DTX: Dream Theater - A Nightmare to Remember

From DT's new album Black Clouds and Silver Linings. This double bass in this song is incredibly difficult. It constantly shifts between 8th beats, 8th beat triplets, 16th and 16th beat triplets. Check out the blast beat near the end of the song!

I cut out some of the solo section because the drums are really repetitive in that part, but this simfile still clocks 13+ minutes.
Download

Acid Rain on the new kit

I don't know how Mike Portnoy can play that drum solo (at 2:37) so cleanly and accurately. It always sounds like mush when I try to play it.

Papa's got a brand new bag

My new kit arrived at long last after Parson's Music "forgot" to deliver it last week. V-Drums for V-Day.

The amount of cardboard they used to pack the kit in is pretty astonishing... guess it's still better than polystyrene.

It's sound quality is a zillion times better than the TD6, and mesh is ahhh.. nice and quiet. I can finally do some blast beats without waking the neighbour's dog.

How does it fare with DTXMania? The best part is having a cymbal to use as an escape button so I can quit a song without reaching for the keyboard? Priceless.

On second thoughts, the kit WAS darn pricey.

Video Tutorial: How to make a DTX simfile

If you are interested in making your own DTX file but aren't sure how to go about doing it, this video is for you. To see the video more clearly, select HQ (high quality).

To begin you must have the following:
GDA Creator*
DTXMania*
Drum sound files*
An image editing program (e.g. Photoshop)
A sound editing program (e.g. Adobe Audition / Audacity)

*These are available in the GDAmania Files section under accessories.

The future direction of DTXMania

According to the DTXMania blog, the author is aiming to do the following (translated from Japanese):

* I want to use it for a more real basic practice.
* I want to improve the degree of freedom of the performance more.
* I want to ease the management of the tune more.
* I want to return feedback to the data author more.
* I want to appeal for the player more.
* I want to support IR more.

I think Internet Ranking would be an awesome feature. It would definitely attract a lot of people to the game. This was exactly what happened to DMGF when e-amusement appeared around 9th mix. Let's hope we won't have to wait too long.

Drummania V5 encore/special stages DTX

Just spent about countless hours editing the DTX files for all the encore stages in V5. None of the original DTXs were made by me. I simply added video, graphics and synced them to the soundtrack version of the songs.

Part 1: Download
流氷の去りて Rin To Shite Saku Aya no Godoku (fixed)
凛として咲く花の如く ryuuhyou no sari te
Dynamis
FORCE Interval Build
VANESSA-転生編-

Part 2: Download
TENGU (fixed)
Blue Forest
A.DOGMA
Rock to Infinity
For the Final

If you notice anything wrong with the files, please leave a comment.

Converting a Youtube or Nicovideo for DTXMania

As I was editing the V5 encore stage simfiles, I learned something new, so I'll share it with you guys. Here is how to turn an online music video into something suitable for DTXMania. Most of the steps I followed using this article. Here are the steps I took.

1. Convert your video into an FLV and download onto your computer.
I used Toshichan Green Tune to do it. Some sites can convert directly into an AVI, but I don't recommend it as it will cause problems at a later stage. If you get a 404 error, play the video first.

2. Convert your FLV into an AVI.
I used FLV extract for this step (refer to the article above).

3. Load your AVI into VirtualDubMod.
I ran into problems opening the AVI in Virtualdubmod, even though I followed all the settings for installing and configuring ffdshow in the article. So I installed TMPGEnc, converted it into MPEG first and then I could open it.

4. Crop your video in Virtualdubmod.
To crop and resize, you will need 2 filters. Go to Video > Filters > Add filters. Use null transform to cut out unwanted parts (use the cropping button). The second filter is Resize - the DTXMania video width / height is 272x352. Under streams you can also disable the audio stream since you won't need audio.

5. Encode your video to a new AVI.
You need the DivX codec. I used 1-pass 780kbps to compress a 2 min video to about 10MB. Save it into the directory you are making your DTX in.

6. Use GDA Creator or DTX Creator to add the video to your DTX
I won't go into the details here. If you need help with this step, please ask in the GDAmania forums.