What can I do to get better feedback from this website?

[Douglas]

I apologize that this is a more personal question, but I didn't know where else to go to. Please read this entire thing before posting an answer. If you don't, I'll probably just seem like a lousy composer who's complaining about his bad ratings.

I started uploading my songs to this website (lmms.io/lsp) so that I would know the quality of my music, and what I need to do to improve. At first I was getting less-than-desirable ratings, but no feedback. At first I thought it was because I wasn't making good music (and the music honestly isn't really that good, but the ratings were still low enough to surprise me), but then I noticed something that seemed kind of weird.

I posted "Dancing_Mushrooms.mmpz" previously, and I finally got a comment. The comment was "LOVE THIS!!" I was feeling really good about myself with my four star rating, but as soon as I refreshed the page, a one star rating brought that rating down to two stars (this song only has one rating previously). I told myself that different people had different music preferences, and told myself that I was still decent because of that comment.

Since then I have posted 5 or 6 songs. I wasn't able to check them until much later, but when I came back, I noticed that I had comments on most of my songs. I was excited, because of the positive comment I received earlier, and I opened my Run_Away WIP song first. The comment read:

hurt ears music

Not very helpful. I was kind of disappointed, but I was mostly fine because first of all, I had many other comments to look forward to, and second of all, I thought he was referring to the fact that it was too loud. I replied with a comment jokingly telling him to turn the volume down.

I then opened my Saturation tutorial. The only comment in there was:

more rubbish bin music

This comment really confused me, because first of all, it was a tutorial, so the music quality wasn't as important as what I was teaching, and second of all, I borrowed that music piece from a song made by a different person, and he received a 5 star rating! I knew something was very wrong then, and I went to check the comments on all my other music.

On all my other music there were unhelpful comments, and some of them were very hurtful. I felt my heart lurch when I read:

noise noise and more noise no harmony and muddy sound like a woman screaming

Looking back at these comments, I discovered that all of these comments were from the same person. I finally put the pieces together of what was going on--

First, I post a project. This person leaving the comments checks the website daily, and insults my music, leaving a bad rating. When somebody comes to this website, they'll see the terrible ratings, and think the song isn't worth looking at. This results in the lack of proper feedback/ratings/improvement. That removes the reason I came to this website in the first place!

I'm sure there's a way to combat this, but I'm very new to the internet/social media, and I'm not sure what to do in this case. My friends suggested I just post my music on other websites, but other people can only listen to the music, not look at how it was put together, so their feedback doesn't have as much potential. I REALLY want to keep putting music on this site, but I'm not getting the constructive criticism that I need.

Hopefully this sounded like an actual issue, and not just a complaint about somebody's low-quality music.

Can you help me out?

[brandystarbrite]

Hi. Just read your post.
From what I've gathered from your post:

1) Either your tracks need to be mastered properly.

2) Or the listeners, are not fans of your genre of music.

If you could put a link to your music, so we could listen to them, that would help alot.

I then opened my Saturation tutorial. The only comment in there was:

more rubbish bin music

This comment really confused me, because first of all, it was a tutorial, so the music quality wasn't as important as what I was teaching, and second of all, I borrowed that music piece from a song made by a different person, and he received a 5 star rating! I knew something was very wrong then, and I went to check the comments on all my other music.

I'm curious to hear, this particular track for myself.

As I mentioned before, if you have any of your tracks, on youtube, vimeo, or soundcloud
or any other similar music uploading site etc. post a link to your tracks in the Music Projects section
of the forum so we could listen to them. I'll be back.

[slipstick]

As Brandy says I think most of us expect music to be on Soundcloud or somewhere similar. I only look at LSP if someone posts a link to it on here. And I confess I'm not really inclined to download a complete project and run it up in LMMS just to find out if it's the sort of music that I might be interested in.

What might be good is to post your tracks on Soundcloud with pointers to the project on LSP for those who are interested in a more detailed look. I think that way you'd get a wider range of people listening to your music. Or at least post here to say you've uploaded something to LSP. With 6000+ projects on there (and most LMMS people producing in styles that are not for me) it's not somewhere I'm ever going to spend much time checking out.

If you have a "stalker" who posts nasty comments about the only way to get round that is to persuade more people to listen to and comment on your stuff so the stalker's comments are drowned out. Telling the rest of us that you've posted something might be a start.

Steve

[musikbear]

exactly, the LSP is not a good place for getting constructive criticism.
LSP is mostly used to swap projects, for various reasons, could be for a remix challenge or just someone who want to let other use the project.
Of cause you also find a ton of instruments-presets, on LSP, and it is used for bughunts :p.
The other thing you need to understand is that even though this forum is pretty active, it is a handful of people who makes the most posts, that is especially true, when it comes to music-critique -Otrherwise the forum is mostly active with help requests of various sort.
Getting 4-5 responses on a project is about what you can expect, and a pre-request is that you have your project at a page like soundcloud. Dont expect peeps to dl your project in order to listen to it :)
On soundcloud you can expect ~10 or so comment at most. Of cause some gets much more, and some gets fewer.
But imo the best way is to:
* Upload the finished project on soundcloud
* post an alert here in our forum, and remember to add the link to the soundcloud file :P -Some forget that :D
But forget LSP as source for constructive critique, thats not gonna work

[Douglas]

Thanks guys! I'll give soundcloud a try, see if I can get some decent results from there. You all are super helpful, it means a lot to me.

Here is a link to all my music, most of the songs are applicable:
https://lmms.io/lsp/?action=browse&user=Douglas