The fact that a contest was hosted allowing importing entire stems from other daws on a website that already had it's own built-in daw defeats the point of hosting a contest on Audiotool. Both winners having their submissions being entirely non-Audiotool, with one only making their account to make a submission is a spit in the face. It's like a school hosting an art contest and someone from an entirely different district comes in and wins.
Also voting should have been left up to the community, rather than judges that had no affiliation with Audiotool.
Auditool users not being immature? impossible,,,,,,,
It really surprises me since last year the exact same thing happened but no one had this level of response? Ignoring who won anyways.
It's evident this is the route audiotool has been wanting to take but no one seemed to have cared except for what I can vaguely remember
like 6 people including the same ones who brought up the prizes this time around to respect the producers time and be capable of getting a paid prize alongside.
And then there's the supposed new TOS that'll swing around regarding AI
Like one good thing one bad but isn't really bad as we already should've seen it coming?
Publicity for audiotool? Yeah ofc
Would they have wanted an audiotool producer to win and have a snapshot to show for it instead of samples? YES that would've been big money for them.
Yet here we are.
It made zero sense for a bunch of amatures to even have this kind of opportunity when less than 5% of this DAW's producers make music and profit off it using distributors via bandcamp soundcloud or spotify and everything else under the rainbow.
This sites userbase it either to young to do anything worthwhile musically with the rewards
Or they have moved to different DAWs.
Like lets face it EVERY single person who could've taken proper advantage of the prizes either left the site or uses another daw.
They could've uploaded stems but didn't
The winners are at no fault.
Even IF they did intentionally compete just to take advantage of the ruleset EVERYONE else could've.
I would've LOVED to see someone just slam down a fucking tonematrix just to prove how stupid the rules are about stems and win but no one did it lmao
Witch hunting someone because they won a music comp with a genuine impressive prize isn't going to solve things for the future
Audiotool users will either need to accept the direction things went or just leave lol
When your school invites schools from other districts to compete, and those districts win, you might blame your school for inviting them. But that doesn't mean you should steal another student's lunch banana and claim that AI painted their winning pictures.
Something people are missing is that there was a brief for this comp. The track had to hit a certain "vibe" as well as being of good quality. Just because lavalamp and client didn't get the top spots doesn't mean their quality isn't top tier, but maybe the vibe just wasn't a fit. I'm not the judge, so I don't know what that decision was based on exactly.
People came at it with different ideas of what this type of music should sound like - quality of production isn't the only factor determining who wins.
Thanks to audiotool that we can continue to make music for free and thanks to the moderators who spend their spare time to keep the site safe and clean!
It think it was clearly communicated that audiotool wants to align itself with other platforms and daws in terms of stems and sample usage, which makes perfect sense.
Attacking the winner and calling him an idiot on his wall and telling him to delete his track is completely unfair and doesn't help anyone.
I have an industrial hiphop/noise music entry I didn't get to submit with criticism towards something like this lol. Didn't take my time to do it though.
I see it a bit differently, but yeah well... you're right.
anonymous user
2025-07-01 23:54 · 2025-07-01
idk. this all just strikes me as super corporate and disconnected from the actual state of things here. it probably wasn't a good idea to host the competition on AT to begin with.
what gets me though- and i don't say this to be egotistical, just to hammer a point- is that i purposefully refrained from participating due to others' and my own criticism on the original announcement for it. i didn't feel right joining in on a competition whose rules i had helped in altering. it felt very self-serving and i preferred to sit back and let smaller, lesser known artists compete for the prize. turns out though, the winners went completely against my own line of thinking.
that's not to diss the winners though. i truly hope they put the prizes to good use and find value from it. their entries aren't bad on their own, either. my issue is the fact that whoever the judges were for this competition were completely disconnected from the community (which can be a good thing in the right context, this just wasn't it) and sought material that fit a certain "vibe," that vibe being corporate-friendly, neutered edm that only a very tiny fraction of the EWC audience will pay any sort of deep attention to. it makes perfect sense that what seems to me to be an industry plant and an artist who barely utilizes AT's own workspace (and who also uses AI for covers and bios, but that's a whole other debate) would be the winners. it's great to see some actual AT artists in the top 8 but it still feels like the team spat a big loogie in all our faces.
i'm just lost now tbh. i've already been frustrated with how stagnant, inactive, and at-odds AT has gotten in the past years and this just completely confirmed all my worst fears about the site (not even to mention the stance on AI in the TOS recently)
anonymous user· reply
2025-07-01 23:59 · 2025-07-01
and i mean, the fact that we even HAD TO HAVE the discussion on the prizes was already a huge red flag. from the jump it seemed that this was gonna be a rigged game- not quite literally, but spiritually and artistically
yeah, really sucks. they seemed to be all for "artistic" music, encouraging contestants to submit any genre they pleased, wanting to see the variety that the AT community has to offer, but then the actual winners end up being very "corporate-friendly" as you described. in general this whole contest just seems like it was so mismanaged, probably should not have been hosted on AT in the first place especially since they literally encouraged non-AT music...
I have my criticisms with the contest but it’s nothing people haven’t already voiced their frustrations over (Carrion Haven pretty much covers all of it) so I won’t beat the dead horse.
What I will do, however; is offer a tough to swallow pill that maybe a lot of people here aren’t willing to hear yet.
A lot or even most of you who are frustrated might not realize that of the tracks that actually scored points here, only three tracks in the entire contest actually understood the assignment given and those also happened to be the top 3. This is no coincidence; this contest wasn’t made for you to employ your full artistic expression, there is a very obvious vibe and fairly strict requirements being sought after that almost nobody, not even the most seasoned artists here even attempted to follow. Whether that be from inexperience or simply comfort in your own space no one here even really made an attempt at taking the prize.
Really it just shows that none of you were good enough.
I understand that’s obviously not what anyone wants to hear and believe me, I’m certainly not a fan of random artists who don’t give a shit about the site swooping in to take what is so easily taken by uploading something you think you’re incapable of making, but that's the bottom line after all.
This should serve as a wake up call to artists who actually want Audiotool to succeed, or you can keep complaining that it’s Audiotool's fault and continue to perpetuate the idea that this app is destined to get buried in the sand, having no place on a global stage like EWC.
Don't think the entire problem is "Try harder or AT will fall." I can understand that the rules for this comp were very specific and most didn't try to hold to that.
I didn’t say it was the entire problem nor did I even recognize it as the problem. The "problem" is that those are the optics given any time someone complains over any corporate decision Audiotool makes to try and succeed at relevance on a macro scale and honestly it’s pretty sad. Sure you can hate the process but let’s face it, stuff like this is designed to gain sponsorships and get outside eyes looking in, outside eyes which don’t give a fuck about the "spirit of Audiotool" and when they see us complaining about something so banal as losing to DAWs that aren’t Audiotool and how it shouldn’t be allowed in our contests; well we aren’t making a great case for our app now are we?
