Jobs Store Support Register

The Witcher Music Contest

+
Burza46

Burza46

CD PROJEKT RED
#1
The Witcher Music Contest



If you're passionate about creating music and love the world of the The Witcher, you must participate in our audio contest!

We know that you guys are a super-creative bunch, that’s why we will be giving you a chance to show off your music-making skills! To give you something to work with, we released a number of samples and music tracks from The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt for you to go crazy with -- download them here.
We want you to express yourself to the fullest, that’s why there are no limitations to the style or genre of your track, for example, you can create a three minute piece featuring a mix of bağlama, kemenche, and vocals combined with some epic heavy metal, which Nekkers would hadbang to! We will accept everything from Pop and Rock, to Classical and Cinematic. You name it.

Winners will be chosen by a jury consisting of CD PROJEKT RED crew members led by Marcin Przybyłowicz -- our Music Director.

The top three entrants will receive awesome prizes that will satisfy even the most demanding music enthusiast as well as Witcher fans. The grand prize is the limited edition of ERA II Medieval Legends -- a comprehensive sample library of historic instruments and voices. The runner-up entrant will receive the standard version of ERA II, while the second runner-up will get the Forest Kingdom II sample library. These prizes were provided by best service. Furthermore, the first three winners will receive a limited edition physical copy of the first expansion to the Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Hearts of Stone for a gaming platform of your choice.

Additionally, we will pick the best entries and create our own epic game-inspired compilation of the best tracks from our community, which will be available digitally on Spotify and other streaming services.

Please send your submissions in Wave PCM 24 bit 48 khz format via a cloud-based hosting service of your choice (e.g. Dropbox, Google Drive). All submissions must be sent in through our audio contest website.

The contest begins today. Submissions close on October 22nd, 23:59 CEST, 2015. The contest is open to fans around the globe over the age of 18. Click here to see detailed contest rules and regulations.
 
Last edited:
Riven-Twain

Riven-Twain

Moderator
#2
What a splendid idea! Good luck to all our Witcher composers! I'm quite eager to hear your creative inspirations!
 
Last edited:
F

facundoen

Senior user
#3
Awesome! The other day while I was playing the pitcher I wondered, what if that song would have this drum, that guitar... and BAM! CDPR releases samples and makes a music contest... I´m speechless. Good luck to all
 
Aes Sídhe

Aes Sídhe

Forum veteran
#4
Burza46 said:
The Witcher Music Contest
Click to expand...

Cracking idea for a competition... nice one ! :)

I noticed, while sampled & mixed electronically appears the general drift, other approaches aren't strictly prohibited, very wise, and could produce some real surprises. Vocal arrangements, for instance... hmmm... what would be the equivalent of a Barbershop Quartet in Witcherworld?

And are 4 of us crazy enough? ;)
 
Gilrond-i-Virdan

Gilrond-i-Virdan

Mentor
#5
Burza46 said:
Please send your submissions in Wave PCM 24 bit 48 khz format via a cloud-based hosting service of your choice
Click to expand...

Just out of curiosity, why not FLAC? It would save 50% of space and uploading / downloading time, and would provide the same lossless data.
 
G

GuyNwah

Ex-moderator
#6
FLAC is not a recording format. It would be asking participating musicians to obtain and use conversion software, a completely unnecessary imposition.
 
Gilrond-i-Virdan

Gilrond-i-Virdan

Mentor
#7
GuyNwah said:
FLAC is not a recording format. It would be asking participating musicians to obtain and use conversion software, a completely unnecessary imposition.
Click to expand...

Firstly, all musicians I know are perfectly capable of producing FLAC from any recorded audio (and of course would prefer it instead of submitting WAV over the wire, because of size reduction). Common recording software supports FLAC export (including free Audacity and commercial stuff like Audition).

But my point is that announcement sounds like WAV is mandatory for submission, while FLAC could be listed there as an option which would make things easier both for actual musicians and CDPR.
 
Last edited:
P

Pattington_Bear

Rookie
#8
A competition for us composers and producers out there! Great stuff! I've already started working on my submission today.

To the comments above the answer is quite simple. The issue with FLAC is that it is not as widely supported as WAV. Most of your standard out of the box operating systems won't open or play FLAC files without installing the extra codec. WAV is also the more common industry standard.

Both are 'technically' lossless compression formats, but it is the way they are encoded which makes them different in terms of file size. Meaning there is very little difference in quality of sound at all.
 
Last edited:
wichat

wichat

Mentor
#9
Congratulatins for this idea CDPR! I wish, for all the Witcher's Family, that this contest have the same answer as your last cosplay contest and see, well in this case hear surprising and/or gorgeous creations.

I'd take part in that but I rather be a simple spectator :D




GOOD LUCK FOR EVERYBODY!!!!
 
Gilrond-i-Virdan

Gilrond-i-Virdan

Mentor
#10
Pattington_Bear said:
To the comments above the answer is quite simple. The issue with FLAC is that it is not as widely supported as WAV files. Most of your standard out of the box operating systems won't open or play FLAC files without installing the extra codec. WAV is also the more common industry standard too.
Click to expand...

As far as I know FLAC is supported out of the box by common media players (such as VLC). It's a pretty established format (nowhere new), and barely any player lacks support for it these days. But more importantly it's supported by recording software (such as Audacity and Adobe Audition), since FLAC is not as useful for playback as for storing master copies. Anyway, if any system does require you to install additional packages for FLAC support, most musicians already have it, since storing your lossless data in WAV is quite wasteful space wise.

