JPF Home Page Forums General Messages Mentor Questions Forum Our Stage - New JPF Community Partner (Feedback!)

Mark,
That's also what I was experience, so I can relate 100%!

So from my experience, here's how I've adapted to their voting system:

1. I do follow the "rules" and listen to at least 15 seconds for both songs.

2. After the 15 second marks, I can move the slider bar to "fast forward" to any part of the song. Usually I slide forward to about half way and listen for a while. If it's really great, I might listen all the way to the end or at least skip forward to somewhere near the end. This gives me a quicker overview of the arrangement and "vibe" of the song. Seriously, some songs (especially instrumentals) are designed to build up towards a climax, so a bit of patience is needed to hear it develop and unfold.

3. In some cases I'll listen to the first 5 or 10 seconds and then skip forwards to the middle of the song to see if it's still the same "bad" thing or if it gets better. So I'll complete the balance of my 15 seconds min. somewhere beyond the start of the song. This makes it more interesting and sometimes I'll discover a pleasant surprise.

4. If a song really "moves" me, it will keep my interest from start to finish, so that's an indication that I should vote "More" or "Much More".

5. If both songs are equally great, I vote "same", but usually I vote "same" because both songs are equally poor.

6. On occasion after I vote for a song, I find that a large percentage of judges didn't agree with my vote. It's a bit discouraging when that happens, but it's fairly rare - maybe only once per 10 or 12 battles.

7. Most of the time over 50% of the judges agree with me and that can range all the way up to 97% which is not too uncommon.

Room for improvement:
I think the only improvement OurStage could make is to add a feature that would allow distinguishing (or qualifying) a "same" vote. For example, both "same" voted songs are either equally: poor, average or fantastic!
They could tabulate that into the final scores. After all probably half the time two songs are either equally horrible or equally great, so the question is: "What do you mean by "same"?

I've suggested this before, but I think this time I may have explained it better and provided a bit more detail. Hopefully Daniel Palmer (aka Danny) will read this suggestion and pass it along to his management team. With all OurStage already has going for them, it would be a relatively simple feature to add. I believe it will be appreciated by the voters and also provide more meaningful input in the judging process. There's just too many times when two songs are a very close match.

Michael