To reiterate, I’m not literally saying that the users will cause Audiotool to fail, Audiotool will continue to be okay. I’m saying that people engaging in this rhetoric are implying that it will fail because they can’t step up to the plate when push comes to shove.
to me your msg boils down to "be the change" and i agree. i dont think everyone should go full doomer about this especially when the studio update is on the horizon, which will hopefully finally give way to site updates afterward. im often conflicted about whether i'm too harsh or too forgiving concerning a lot of audiotool's practices because at the end of the day this is all free to use. it feels very spoiled for me to be so frustrated when i know most of the team cares deeply about audiotool. it's tough emotions swirling around. i realize the community's sorta become an echo-chamber of negativity. the narrative that's the least forgiving is the one that sticks because then people can feel justified sitting back and not rlly contributing. i think most of us criticize out of love but love also requires the effort to see shit through. it's been an awkward and at times exhausting process so far but i continue to hold out optimism despite everything
The issue is, do better in what? Showing off ATs capabilities? Because we have plenty of people who do. Just no one gets any attention. If we're talking in terms of "industry standard", do we want that? What actually constitutes for quality music is the question. Popularity? Because as charts in general show, it's usually the most expectable and non-challenging music. I guess that's just a personal opinion, but what I don't really want to see is more "Spotify recommended"-esque stuff popping up. It holds little artistic value to me. And most of that stuff ISN'T even properly mixed and just aims to win the loudness war. Should I expect to ever get seen in any way? Should I expect AT to get seen? IDK... maybe not. Simply, the limitations of aoudiotool actually give the site its artistic value. Like this you're not just another fish in the ocean (global music "market").
Also, arguably there are criteria for "good" music and "bad" music. Etterath, we die, Naswalt and a few others have been able to fuse that artsy side with good mixing. But you can hear from the sounds in those "good tracks" we value in the community, there is no real match to a DAW and 300 resamples of a sound. How do Clients megadraft sizes (completely unrealistic to most people here) compare to someone taking 3 phaseplants with tweaked presets and doing complex processing with soothe 3. Not even our EQs work correctly.
I'm not being a doomer here. But it's clear to me that the site is heading a certain direction... and it's only logical for it to "devalue itself", fuse with the global market to be able to compete. What bothers me most is that it seems AI is one of the steps they want to take that will make this website attractive to people because half of the world does it. Then I can no longer see the process of how someone made something, can't trust the way they made it, have to use external software myself to keep up in any way shape or form. That kills the collaborative aspect of AT which it is arguably completely built on.
Have you listened to the list of submissions? There are some tracks at industry standard that, compared to 5 Audiotool tracks, didn't make it into the top 8.
Either way. This isn't about who won. It's about stems, it's about the absurdity of hosting EWC on Audiotool and systematically breaking of the values I thought Audiotool had.
If it hadn’t been about who won, the emotions wouldn’t have erupted until no Audiotool user was among the top two. Regarding the question you deleted: My comment wasn’t a reaction to yours as a response to Kiari, but rather to a part of your answer. But since you’re asking: For me, a project of this kind would always start with research. Who is the company, what do they represent, and what kind of music style and athmosphere have they used so far? For example, Client’s track personally blew me away with its quality and atmosphere. If I had to decide as the organizer of an event like this whether such a dark, edgy ambient track could play between the uplifting, pompous orchestral pieces, I would probably decide against it, even though it’s my personal favorite. And I would assume, after listening to the submissions, that hardly any Audiotool users, if any, have done this kind of research. If every genre is allowed, that doesn’t mean you should just submit everything you personally like, but it should fit the theme, right? If it’s allowed to use old tracks, that doesn’t mean you should submit every track of yours that you think is good; instead, you should check its suitability, revise it if necessary, and adjust it for quality. And last but not least, for over a year now, it’s been possible to upload stems in full track length. Time to get used to it. I did and I wasn't a friend of that idea either. What’s truly annoying are the people who exploit this feature and cheat their way into chart rankings. But I see them, not the possibility itself, as the problem.
Seeing AI is not something I want to get used to.
Inevitability is a different question I suppose...
You are right about the rules. That's why I deleted the comment. It was redundant.
@sandburgen I agree that the contest had certain thematic requirements, but one of the underlying problems is just that: they were looking for music that is objectively harder to create on AT compared to other DAWs. In order to fit the criteria that they were looking for, it's practically required that you use 3rd-party software. There are 0 orchestral VSTs on this site, and getting "cinematic" sounds, while possible, is significantly harder to accomplish using AT's resources. So, the path of least resistance applies here, and anyone who has access to an external DAW will most likely use it, as the winners did, giving them an objective advantage over people who don't.
The frustration most people are feeling comes from the fact that this was marketed as an "opportunity" for "global recognition" if you were an Audiotool user. But the truth is that there was actually no opportunity for AT users, rather the opportunity was, by design, only obtainable for FL users, Ableton users, and so on. That's why we've seen so much complaints about both winners making one-time accounts for this contest; the sentiment that they aren't "true" AT users, while it doesn't discredit their musical talent, does make it feel like they somehow cheated without cheating. Personally I don't agree with this, and I recognize that they did win by technically following all the rules, but the fact still remains that the rules themselves were tilted in their favor. That's what everyone hates about this, not the judges, not the winners, but the contest itself being "BS". If all EWC was worried about is finding good music for their special segment, it would have made so much more sense to host this contest outside of any specific production website, but they didn't and now everyone feels lied to.
It's pretty ironic that the growing sentiment I'm trying to combat is being used directly in my own thread, neatly tied up into one perfect defeatist package.
Yes, as long as you think you're at a disadvantage and never give anything a well-researched, effort-given shot you will always lose so really why bother submitting anything? It seems to be all fun and games around here until an actual challenge shows up and forces you to walk on those weak knees of yours.
Opinions on corporate decisions and scummy user behaviour are completely on the table and the frustrations between them are very clearly shared universally by all members of our community; but please stop with this embarrassing rhetoric that we and our app are so useless on the global stage that we collectively can't even drum up an appropriate submission worthy of testing that theory.
So suddenly it is not possible anymore to upload sounds and use them in audiotool? It's not that we accepted stems from other DAWs but Audiotoolers should only use the 909 and the Tonematrix. There were 5 points between FranzFritz and Lavalamp. Where is the missing opportunity? I could understand the frustration of newbie producers that this one wasnt for them but saying that grown up audiotool producers had no chance to win this is simply not true. Batoune & The Brewers used a lot of musical samples from BANDLAB and made it to the Top 8. Maybe if he had uploaded orchestra or cinematic samples instead of Funk and House samples he could have been the winner of the game.
@yit0 I can understand your aversion to AI from the perspective that it gives unskilled and perhaps untalented individuals the chance to present themselves as something they are not. Personally, I really enjoy using it to bring creative ideas to life, as you can see from my profile pictures and covers over the past two years. I've even created a track with AI-generated vocals. Completely rejecting it seems a bit short-sighted to me; using it thoughtfully and creatively, I don't find objectionable.
I'm not trying to be "defeatist", but just recognizing that it is simply more challenging to procure industry-level music without industry-level tools. Yes, there are talented and skillful users who are exceptions to that, and I'm not trying to say there was 0 chance for them to win. However, most AT users are not going to be willing to put in the effort to reach that level of skill while staying on AT, because at that point you might as well just upgrade to industry-level software. And before you say "who says AT isn't industry level software?", the truth is that its subjective. Some people can use it at an industry level, some people can't. Your point is that AT users should just lock in and compete better, but this is just unrealistic, especially if favoritism is offered to those who don't use Audiotool.
