IMHO, more gentle loopable background music. separate intro, looping segment, and outro. The kind that is played when the player is exploring the world, but nothing super exciting is going on. Exciting music is fantastic, but when the player is in a pastoral setting, it doesn't make sense. By "gentle" I also mean music that doesn't annoy the player when it's repeating a lot. This is not the kind of music you play when there is an action scene or during combat. More like when you're in a peaceful town or the lonely wastelands or the vast unexplored regions of a distant nebula.

Although maybe there is that sort of music here on OGA, but I haven't been able to find it. If you guys know about this stuff, drop me a link to it or some keywords I should be searching for. :)

I agree with medicine storm, there is plenty of action, title screen, character select, so the more calming, subtle tracks there are would be good. I think sub categorie searches don't help, not here though, just everywhere, there are so many of these it's hard to know what sort of catagory to place your music in to decide what best theme it suits, or depicts. 'Gentle' 'soft' 'tranquil' and 'peaceful' that's just a couple as an example, not everyone would use these of coarse, but I think that's the point I'm making.:) it's just as hard when searching for it too. You could say the same for most art assets but I would say it was more hit then miss, and more miss then hit with music searches.

anyways, I would like to see more 16bit music, megadrive snes themed music. :)

First I agree with MedicineStorm and Chasersgaming. I have found "gentle" music, but I do brute force searches and it does seem less common.

Now I would like to take this opportunity to "share a little". I hope you don't mind.

There is no easy way to find music on OGA. You try your best with the search engine (or give up and use it as a license filter only) and then grind it out. There is no way to see a preview of the songs. You have to listen to each song you choose to give a chance to for a few seconds just to know if it was worth setting aside as a cannadite. Then when you have your canadites they never go together. You always end up letting a really good song or two go just because it does not sound good with the other songs.

If you want your songs to be as helpful as possible do not make "songs" make "OST"s. That way when someone stumbles across one of your songs and checks your contributions to see if you uploaded anything else like it, they will find your other songs that go with it. This greatly enhances the chance that any of your songs get used. This is the difference between a random sprite sheet and a LPC sprite sheet.

Oh, also use the collections feature. This lets you tell people who are searching what songs are in the "OST". Plus you can include songs you did not upload in your OST this way. This has the benefit of if I stumble on the other person's contribution it will list your collection (which has your songs in it) on that page. But please keep the license options consitent in your OST collections. There should be at least 1 license that applies to every song in it. It makes the legal side of game dev simpler to not have to use 3 or 4 different licenses.

P.S. Great work on your songs!

LOL, I feel stupid. I just got done looking at your uploads >.<;

MedicineStorm I found a decent way to find "gentle" songs. Do a search with "Joth" as the submitter. I think you will find that a lot of the results qualify.

Anyway, keep up the good work!

I agree with Chasersgaming's and Joth's idea about musical subcategories. That could be a possibility in OGA3, but I'm wondering if it would be very helpful. I think we had something similar for textures, but the feature was removed. I'll have to ask bart why it didn't work out. Nothing prevents submitters from using tags like "soft", "tranquil", etc. Seems like a lot of music submissions lack tags describing the music's mood. I like this list I'm seeing here:

I certainly like Y'all's initial list of "80s", "Nostalgia", "Traditional Asian", "Space", "JRPG", "Chill", "Chiptune", "Retro", Sci-Fi", "Underwater", "Fantasy", "Tranquil", "Peaceful", "Soft". A good start. What are some others?

Thanks, Saliv. I did indeed listen to a lot of Joth's submissions at your suggestion and found some fairly good examples of what I'm talking about. :) Also, yes collections are a pretty solid way to find hidden gems. If someone else thought it was decent enough to hoard it, chances are you'll find something good there, too.

