hi first off i'm sim, you may have seen me in the open source musician IRC room. because dan is quite busy i've taken over the tunestorm comp and am changing things slightly to make it a bit more streamlined and hopefully more interesting. this is something i'm trying, if you don't think it's working then obviously constructive criticism is welcome. for this comp it's going to be based around a sample that you can build your track around. the sample is recorded from a hard drive with a jack soldered onto the bottom so that when the platter is spun it outputs a sine wave. the sample has a few different spins and timings, it will need chopping and tidying up as this is the raw sample, i thought giving the raw sample would be a better idea because it gives you more scope to manipulate it. the sample can be as prominent as you want to make it, it doesn't have to be the main focus, it is left to your discretion. obviously making a track where the sample is completely unrecognisable does slightly go against the point of the comp. THE LINK TO THE SAMPLE IS HERE http://db.tt/nMBjufE i am provisionally making the submission date for the competition the 21st january which should give you a decent amount of time to work on it. the submission process is changing too, i've setup a soundcloud group here http://soundcloud.com/groups/open-source-musician where you can submit the tracks and also comment and vote on other peoples submissions. if you haven't used soundcloud before i highly recommend it. there is a very neat function where you can comment on the timeline of a track, really useful for directing crits. the other major plus of soundcloud is that a free account entitles you to 2hours worth of uploaded music in ANY format, so you can directly upload ogg and flac. the 2 hours is consistent regardless of whichever format you use. i look forward to hearing your submissions :) sim