If they really wanted this competition to give AT users a chance to shine, they should have evened the playing field and not allowed submissions to be made entirely outside of the site. The problem is that they didn't, and actually encouraged non-AT submissions instead. Naturally, this leads to a sense of betrayal from the general community, even if it was all stated in the rules.
As for sample uploading, correct me if I'm wrong but you can do that in other DAWs too, right? It doesn't really make the contest any fairer if it's something that any DAW can do.
I know this sounds pessimistic to yall but like, I'm just trying to look at this objectively and explain why everyone is so upset with this. I don't even have such strong feelings on the situation, I just think the contest was mismanaged and would have been better off somewhere else.
Btw, facing off against other DAWs is in no way a deterrent to me. For all of the disadvantages I'm claiming, I personally don't care at all where the music was made; it just comes down to making a good song at the end of the day. But I understand the frustration that everyone is feeling due to this, and as I've been trying to point out it's not exactly fair.
This is a much better worded argument than the one you started out with, but I'd like to like to correct the record and say that it is in fact 100% realistic to expect more of people who actually want to win a contest and also preferably drop the idea that there was favouritism in picking non-Audiotool winners. That is just a coping mechanism devised to soften the blow that audiotoolers don't want to hear and has no evidence to support it other than feelings on what constitutes a better daw.
I suppose favoritism was the wrong way to put it, it's more like external DAWs were, in a way, incentivized. As I explained, it's simply easier to use 3rd-party tools, and the fact that this contest entirely allowed and embraced it just goes to show that they weren't concerned about the possible disadvantages AT users might face. If you had two producers of equal skill level and who equally want to win, one using Audiotool and the other using Pro Tools, who's making a better quality song? The AT user has less to work with, and in order to make a song of the same caliber the AT user has to be more proficient in AT than the PT user in PT. You would argue that they could both make a better song than the other, and I agree; music is subjective after all. But we can't act like it isn't going to be more challenging for the AT user, which is why I say that allowing external DAWs directly incentivizes their use.
Again, path of least resistance: if there's an easier option, people are going to take it, and when only SOME have that option rather than ALL, it is definitively "unfair". If they were interested in fairness, AT (or EWC) ought to have eliminated the option that only some people would have. But if they weren't interested in fairness and just wanted a song (which is totally in their right to do, and an option I personally wish they went with), they really shouldn't have brought this contest to AT in the first place. You just can't dress it up as this "golden opportunity" for a specific community, then present the rewards to people who aren't even from that community. And yes, I know that the contest wasn't explicitly designed for just long-standing AT members, but that's probably the biggest point of failure: why even host it here at all then?
To show that AT (and it's users) can stand alongside industry-level equipment.
It's that simple.
And if you don't think that having 6/8 of the top entries produced in the AT studio demonstrates that, well there's a problem.
AT entries don't have to win to prove they are capable of competing.
If we take your argument of levelling the playing field regarding affordibility of a DAW then we could extrapolate that to all DAWs competing in any competition - "you can only use a DAW that cost x or less." "You can't use VSTs that cost more than x" "You can't have spent more than x on samples used in the project" "Total money spent on features, samples, presets etc. cannot exceed x". - this would be utterly ridiculous.
A large number of people I know with other DAWs and a lot of the top tier (most expensive and fashionable) VSTs cracked them for free anyway making the only limitation whether you're using an OS that supports the software or not.
The playing field is never even. Remove other DAWs from the equation and you have the likes of Client with a PC capable of handling monstrous drafts up against twelve year old Jimmy using his school chromebook that lags every five seconds and monitoring his playback with skullcandy earbuds (or worse, in-built speakers). Even if Jimmy was as technically advanced as Client or as musically talented as Naswalt etc. he "can't compete" without applying restrictions to everyone else.
Last year people weren't happy with the idea of stem uploads allowing users to make music elsewhere and come in and sweep the competition. Then the results came out and a lot of AT entries won the category stages, and Jetdarc took home the grand prize (beating this year's second place winner). There is no uproar about this.
This year, that didn't happen and two non-AT studio tracks won and suddenly the game is rigged against AT users, AT isn't good enough to compete with others DAWs, the winners must be plants, the judges were biased against AT users etc.
If you don't like stem uploads because it detracts from the original intent of AT, that's fine. Me too. But I don't upload external works, nor interact with the external work of others.
If you don't like the idea of a competition on this site being open to any music creator and not exclusively for users of the studio, that's also fine, but have a better reason for that than "AT isn't good enough to compete against the other DAWs" or "The playing field isn't even".
anonymous user
2025-07-03 18:09 · 2025-07-03
slept on it and i'm honestly not even that frustrated anymore so i deleted my initial comment. i don't feel comfortable entertaining needlessly pessimistic narratives about audiotool's future based on 1 contest outcome. i still understand why people were upset but tbh a lot of the outrage was overblown asf and in some cases completely unacceptable. makes us look really bad. i think the larger problem is that the community is so hungry for change that we've become unreasonably agitated and pretty annoying. i cringe thinking about the amount of people who've come to audiotool thru esports seeing the outrage and getting turned off. i try to put my friends onto audiotool but then i realize all the things i've told them about the community over the years and it's no wonder i've had more success putting them onto FL instead LOL. but that requires its own board post. all of this is just to say: i regret thinking this was such a big deal
@sandburgen then you are missing the point about AI. It's not about giving people opportunities. That's great. My brother writes super clever lyrics and then feeds that to AI to get a very funny and clever song. But the art isn't the music, it's the lyrics. And he doesn't upload it anywhere claiming it's his. If you generate everything, none of it is your art. PLUS there are almost NO copyright laws for AI!!! This is the biggest flaw. What people generate is essentially stolen content from a swirl of creators that will never see any credit going to them. With sampling you can at least reverse search or look at the tags.
@callycus Again, this isn't about this one time. It's the cumulative problems that have been emerging from audiotool. First stems that are being abused (I understand the point, and it's not something I can control nor really keep people from doing), then a largely externalyzed competition (EWC no.1 [There were several users who expressed their doubts, but we haven't been THAT vocal]), AI and then EWC no.2. You admitted that the playfield isn't even and I really do not understand how we're supposed to pretend it is. (Only with stems can you get somewhere). That is the realistic version of the argument. What you describe is quite utopian IMHO. I do see the value in trying to get close, however. I also said how keeping stems out of AT could enhance the creativity on AT in terms of using the native tools.
I keep making the same arguments. It seems we can't really get to common ground on those points. I will no longer write any responses, since you will likely not change my mind. I don't know who shares these opinions, but so far it seems like I'm not the only one.
