I always get concerned when this thread goes silent...
I brace for something really bad to happen and the anxiety is real...
Maybe others feel the same...?
So I thought I'd lighten the pent-up tension by sharing "one" of my "more speculative reports" here.
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This is how I found this particular uploader in question. They leave a "great" impression right of the bat,:
- very complain-y tone & typos
- no signs of remorse (A regular person would write something akin to "Sorry I messed up. Can somebody please help me?")
- addressing the void, rather than to do 2 minutes of digging to determine how to contact the powers that be... (Why would anyone even do that? "Writing a wish on a slip of paper and throwing it into the street" is not how humans communicate!)
To make it clear: I do not believe that every single person who "gets caught" is a "problem case". I just think 90% of them are. After all, we get a lot of them... So doing a quick check always seems to be worth a minute or two of my time.
They still have one track left uploaded so let's have a look:
No immediate search results for the title given. But I find it hard to believe that somebody who has the this voice and the recording quality to go along with to then get into trouble over stolen music and then tries to "communicate" like that.
I am a bit on the fence about the case. Just like everyone else, musicians can make stupid mistakes from time to time. It just seems unlikely that somebody on that skill level
- composes 20 to 100 tracks
- buys professional recording equipment or invests into another 100% legit "source of a singing voice"
- then hops on NG - and NG only!
- bins almost all of their tracks and only releases one track that sound "good enough"
- and the second track they ever upload is not one of their own...
- And just to top it off, after all that hard work, they do the equivalent of walking into the street, exclaiming "To anyone who hears this: Fix my problem for me." It just doesn't fit.
And that's the kind of suspicious behavior that makes me go "I am moderately sorry if I waste your time, dear anonymous Audio Portal Moderator, but could you please look into this? I think this might be worth your time."
(To be perfectly honest here: I just write "Speculative report:" in the top line. They probably have another 100 of these to go through today and will probably not care as much about pleasantries. I know how it feels when you're tired and "do stuff on NG" out of feeling obligated to.)
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And to celebrate "finally weekend!", today you'll get a two-for-one special! ;)
This user stands out by providing "information out of nowhere". The kind of information one might provide preemptively if one would like to evoke the impression of "legitimacy". But at the same time, they did not take the time to look into how "other" music producers present their work here. Odd for somebody who allegedly invested hundreds of hours into "getting good"...
Again, this is a user who has no accounts aside the one on NG and no discernible growth curve.
They also have an "interesting" uploading record:
- 2 "test tracks"
- 2 tracks somehow related to the Sonic franchise
- followed by what might or might not be a midi-fied portion of the track composed by another Newgrounds user. They even credited the original artist, which is unusual.
- The first 2 are most certainly theirs.
- The Sonic ones might be stolen.
- The last one may or may not be mostly ripped from another artist's work. They do know how to create audio files so it would not be hard to convince me that they actually created the file through their own efforts. But how much of those efforts were creative in nature...? Answering that last bit is above my pay-grade.
Here's how my report looked (which I left on their final upload):
I suspect that this is part of 'F-777 - Deadlocked (Full)' by 'F-777' - just midi-fied:
https://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/503731
However, I neither have the musical ear nor the tools to assist me in analyzing the situation further.
Part of that makes me suspicious of them is that they jumped from "I hitted the keysboard, mom!" to "Professionally recorded piece that's _most_likely_ stolen from a Sonic game" within a week... and then went back to "Cheap midi-cover".
Here are the links to the Sonic-tracks in question, so you don't have to deal with 3 identical reports:
https://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/1434454
https://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/1434464
This is both a complex situation for a single report, but also an interesting case in concerns to this thread. As you can see my reports are rather condensed, compared to the lengthy explanation I provided for the thread. Because NG Moderators see a lot of this, I am convinced that they can follow me if I skip a few steps.
(This was also a good chance for me to demonstrate that I am not as nice of a person as some users on NG think I am. I can display really dickish behavior sometimes when I think somebody "did wrong", so I decided to leave my insults in.)