As for external examples of what I mean... The Elder Scrolls games do a pretty good job with "gentle" music. Probably because they're such open-world concepts. Every game I use as an example is in context to the other music of that game. So what I would call "gentle" music in Chrono Trigger could only be called that in comparision to the other songs from Chrono Trigger, but those same songs compared to the music of Skyrim might not be considered very gentle at all. I hope that's more helpful than it is confusing. :P

Oblivion: Not all the music qualifies, obviously, but here are the ones that stood out to me as "gentle" background-ish, doesn't-get-annoying-on-repeat music. A lot of Oblivions music starts to sound similar, but that's probably because it was designed as a cohesive self-consistent soundtrack :

• Through the Valleys
• Harvest Dawn
• Wind from the Depths - more creepy than calm, but never-the-less, "gentle"
• Wings of Kynareth
• Tension - Certainly lives up to it's name, but is still not abrupt or action-y
• Watchman's Ease
• Glory of Cyrodiil
• Minstrel's Lament
• Ancient Sorrow
• Auriel's Ascension
• Unmarked Stone
• Sunrise of Flutes
• Deep Waters
• Dusk at the Market
• Peace of Akatos 

I was thinking of including several examples from Legend of Zelda - Breath of the Wild  or Twilight Princess  but those OSTs have a lot of atonal cutting parts. I like them for sure, but they don't do as well on repeat and certainly don't convey the gentleness I'm referencing. Some I would even call "calm", but I wouldn't say any of them are very "gentle". LoZ-TP Hyrule Field Night and Cave being decent exceptions.

Chrono Trigger has a lot of songs that do pretty well on repeat. They don't get very annoying after several loops (although this is controversial; Some people feel that every song on this OST is irritating on the first listen :) The songs are rarely subtle, though, and are usually in the foreground of my inner ear rather than the background. With that caviat in mind, some notable examples IMHO:

• Secret in the forest
• Silent Night
• Ruined World
• People Without Hope
• Remains of The Factory
• Rhythm of Sky, Wind, and Earth
• Confusing Melody By my own definition, this one could be said to not do well on repeat, but only becase the very purpose of the melody is to unsettle the player.
• Corridors of Time
• Schala's Theme
• Sealed Door

Part of the problem is that there are a lot of ways to search for a song:

• Feel (What is the emotion the peice is trying to convey?)
• Genre (dubstep, nightcore, trance... actualy see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_popular_music_genres and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_music_styles. I don't know the difference, so you get both lists :P)
• Technical (Is this real chiptune and if so what platform was it made for? Does the song have intros? Loops? Closings? Variations? etc.)
• What instruments where used? (includes, excludes, and only the selected instruments.)
• What is the song supposed to be used for? (Title scene, battle, boss, character theme, mood, overworld, etc.)

I do not believe it is fair to ask all of that from the artists so a user generated labels option might be a good plan, but I would still like to see what the artist thoughts are though...

Honestly, that should probably be a more site wide discussion. Unless, you want each category to have it's own sort function.

Sorry, i don't think it's too much to ask artists to include more tags than just "soundtrack" and "music". I'm not talking about submitters like joth; his tags have the kind of categorical descriptions we need. Those are far from the majority, though. If submitters don't want anyone to ever find their submissions, then by all means don't take the 60 seconds it requires to give more than two descriptive tags to your music. 

Interesting considerations! A genre selection option might sound nice in theory, if there wasn't so many musical genres and fusions and permutations of those genres.... still, it's not entirely a bad idea... 

Also, while I'm sure there would be more need for said gentle background music, hopefully it's ok that I just keep making my stuff as usual too ;; 

But that's another thing, what if you feel your archive here is bloated with old worthless tracks (like mine)? I know the obvious solution is just for the artists producing them to have better quality control...

@chasersgaming I could look into doing some megadrive stuff, I already have a fair few mega drive songs and it's a fun sound chip to work with ^^

Awww, that was a very rambly post.

in terns of 'Sub catagories' the 'Tab' system is the best and only way to get the best search results, but as we have all mentioned or reconised that its very dependant on what is uploaded and tagged by the uploader to whether or not it is what the downloader is expecting or looking for, we need to find a better way of matching them up. perhaps tags that are searched for could also bring up other music that are not tagged with the same tag , but bring them more towards the end of a search result.

i dunno something like:

here are the results based on your search criteria. ("Peaceful")

 1,2,3,4, etc

here are some suggested results based on your search criteria ("gentle,soft,tranquil")

1,2,3,4,5, etc

peaceful tag is also linked to gentle tag, although the submitter hasnt actually used it as a tag.

the only other way that is generally the way, it to write as many tags as ytou can think of in hope someone will find your track. :)

its just a idea, maybe something like this could be done for OGA 3.

@spring that would be cool, what do you use?, id love to have a go myself too. :)

@chasersgaming for mega drive stuff I use DefleMask, it's a free program which can write for many different soundchips, maybe we could write a theme for the Furry Wrestling Federation :D