I will not compete in such events. I have no reason or desire to. I don't know where audiotool is heading, but I have a feeling I won't like it and someone up there barely listens... gotta be honest. That is also not only my opinion as far as I am aware. Who or what is this company really interested in? I encourage people to ask that.
anonymous user· reply
2025-07-03 18:44 · 2025-07-03
at this point i dont really believe in the shady conspiracy talk like "what is this site really interested in?"
i think people are so bored and antsy for any kind of closure about what changes are on the horizon that they're trying to find patterns that aren't there. ever since the andre thing there's this idea in people's heads that audiotool have completely transformed under new management and that they're trying to larp as google or something. most of audiotool's exhausting moments have boiled down to mismanaging events and being confusing. this is evidence of a skeleton crew, not audiotool suddenly becoming an evil for-profit company
as much as i hate any kind of ai generated work it's super hard to moderate properly which is most likely why audiotool has the stance on it that it does. i dont fw the growing approval for ai track covers bc they're ugly as fuck but it's not illegal so there's not much you can do. afaik there's no ai sponsor that audiotool's hiding or anything, it's just a move to prevent the mod team from killing themselves trying to figure out if that transient sounds weird because it's ai or simply because it's an ass song. it would be controversial if they took down a song that turned out to just be ass and nothing nefarious. the community can weed out ai artists just fine, we harass people just for winning a contest
seriously? i don't know why this specific comment got to me but:
get your head out the fucking dirt dude.
people (especially me) aren't pessimistic about audiotool's future because of a single contest. first of all, it is the new leadership of audiotool going towards the gaming industry. it's the whole andre michelle fiasco & lawsuit. it's the entire lack of any updates for years on this site. it's the declining activity of the site. it's the new AI TOS update which was completely unannounced. it's the fact that we all had to complain to audiotool about the terms of conditions for the newest contest.
literally countless fuck you's and shitting on the community that it really makes you wonder if audiotool is planning to get rid of the current community or just incredibly incompetent
audiotool is no longer about democratisation of music. that is dead now
let me be clear by the way that a business is LEGALLY required to notify you about terms of service changes. people are also required to consent to it!!!!
@yit0 The playing field is never even. That's the point. You can't even the playing field without pandering to the lowest common denominator - everyone must use a specific chromebook (cheapest available) and can only monitor this using the inbuilt speakers. Otherwise someone has an "unfair advantage" over someone else. Yes, it's "dystopian" but that's my point. Where do you draw the line? Different people will always have different opinions on that. Simplest way to avoid the dystopian concept is to just open it up to "use whatever you have available".
Because I don't have the space for a drumkit or currently have access to one, does that mean nobody else should be allowed to record their own kit and use those samples/loops in their competition work? If not..why limit the use of other DAW's as well? It's a fun double standard I see a lot "You didn't make that synth sound on AT, you suck." vs "That guitar you recorded sounds sick, kudos!". Both took time to learn and create, both cost money, both took effort. One is valued by the community, one is typically hated by the community.
Also, I definitely didn't say, or imply, that the only way to get anywhere is with stem uploads..quite the opposite. Again, 6/8 tracks were AT studio made. I didn't check how many of those utilised stems/recordings etc. alongside the tools in AT, but the point still stands: AT studio can hold it's own alongside people of a similar capability in the wider music scene.
As for "this isn't about this one time" that's exactly what I've been getting at for a while: people are conflating their anger/frustration with some of the choices the site has made, with this one competition's results.
The more I read from this community, the more I think that the community has become so comfortable inside it's own bubble that it just won't step outside of that for fear of falling down.
anonymous user· reply
2025-07-03 20:51 · 2025-07-03
this is what i mean dawg you're immediately getting furious and exaggerating. i don't think audiotool's completely out of fault nor is this the first weird thing that's happened. but i do think the community response to it is unhelpful. everyone immediately goes "it's all overrrr i fucking HATE audiotool!!!!!!!!!!!!!" then log off bro. i think kiari's right that it was more a situation of the participants not rlly capturing the vibe despite being capable of making a winning track. a good amount of the top 8 made in audiotool were super impressive regardless. my issue on that front is that the contest description gave off the impression of it being more open-ended than it was, but as an esports contest im sure most people could fill in the blanks. i also think they should've held off on starting the competition until the studio update, but ig they had to seize the opportunity when it was available. either way, in the context of a competition, throwing in the towel and saying audiotool can't compete is a justification to put in no effort. defeatism and toxicity are such huge problems in this community and then ppl wonder why it's dead and why everything seems hopeless LOL
i have not read the rest of the discussion fully but audiotool has potential to compete with the already existing DAWs. and some audiotool songs already have tens of millions of views on youtube. i don't see why it can't win a competition like this. i am completely unsurprised at the judge's choices nor am i sad that i lost. i think i would probably be more sad to attempt a real catered submission than to submit what i think is true to me
you're right that I'm afraid of "falling down" I think everyone is. It's all new and we don't know how to handle it. And I AM conflating it because it has interconnected relevance and I haven't had this opportunity to voice my opinions. Other question is whether I should have said all of this separately as it was going on.
@evilpanda107 Yeah... sorry about that. I'm not trying to spread some conspiracy. I know its inflated on my side, which again, I apologize for. I'm just a bit confused about these decisions and don't really understand the plans. I get that audiotool needs to get money from somewhere. The problem with AI is that it will be even harder to discern what is and what isn't AI in the future. Saying "we tolerate AI" is a fairly strange way to easing the problem for the team and handing it to the community to handle (from what I gathered you said), but I understand that there might not really be another way. It's only problematic because they make it sound a bit encouraging. Either way... not looking forward to sift through pointless slop. I am yet to see the acceptance of this development as Sandburgen does, but I get it. Regardless, I will value my own work, whether visual or audio as having more substance than AI. Just hope the rest of the world will too, at least for now.
The important part of this whole thing is that the community got to say what we think and discuss about it. Voice community opinions that hopefully will be taken into consideration in some way or another. It was fairly big and kanaris has a point.
People quitting is not the way to go. Defeatism to me is not voicing these opinions and just going along hoping it'll go the right way. Or in the other instance quitting AT with a middle finger. I'm really glad this discussion board exists and plenty of people made their good points. But again, I see this as the discussion about the whole series of developments and not this single "EWC incident." That would be silly. Don't really know how others see it.
@kanaris, that is such an exaggerated negative view.
AI clause: It just says: dont breach copyright with AI and try to disclose when you've used it. How is this deserving of outrage? It's not even a binding TOS, just a guide to not flood AT with slop.
Leadership: People in leadership right now, have been there from day 1. I am beyond thankful to them being able to keep this site alive and free for 16 years and I wish more people were too.
Andre fiasco, honestly tired of reading about it here. I've told my recount of what happened (as I was already employed at the time) and pointed out all inconsistencies and lies in his story, and no one even gave a crap. Except Andre himself, who made alt accounts impresonating a 'concerned user' to argue with me.
Democratisation of music is dead: What does that even mean? I swear some people just take these new buzz words and just say audiotool somehow used to but doesn't have them anymore (while also complaining about no changes in like 8 years)
I remember when Audiotool used to do all sorts of missteps but people were more forgiving and still happy to come along on the journey. I remember personally receiving an apology T-Shirt after NO ONE ended up winning a contest which had something like a trip to Ibiza as a prize. There's always gonna be hits an misses and it's just a matter of attitude from the community.
I don't want to dismiss the valid sourness of everyone's mood after no updates to the software for such a long time, but it is true that a lot of people are just on edge more now than they used to be.
This contest wasn't people's taste, but like 6 (or more, I've lost count) other contests that AT organised or provided prizes for in the last 2 years were celebrated and well received. It aint doomsday
Comments (57)
should point out to keep this civil instead of being straight up immature to try and "prove a point" whoever comments here
@redguy5009 I deleted your thread so things can stay in one place.
I'll repeat myself:
The fact that a contest was hosted allowing importing entire stems from other daws on a website that already had it's own built-in daw defeats the point of hosting a contest on Audiotool. Both winners having their submissions being entirely non-Audiotool, with one only making their account to make a submission is a spit in the face. It's like a school hosting an art contest and someone from an entirely different district comes in and wins.