---------- Updated at 02:04 PM ----------

Pattington_Bear said:
Both are 'technically' lossless compression formats, but it is the way they are encoded which makes them different in terms of file size. Meaning there is very little difference in quality of sound at all.
Click to expand...

That's the whole point. FLAC simply compresses PCM data, without losing any frames. On average it provides 50% size reduction in comparison with raw WAV. And if you are multiplying it by many files - you can easily see how useful it becomes. Upload time also matters. Also CPU compression / decompression is way faster than disk I/O which becomes very intense on huge files.
 
Last edited:
P

Pattington_Bear

Rookie
#11
Gilrond-i-Virdan said:
As far as I know FLAC is supported out of the box by common media players (such as VLC). It's a pretty established format (nowhere new), and barely any player lacks support for it these days. But more importantly it's supported by recording software (such as Audacity and Adobe Audition), since FLAC is not as useful for playback as for storing master copies. Anyway, if any system does require you to install additional packages for FLAC support, most musicians already have it, since storing your lossless data in WAV is quite wasteful space wise.
Click to expand...

Gilrond-i-Virdan said:
That's the whole point. FLAC simply compresses PCM data, without losing any frames. On average it provides 50% size reduction in comparison with raw WAV. And if you are multiplying it by many files - you can easily see how useful it becomes. Upload time also matters. Also CPU compression / decompression is way cheaper than disk I/O which becomes very intense on huge files.
Click to expand...

Which sort of confirms what I am saying in a way, you need to download the required codecs or have the codecs readily to hand in order to play FLAC files. VLC is one of the few out there which does support such a codec. Whilst musicians, producers and composers like myself may have such codecs readily available, those who request the files know how they want to receive said files, as they have requested specific specifications. Meaning sometimes you don't always have the privilege of a choice in the matter. They know what will work for them and what meets the correct standards. It is good practice for those who are interested in an industry job anyway.

Most companies will ask for a file that is easily editable as well as something that is transferable across all platforms and machines in order save time as well as money further down the line. This is something that FLAC is not.

Most DAWs (digital audio workstations) on the market do not support the FLAC Format (at least the ones I know). Audio Editors will (as you've listed), but they are built for a completely different purpose and are not built to handle as many complex audio editing tasks as DAWs are. Most people who take part in this competition will use a DAW over an Audio Editor at some point (I will be), meaning a majority of tracks will need to be bounced via PCM anyway.

It comes down to how the data is handled, and if you are using FLAC for easy listening that is perfectly fine. There is literally no difference in quality between the two. However FLAC becomes more of a hinderance when the file is used for something more than just listening and not every machine is able to handle it without the extras.

Whilst the benefits of saving space is true, it is also slightly melodramatic as well. A single three and a half minute WAV file will no more than 1GB of space and most companies out there active in the industry do have the means to cope with CPU as well as file storage on a massive scale anyway.
 
Last edited:
Gilrond-i-Virdan

Gilrond-i-Virdan

Mentor
#12
Pattington_Bear said:
Most companies will ask for a file that is easily editable as well as something that is transferable across all platforms and machines in order save time as well as money further down the line. This is something that FLAC is not.
Click to expand...

Not sure why. FLAC is supported on all common OSes as far as I know, as well as in all audio editors, especially professional ones. Do you have specific scenario on mind when someone can't use FLAC? It's a de-facto standard for storing lossless compressed audio. When someone is using a specific task which requires raw PCM, it's easily exportable from FLAC (i.e. if DAW is a concern, which can't consume FLAC, you can easily convert FLAC to WAV - it takes seconds on any modern computer). The benefit that FLAC provides is size reduction. Pushing WAVs over the network is not a good idea.

---------- Updated at 05:10 PM ----------

Pattington_Bear said:
It comes down to how the data is handled, and if you are using FLAC for easy listening that is perfectly fine. There is literally no difference in quality between the two. However FLAC becomes more of a hinderance when the file is used for something more than just listening and not every machine is able to handle it without the extras.
Click to expand...

No, I view it as the opposite. FLAC is pretty pointless for listening, because you can produce much smaller sizes with lossy codecs like Opus but without any noticeable audible difference. FLAC is useful precisely for storage and transfer of master copies however, and because it's trivial to convert between FLAC and WAV back and forth, and you can always get WAV from it when you need it.

---------- Updated at 05:14 PM ----------

Pattington_Bear said:
Whilst the benefits of saving space is true, it is also slightly melodramatic as well.
Click to expand...
Not when you multiply storage savings within one recording to hundreds and thousands. And not when transferring it over the network takes time.
 
Last edited:
R

radulaur234

Rookie
#15
I know this is a stupid idea but please,PLEASE can you put the music the winners do in the Hearts of Stone credits?(if it has one)...Or just put some combat track,like "Silver for monsters"...I really know this is stupid,and that I'm the only one who cares about this :)
 
gregski

gregski

Moderator
#19
So, it's a rule that everyone's sharing their pieces of music here, no matter if they win the contest or not...right? RIGHT!?
 

Similar threads

The Witcher 3 REDkit Playtest
1
489
It’s All About You! — S02E02: Imbaelk
1
845
[CONTEST] RED Holidays 2023
20
16K
RED Holidays 2023 Contest - Holiday gifts in The Continent!
15
3K
RED Holidays 2023 Contest - Holiday screenshot adventure!
8
3K
Top Bottom