them.
If we could find the person with the skills necessary to build something like this the only real problem i can think of is if the votes are in a tie,
but that could possibly be solved by a quick revote or maybe just a random pick?
So…skillz anyone?
let’s have a look on what’s allready been coded for free.
(1) ID3 tags killar : I think there’s an efficient one here.
(2) fast zip extractor : here.
Too bad, I didn’t find a LUA based “song cleanser/packer”… removing comments, renaming DSPs by their “true natural” names, removing matrix labels, removing background/track colors… remove unused samples, and replace .flac samples by .OGG samples format when needed. Or I didn’t found a “xrns song obfuscator”, that fills comments, track colors, DSPs names, matrix labels, matrix colors, with pure random bullshit.
I do like the whole idea of writing a script to take care of DDRC but maybe we should focus more on how we’re going to take care of it ourselves.
Maybe Kaza could write a detailed instructional of how he runs DDRC and whoever is willing to take the duty can.
hey we have a draw
oh dang, the first time i forgot to vote. i listened to the tracks as soon as they were availabe, but sry, so much going on right now…
Well, then i think the loser should win! 
Hmmm, who may that be? 
How bout a sudden death match? Giving each opponent exactly 24 hours to track. Or better yet they have to use their opponents xrns. Or maybe even both of the winners come up with ideas and we vote on which to use or we have to use both of them.
well globaly if no rule can be defined because of a draw, a “default round” happens, kazakore randomly selects a few samples and… that’s all…
Kazakore has probably saved his vote and the voting is still on, so you shouldn’t worry. 
sdcompo