Also voting should have been left up to the community, rather than judges that had no affiliation with Audiotool.
Auditool users not being immature? impossible,,,,,,,
It really surprises me since last year the exact same thing happened but no one had this level of response? Ignoring who won anyways.
It's evident this is the route audiotool has been wanting to take but no one seemed to have cared except for what I can vaguely remember
like 6 people including the same ones who brought up the prizes this time around to respect the producers time and be capable of getting a paid prize alongside.
And then there's the supposed new TOS that'll swing around regarding AI
Like one good thing one bad but isn't really bad as we already should've seen it coming?
Publicity for audiotool? Yeah ofc
Would they have wanted an audiotool producer to win and have a snapshot to show for it instead of samples? YES that would've been big money for them.
Yet here we are.
It made zero sense for a bunch of amatures to even have this kind of opportunity when less than 5% of this DAW's producers make music and profit off it using distributors via bandcamp soundcloud or spotify and everything else under the rainbow.
This sites userbase it either to young to do anything worthwhile musically with the rewards
Or they have moved to different DAWs.
Like lets face it EVERY single person who could've taken proper advantage of the prizes either left the site or uses another daw.
They could've uploaded stems but didn't
The winners are at no fault.
Even IF they did intentionally compete just to take advantage of the ruleset EVERYONE else could've.
I would've LOVED to see someone just slam down a fucking tonematrix just to prove how stupid the rules are about stems and win but no one did it lmao
Witch hunting someone because they won a music comp with a genuine impressive prize isn't going to solve things for the future
Audiotool users will either need to accept the direction things went or just leave lol
problem with community based voting
I can make a discord and pay my fans to vote for me
Everything else however spot on
When your school invites schools from other districts to compete, and those districts win, you might blame your school for inviting them. But that doesn't mean you should steal another student's lunch banana and claim that AI painted their winning pictures.
Sure, but it defeats the point of hosting a contest on a website with a built-in daw.
Or does it promote the idea that AT can/should compete on the world stage with other DAWs?
Well clearly it can't since the two winners didnt actually utilize audiotool lol
It did last year. And this year the others in the top8 are all AT (despite other non-AT entries, if memory serves).
This time. Last time it worked well for us and jetdarc won the main price.
Actually good points, i forgot about the EWC contest last year. Thanks for the example.
Something people are missing is that there was a brief for this comp. The track had to hit a certain "vibe" as well as being of good quality. Just because lavalamp and client didn't get the top spots doesn't mean their quality isn't top tier, but maybe the vibe just wasn't a fit. I'm not the judge, so I don't know what that decision was based on exactly.
People came at it with different ideas of what this type of music should sound like - quality of production isn't the only factor determining who wins.
Thanks to audiotool that we can continue to make music for free and thanks to the moderators who spend their spare time to keep the site safe and clean!
It think it was clearly communicated that audiotool wants to align itself with other platforms and daws in terms of stems and sample usage, which makes perfect sense.
Attacking the winner and calling him an idiot on his wall and telling him to delete his track is completely unfair and doesn't help anyone.
I have an industrial hiphop/noise music entry I didn't get to submit with criticism towards something like this lol. Didn't take my time to do it though.
I see it a bit differently, but yeah well... you're right.
idk. this all just strikes me as super corporate and disconnected from the actual state of things here. it probably wasn't a good idea to host the competition on AT to begin with.
what gets me though- and i don't say this to be egotistical, just to hammer a point- is that i purposefully refrained from participating due to others' and my own criticism on the original announcement for it. i didn't feel right joining in on a competition whose rules i had helped in altering. it felt very self-serving and i preferred to sit back and let smaller, lesser known artists compete for the prize. turns out though, the winners went completely against my own line of thinking.
that's not to diss the winners though. i truly hope they put the prizes to good use and find value from it. their entries aren't bad on their own, either. my issue is the fact that whoever the judges were for this competition were completely disconnected from the community (which can be a good thing in the right context, this just wasn't it) and sought material that fit a certain "vibe," that vibe being corporate-friendly, neutered edm that only a very tiny fraction of the EWC audience will pay any sort of deep attention to. it makes perfect sense that what seems to me to be an industry plant and an artist who barely utilizes AT's own workspace (and who also uses AI for covers and bios, but that's a whole other debate) would be the winners. it's great to see some actual AT artists in the top 8 but it still feels like the team spat a big loogie in all our faces.
i'm just lost now tbh. i've already been frustrated with how stagnant, inactive, and at-odds AT has gotten in the past years and this just completely confirmed all my worst fears about the site (not even to mention the stance on AI in the TOS recently)
and i mean, the fact that we even HAD TO HAVE the discussion on the prizes was already a huge red flag. from the jump it seemed that this was gonna be a rigged game- not quite literally, but spiritually and artistically
yeah, really sucks. they seemed to be all for "artistic" music, encouraging contestants to submit any genre they pleased, wanting to see the variety that the AT community has to offer, but then the actual winners end up being very "corporate-friendly" as you described. in general this whole contest just seems like it was so mismanaged, probably should not have been hosted on AT in the first place especially since they literally encouraged non-AT music...
I have my criticisms with the contest but it’s nothing people haven’t already voiced their frustrations over (Carrion Haven pretty much covers all of it) so I won’t beat the dead horse.
What I will do, however; is offer a tough to swallow pill that maybe a lot of people here aren’t willing to hear yet.
A lot or even most of you who are frustrated might not realize that of the tracks that actually scored points here, only three tracks in the entire contest actually understood the assignment given and those also happened to be the top 3. This is no coincidence; this contest wasn’t made for you to employ your full artistic expression, there is a very obvious vibe and fairly strict requirements being sought after that almost nobody, not even the most seasoned artists here even attempted to follow. Whether that be from inexperience or simply comfort in your own space no one here even really made an attempt at taking the prize.
Really it just shows that none of you were good enough.
I understand that’s obviously not what anyone wants to hear and believe me, I’m certainly not a fan of random artists who don’t give a shit about the site swooping in to take what is so easily taken by uploading something you think you’re incapable of making, but that's the bottom line after all.
This should serve as a wake up call to artists who actually want Audiotool to succeed, or you can keep complaining that it’s Audiotool's fault and continue to perpetuate the idea that this app is destined to get buried in the sand, having no place on a global stage like EWC.
Don't think the entire problem is "Try harder or AT will fall." I can understand that the rules for this comp were very specific and most didn't try to hold to that.
I didn’t say it was the entire problem nor did I even recognize it as the problem. The "problem" is that those are the optics given any time someone complains over any corporate decision Audiotool makes to try and succeed at relevance on a macro scale and honestly it’s pretty sad. Sure you can hate the process but let’s face it, stuff like this is designed to gain sponsorships and get outside eyes looking in, outside eyes which don’t give a fuck about the "spirit of Audiotool" and when they see us complaining about something so banal as losing to DAWs that aren’t Audiotool and how it shouldn’t be allowed in our contests; well we aren’t making a great case for our app now are we?
To reiterate, I’m not literally saying that the users will cause Audiotool to fail, Audiotool will continue to be okay. I’m saying that people engaging in this rhetoric are implying that it will fail because they can’t step up to the plate when push comes to shove.
