nesdev.org

Someone needs to set up a website for all the new NSFs being ripped. This idea has been bouncing around in my mind as a solution to the current mess. I'll describe the idle thoughts I've had as if it already exists.

If you've ripped something, you register for an account then upload your rips. All submitted rips can be viewed by name, submitter, etc. Multiple rips for the same game can be submitted by different people. A submitter can update any of his rips, and perhaps the previous version can still be downloaded (in case the new one has problems).

There might be a list of requests, along with anyone who's working on ripping it.

No administration is required other than fixing problems. This means that rips appear immediately after being submitted. Rip quality can be judged by looking at who submitted it.

How would this handle originals? Or would it only be for rips?

It'd be for rips only. 2A03.org handles the originals.

Because of the disorder there is in the request thread, I would agree that's a very fair idea.

I would do it. But I don't know jack about making websites

Quite honestly I've thought about this many times over.

There needs to be something similar to an NSF database, preferably with MD5 or SHA-1 checksums of the NSFs per release.

Right now there's no real way to handle tracking of changes or releases or who does what. This isn't a problem with the NSF file format (I think that's generally fine), but rather just one of organising all of the files...

I'd probably do something like this on Parodius, but storing the NSFs themselves would be a bandwidth muncher, so I can't really do it... :-( If they could be stored off-site somewhere, while the main interface was here, I could probably do that.

I can compress your request to under 16 bytes: "Make GoodNSF."

Bandwidth muncher? I would have thought NSFs would be the last thing to do that.

"Make GoodNSF" <-- and be sure to have it ignore some critical bytes in the header, perhaps the 8 bankswitch bytes.

Who would maintain the site?

Assuming someone volunteers a server and bandwidth, then whoever volunteers to write the server-side code would probably maintain the site, which would involve improvements and fixing any problems that arise.

Well, I could host it, but I'm not sure if I'd have time to code something more than a basic interface untill the 2nd week of June.
Oh yeah, and my current hosting plan is 80GB space and 600GB monthly bandwidth.

Edit:
And now that I think about it, the NSF files have a header with the file information, right? Just thinking of ways an archive could be even more automated by automatically extracting header info for sorting.

Well if anyone is serious about providing the bandwidth (who knows how much it would use) and server, please discuss the site design here rather than implementing something on your own. It would benefit from group input and design. The general operation I have in mind is this:
* Main goal of site is to provide a single location to go for NES soundtracks
* Site stores NSF soundtracks for games (2A03.org is the place for anything not from a game)
* Submissions are handled by an automatic script, not a human moderator
* More than one rip for a particular game can exist, each differentiated by who submitted it

Any other goals people have should not interfere with this main goal. Currently it's hard to find all the NES soundtrack rips out there because each person has their rips stored in a different place. Someone could seek these out and make a centralized list, but this would require continual effort to keep up-to-date, hence the idea of an automated site. It'd be best if the person implementing this system has some experience with file databases and web presentation of them. A poor implementation wouldn't help much. If this works well, it could be generalized to other systems, like Game Boy and PCE soundtracks, which are also being actively ripped.

i have a zipped archive with every nsf there is till now, and i properly named and tagged them all (which took a bitchin long time time btw)

if you want it just tell me

Sure, if you have an archive based on NSFs posted to various places recently, make it available. Use a good solid compressor like RAR, and maybe one of those free file transfer websites would provide the bandwidth to host it.