I appreciate this @inxile412 .
to me your msg boils down to "be the change" and i agree. i dont think everyone should go full doomer about this especially when the studio update is on the horizon, which will hopefully finally give way to site updates afterward. im often conflicted about whether i'm too harsh or too forgiving concerning a lot of audiotool's practices because at the end of the day this is all free to use. it feels very spoiled for me to be so frustrated when i know most of the team cares deeply about audiotool. it's tough emotions swirling around. i realize the community's sorta become an echo-chamber of negativity. the narrative that's the least forgiving is the one that sticks because then people can feel justified sitting back and not rlly contributing. i think most of us criticize out of love but love also requires the effort to see shit through. it's been an awkward and at times exhausting process so far but i continue to hold out optimism despite everything
The issue is, do better in what? Showing off ATs capabilities? Because we have plenty of people who do. Just no one gets any attention. If we're talking in terms of "industry standard", do we want that? What actually constitutes for quality music is the question. Popularity? Because as charts in general show, it's usually the most expectable and non-challenging music. I guess that's just a personal opinion, but what I don't really want to see is more "Spotify recommended"-esque stuff popping up. It holds little artistic value to me. And most of that stuff ISN'T even properly mixed and just aims to win the loudness war. Should I expect to ever get seen in any way? Should I expect AT to get seen? IDK... maybe not. Simply, the limitations of aoudiotool actually give the site its artistic value. Like this you're not just another fish in the ocean (global music "market").
Also, arguably there are criteria for "good" music and "bad" music. Etterath, we die, Naswalt and a few others have been able to fuse that artsy side with good mixing. But you can hear from the sounds in those "good tracks" we value in the community, there is no real match to a DAW and 300 resamples of a sound. How do Clients megadraft sizes (completely unrealistic to most people here) compare to someone taking 3 phaseplants with tweaked presets and doing complex processing with soothe 3. Not even our EQs work correctly.
I'm not being a doomer here. But it's clear to me that the site is heading a certain direction... and it's only logical for it to "devalue itself", fuse with the global market to be able to compete. What bothers me most is that it seems AI is one of the steps they want to take that will make this website attractive to people because half of the world does it. Then I can no longer see the process of how someone made something, can't trust the way they made it, have to use external software myself to keep up in any way shape or form. That kills the collaborative aspect of AT which it is arguably completely built on.
And that is NOT better music to me.
But for that last point, guess we'll have to see in the new stu.
Have you listened to the list of submissions? There are some tracks at industry standard that, compared to 5 Audiotool tracks, didn't make it into the top 8.
Either way. This isn't about who won. It's about stems, it's about the absurdity of hosting EWC on Audiotool and systematically breaking of the values I thought Audiotool had.
If it hadn’t been about who won, the emotions wouldn’t have erupted until no Audiotool user was among the top two. Regarding the question you deleted: My comment wasn’t a reaction to yours as a response to Kiari, but rather to a part of your answer. But since you’re asking: For me, a project of this kind would always start with research. Who is the company, what do they represent, and what kind of music style and athmosphere have they used so far? For example, Client’s track personally blew me away with its quality and atmosphere. If I had to decide as the organizer of an event like this whether such a dark, edgy ambient track could play between the uplifting, pompous orchestral pieces, I would probably decide against it, even though it’s my personal favorite. And I would assume, after listening to the submissions, that hardly any Audiotool users, if any, have done this kind of research. If every genre is allowed, that doesn’t mean you should just submit everything you personally like, but it should fit the theme, right? If it’s allowed to use old tracks, that doesn’t mean you should submit every track of yours that you think is good; instead, you should check its suitability, revise it if necessary, and adjust it for quality. And last but not least, for over a year now, it’s been possible to upload stems in full track length. Time to get used to it. I did and I wasn't a friend of that idea either. What’s truly annoying are the people who exploit this feature and cheat their way into chart rankings. But I see them, not the possibility itself, as the problem.
Seeing AI is not something I want to get used to.
Inevitability is a different question I suppose...
You are right about the rules. That's why I deleted the comment. It was redundant.
@sandburgen I agree that the contest had certain thematic requirements, but one of the underlying problems is just that: they were looking for music that is objectively harder to create on AT compared to other DAWs. In order to fit the criteria that they were looking for, it's practically required that you use 3rd-party software. There are 0 orchestral VSTs on this site, and getting "cinematic" sounds, while possible, is significantly harder to accomplish using AT's resources. So, the path of least resistance applies here, and anyone who has access to an external DAW will most likely use it, as the winners did, giving them an objective advantage over people who don't.
The frustration most people are feeling comes from the fact that this was marketed as an "opportunity" for "global recognition" if you were an Audiotool user. But the truth is that there was actually no opportunity for AT users, rather the opportunity was, by design, only obtainable for FL users, Ableton users, and so on. That's why we've seen so much complaints about both winners making one-time accounts for this contest; the sentiment that they aren't "true" AT users, while it doesn't discredit their musical talent, does make it feel like they somehow cheated without cheating. Personally I don't agree with this, and I recognize that they did win by technically following all the rules, but the fact still remains that the rules themselves were tilted in their favor. That's what everyone hates about this, not the judges, not the winners, but the contest itself being "BS". If all EWC was worried about is finding good music for their special segment, it would have made so much more sense to host this contest outside of any specific production website, but they didn't and now everyone feels lied to.
It's pretty ironic that the growing sentiment I'm trying to combat is being used directly in my own thread, neatly tied up into one perfect defeatist package.
Yes, as long as you think you're at a disadvantage and never give anything a well-researched, effort-given shot you will always lose so really why bother submitting anything? It seems to be all fun and games around here until an actual challenge shows up and forces you to walk on those weak knees of yours.
Opinions on corporate decisions and scummy user behaviour are completely on the table and the frustrations between them are very clearly shared universally by all members of our community; but please stop with this embarrassing rhetoric that we and our app are so useless on the global stage that we collectively can't even drum up an appropriate submission worthy of testing that theory.
So suddenly it is not possible anymore to upload sounds and use them in audiotool? It's not that we accepted stems from other DAWs but Audiotoolers should only use the 909 and the Tonematrix. There were 5 points between FranzFritz and Lavalamp. Where is the missing opportunity? I could understand the frustration of newbie producers that this one wasnt for them but saying that grown up audiotool producers had no chance to win this is simply not true. Batoune & The Brewers used a lot of musical samples from BANDLAB and made it to the Top 8. Maybe if he had uploaded orchestra or cinematic samples instead of Funk and House samples he could have been the winner of the game.
@yit0 I can understand your aversion to AI from the perspective that it gives unskilled and perhaps untalented individuals the chance to present themselves as something they are not. Personally, I really enjoy using it to bring creative ideas to life, as you can see from my profile pictures and covers over the past two years. I've even created a track with AI-generated vocals. Completely rejecting it seems a bit short-sighted to me; using it thoughtfully and creatively, I don't find objectionable.
I'm not trying to be "defeatist", but just recognizing that it is simply more challenging to procure industry-level music without industry-level tools. Yes, there are talented and skillful users who are exceptions to that, and I'm not trying to say there was 0 chance for them to win. However, most AT users are not going to be willing to put in the effort to reach that level of skill while staying on AT, because at that point you might as well just upgrade to industry-level software. And before you say "who says AT isn't industry level software?", the truth is that its subjective. Some people can use it at an industry level, some people can't. Your point is that AT users should just lock in and compete better, but this is just unrealistic, especially if favoritism is offered to those who don't use Audiotool.
If they really wanted this competition to give AT users a chance to shine, they should have evened the playing field and not allowed submissions to be made entirely outside of the site. The problem is that they didn't, and actually encouraged non-AT submissions instead. Naturally, this leads to a sense of betrayal from the general community, even if it was all stated in the rules.
As for sample uploading, correct me if I'm wrong but you can do that in other DAWs too, right? It doesn't really make the contest any fairer if it's something that any DAW can do.
I know this sounds pessimistic to yall but like, I'm just trying to look at this objectively and explain why everyone is so upset with this. I don't even have such strong feelings on the situation, I just think the contest was mismanaged and would have been better off somewhere else.
Btw, facing off against other DAWs is in no way a deterrent to me. For all of the disadvantages I'm claiming, I personally don't care at all where the music was made; it just comes down to making a good song at the end of the day. But I understand the frustration that everyone is feeling due to this, and as I've been trying to point out it's not exactly fair.
This is a much better worded argument than the one you started out with, but I'd like to like to correct the record and say that it is in fact 100% realistic to expect more of people who actually want to win a contest and also preferably drop the idea that there was favouritism in picking non-Audiotool winners. That is just a coping mechanism devised to soften the blow that audiotoolers don't want to hear and has no evidence to support it other than feelings on what constitutes a better daw.
I suppose favoritism was the wrong way to put it, it's more like external DAWs were, in a way, incentivized. As I explained, it's simply easier to use 3rd-party tools, and the fact that this contest entirely allowed and embraced it just goes to show that they weren't concerned about the possible disadvantages AT users might face. If you had two producers of equal skill level and who equally want to win, one using Audiotool and the other using Pro Tools, who's making a better quality song? The AT user has less to work with, and in order to make a song of the same caliber the AT user has to be more proficient in AT than the PT user in PT. You would argue that they could both make a better song than the other, and I agree; music is subjective after all. But we can't act like it isn't going to be more challenging for the AT user, which is why I say that allowing external DAWs directly incentivizes their use.
Again, path of least resistance: if there's an easier option, people are going to take it, and when only SOME have that option rather than ALL, it is definitively "unfair". If they were interested in fairness, AT (or EWC) ought to have eliminated the option that only some people would have. But if they weren't interested in fairness and just wanted a song (which is totally in their right to do, and an option I personally wish they went with), they really shouldn't have brought this contest to AT in the first place. You just can't dress it up as this "golden opportunity" for a specific community, then present the rewards to people who aren't even from that community. And yes, I know that the contest wasn't explicitly designed for just long-standing AT members, but that's probably the biggest point of failure: why even host it here at all then?
Why host it here at all:
To show that AT (and it's users) can stand alongside industry-level equipment.
It's that simple.
And if you don't think that having 6/8 of the top entries produced in the AT studio demonstrates that, well there's a problem.
AT entries don't have to win to prove they are capable of competing.
If we take your argument of levelling the playing field regarding affordibility of a DAW then we could extrapolate that to all DAWs competing in any competition - "you can only use a DAW that cost x or less." "You can't use VSTs that cost more than x" "You can't have spent more than x on samples used in the project" "Total money spent on features, samples, presets etc. cannot exceed x". - this would be utterly ridiculous.
A large number of people I know with other DAWs and a lot of the top tier (most expensive and fashionable) VSTs cracked them for free anyway making the only limitation whether you're using an OS that supports the software or not.
The playing field is never even. Remove other DAWs from the equation and you have the likes of Client with a PC capable of handling monstrous drafts up against twelve year old Jimmy using his school chromebook that lags every five seconds and monitoring his playback with skullcandy earbuds (or worse, in-built speakers). Even if Jimmy was as technically advanced as Client or as musically talented as Naswalt etc. he "can't compete" without applying restrictions to everyone else.
Last year people weren't happy with the idea of stem uploads allowing users to make music elsewhere and come in and sweep the competition. Then the results came out and a lot of AT entries won the category stages, and Jetdarc took home the grand prize (beating this year's second place winner). There is no uproar about this.
This year, that didn't happen and two non-AT studio tracks won and suddenly the game is rigged against AT users, AT isn't good enough to compete with others DAWs, the winners must be plants, the judges were biased against AT users etc.
TLDR:
If you don't like stem uploads because it detracts from the original intent of AT, that's fine. Me too. But I don't upload external works, nor interact with the external work of others.
If you don't like the idea of a competition on this site being open to any music creator and not exclusively for users of the studio, that's also fine, but have a better reason for that than "AT isn't good enough to compete against the other DAWs" or "The playing field isn't even".
slept on it and i'm honestly not even that frustrated anymore so i deleted my initial comment. i don't feel comfortable entertaining needlessly pessimistic narratives about audiotool's future based on 1 contest outcome. i still understand why people were upset but tbh a lot of the outrage was overblown asf and in some cases completely unacceptable. makes us look really bad. i think the larger problem is that the community is so hungry for change that we've become unreasonably agitated and pretty annoying. i cringe thinking about the amount of people who've come to audiotool thru esports seeing the outrage and getting turned off. i try to put my friends onto audiotool but then i realize all the things i've told them about the community over the years and it's no wonder i've had more success putting them onto FL instead LOL. but that requires its own board post. all of this is just to say: i regret thinking this was such a big deal
@sandburgen then you are missing the point about AI. It's not about giving people opportunities. That's great. My brother writes super clever lyrics and then feeds that to AI to get a very funny and clever song. But the art isn't the music, it's the lyrics. And he doesn't upload it anywhere claiming it's his. If you generate everything, none of it is your art. PLUS there are almost NO copyright laws for AI!!! This is the biggest flaw. What people generate is essentially stolen content from a swirl of creators that will never see any credit going to them. With sampling you can at least reverse search or look at the tags.
@callycus Again, this isn't about this one time. It's the cumulative problems that have been emerging from audiotool. First stems that are being abused (I understand the point, and it's not something I can control nor really keep people from doing), then a largely externalyzed competition (EWC no.1 [There were several users who expressed their doubts, but we haven't been THAT vocal]), AI and then EWC no.2. You admitted that the playfield isn't even and I really do not understand how we're supposed to pretend it is. (Only with stems can you get somewhere). That is the realistic version of the argument. What you describe is quite utopian IMHO. I do see the value in trying to get close, however. I also said how keeping stems out of AT could enhance the creativity on AT in terms of using the native tools.
I keep making the same arguments. It seems we can't really get to common ground on those points. I will no longer write any responses, since you will likely not change my mind. I don't know who shares these opinions, but so far it seems like I'm not the only one.
I will not compete in such events. I have no reason or desire to. I don't know where audiotool is heading, but I have a feeling I won't like it and someone up there barely listens... gotta be honest. That is also not only my opinion as far as I am aware. Who or what is this company really interested in? I encourage people to ask that.
at this point i dont really believe in the shady conspiracy talk like "what is this site really interested in?"
i think people are so bored and antsy for any kind of closure about what changes are on the horizon that they're trying to find patterns that aren't there. ever since the andre thing there's this idea in people's heads that audiotool have completely transformed under new management and that they're trying to larp as google or something. most of audiotool's exhausting moments have boiled down to mismanaging events and being confusing. this is evidence of a skeleton crew, not audiotool suddenly becoming an evil for-profit company
as much as i hate any kind of ai generated work it's super hard to moderate properly which is most likely why audiotool has the stance on it that it does. i dont fw the growing approval for ai track covers bc they're ugly as fuck but it's not illegal so there's not much you can do. afaik there's no ai sponsor that audiotool's hiding or anything, it's just a move to prevent the mod team from killing themselves trying to figure out if that transient sounds weird because it's ai or simply because it's an ass song. it would be controversial if they took down a song that turned out to just be ass and nothing nefarious. the community can weed out ai artists just fine, we harass people just for winning a contest
Record inlay from the seventies. I am going to leave this now. Each of you in this chat has interesting views. It was a pleasure discussing with you
seriously? i don't know why this specific comment got to me but:
get your head out the fucking dirt dude.
people (especially me) aren't pessimistic about audiotool's future because of a single contest. first of all, it is the new leadership of audiotool going towards the gaming industry. it's the whole andre michelle fiasco & lawsuit. it's the entire lack of any updates for years on this site. it's the declining activity of the site. it's the new AI TOS update which was completely unannounced. it's the fact that we all had to complain to audiotool about the terms of conditions for the newest contest.
literally countless fuck you's and shitting on the community that it really makes you wonder if audiotool is planning to get rid of the current community or just incredibly incompetent
audiotool is no longer about democratisation of music. that is dead now
let me be clear by the way that a business is LEGALLY required to notify you about terms of service changes. people are also required to consent to it!!!!
also like really bro. skeleton crew? reallyu??!?!?!?! they have like 2497129487 managers. if anything it just proves they're all incompetent
how many more managers does audiotool need to successfully run a competition that isn't out of touch with the community?
it was a change in the code of conduct 🤓☝️
@yit0 The playing field is never even. That's the point. You can't even the playing field without pandering to the lowest common denominator - everyone must use a specific chromebook (cheapest available) and can only monitor this using the inbuilt speakers. Otherwise someone has an "unfair advantage" over someone else. Yes, it's "dystopian" but that's my point. Where do you draw the line? Different people will always have different opinions on that. Simplest way to avoid the dystopian concept is to just open it up to "use whatever you have available".
Because I don't have the space for a drumkit or currently have access to one, does that mean nobody else should be allowed to record their own kit and use those samples/loops in their competition work? If not..why limit the use of other DAW's as well? It's a fun double standard I see a lot "You didn't make that synth sound on AT, you suck." vs "That guitar you recorded sounds sick, kudos!". Both took time to learn and create, both cost money, both took effort. One is valued by the community, one is typically hated by the community.
Also, I definitely didn't say, or imply, that the only way to get anywhere is with stem uploads..quite the opposite. Again, 6/8 tracks were AT studio made. I didn't check how many of those utilised stems/recordings etc. alongside the tools in AT, but the point still stands: AT studio can hold it's own alongside people of a similar capability in the wider music scene.
As for "this isn't about this one time" that's exactly what I've been getting at for a while: people are conflating their anger/frustration with some of the choices the site has made, with this one competition's results.
The more I read from this community, the more I think that the community has become so comfortable inside it's own bubble that it just won't step outside of that for fear of falling down.
this is what i mean dawg you're immediately getting furious and exaggerating. i don't think audiotool's completely out of fault nor is this the first weird thing that's happened. but i do think the community response to it is unhelpful. everyone immediately goes "it's all overrrr i fucking HATE audiotool!!!!!!!!!!!!!" then log off bro. i think kiari's right that it was more a situation of the participants not rlly capturing the vibe despite being capable of making a winning track. a good amount of the top 8 made in audiotool were super impressive regardless. my issue on that front is that the contest description gave off the impression of it being more open-ended than it was, but as an esports contest im sure most people could fill in the blanks. i also think they should've held off on starting the competition until the studio update, but ig they had to seize the opportunity when it was available. either way, in the context of a competition, throwing in the towel and saying audiotool can't compete is a justification to put in no effort. defeatism and toxicity are such huge problems in this community and then ppl wonder why it's dead and why everything seems hopeless LOL
i have not read the rest of the discussion fully but audiotool has potential to compete with the already existing DAWs. and some audiotool songs already have tens of millions of views on youtube. i don't see why it can't win a competition like this. i am completely unsurprised at the judge's choices nor am i sad that i lost. i think i would probably be more sad to attempt a real catered submission than to submit what i think is true to me
you're right that I'm afraid of "falling down" I think everyone is. It's all new and we don't know how to handle it. And I AM conflating it because it has interconnected relevance and I haven't had this opportunity to voice my opinions. Other question is whether I should have said all of this separately as it was going on.
@evilpanda107 Yeah... sorry about that. I'm not trying to spread some conspiracy. I know its inflated on my side, which again, I apologize for. I'm just a bit confused about these decisions and don't really understand the plans. I get that audiotool needs to get money from somewhere. The problem with AI is that it will be even harder to discern what is and what isn't AI in the future. Saying "we tolerate AI" is a fairly strange way to easing the problem for the team and handing it to the community to handle (from what I gathered you said), but I understand that there might not really be another way. It's only problematic because they make it sound a bit encouraging. Either way... not looking forward to sift through pointless slop. I am yet to see the acceptance of this development as Sandburgen does, but I get it. Regardless, I will value my own work, whether visual or audio as having more substance than AI. Just hope the rest of the world will too, at least for now.
The important part of this whole thing is that the community got to say what we think and discuss about it. Voice community opinions that hopefully will be taken into consideration in some way or another. It was fairly big and kanaris has a point.
People quitting is not the way to go. Defeatism to me is not voicing these opinions and just going along hoping it'll go the right way. Or in the other instance quitting AT with a middle finger. I'm really glad this discussion board exists and plenty of people made their good points. But again, I see this as the discussion about the whole series of developments and not this single "EWC incident." That would be silly. Don't really know how others see it.
@kanaris, that is such an exaggerated negative view.
AI clause: It just says: dont breach copyright with AI and try to disclose when you've used it. How is this deserving of outrage? It's not even a binding TOS, just a guide to not flood AT with slop.
Leadership: People in leadership right now, have been there from day 1. I am beyond thankful to them being able to keep this site alive and free for 16 years and I wish more people were too.
Andre fiasco, honestly tired of reading about it here. I've told my recount of what happened (as I was already employed at the time) and pointed out all inconsistencies and lies in his story, and no one even gave a crap. Except Andre himself, who made alt accounts impresonating a 'concerned user' to argue with me.
Democratisation of music is dead: What does that even mean? I swear some people just take these new buzz words and just say audiotool somehow used to but doesn't have them anymore (while also complaining about no changes in like 8 years)
I remember when Audiotool used to do all sorts of missteps but people were more forgiving and still happy to come along on the journey. I remember personally receiving an apology T-Shirt after NO ONE ended up winning a contest which had something like a trip to Ibiza as a prize. There's always gonna be hits an misses and it's just a matter of attitude from the community.
I don't want to dismiss the valid sourness of everyone's mood after no updates to the software for such a long time, but it is true that a lot of people are just on edge more now than they used to be.
This contest wasn't people's taste, but like 6 (or more, I've lost count) other contests that AT organised or provided prizes for in the last 2 years were celebrated and well received. It aint doomsday