The End of TIMGUL (2007-2012)

[DJ Omnimaga]

2007 - 2012

Starting on October 29th 2007, Omnimaga's sister site, TIMGUL (The International Music Generator Users Lounge), opened its doors for musicians who use the MTV Music Generator/Music 2000 software series to create their songs, allowing users of those softwares to share their work together without being judged solely based on the software they use, and hosted about 1000 songs at two occasions in its life. It saw a huge period of growth in 2008 and early 2009 (sometimes more active than Omnimaga), but went through troubles in most of 2009, causing it to never really recover. It saw a short resurgence in 2010 under a new administration, but managers eventually moved on in their respective lives or music careers, while increasing downtimes in 2012, an uncertain hosting future and increasing competition from other music softwares started to plummet what was left of the site activity.

The final post from TIMGUL archived front page, posted on April 21st (updated tonight due to the recent song data loss) follows:

"Starting tonight, The International Music Generator Users Lounge will be put in read-only mode, so all file attachments up to July 2011 (all attachments uploaded afterward were lost in a backup corruption on April 23rd 2012), along with every post and topic made until this very last one will remain available online, but it will no longer be possible to post new topics, replies, music files. Also it will no longer be possible to sign up new user accounts. All files attached to forum messages will be made visible to guests to accomodate the lack of ability to create new accounts.

This decision was taken due to the decision to end TIMGUL's hosting a few weeks ago, along with the general inactivity on the forums. Back in the days, TIMGUL thrived and gave the Music 2000 series a small resurgence, then it even recovered from one year of drama and a massive data loss, reaching high activity levels again from a renewed userbase. But it seems that with the arrival of freeware alternatives such as LMMS and the lack of any new music software project finally had its toll. This isn't to mention that getting the Music softwares to work on new computers or emulators is difficult, so the arrival of freeware music creation tools probably didn't help. This is not to mention it was always difficult for TIMGUL to compete against Youtube for music showcase, as many MTVMG users have chosen to stay on Youtube. Besides that, over the last two years, all the TIMGUL administrators have either moved on in their music carreers or no longer have enough time to keep TIMGUL afloat (such as posting at least a few times per week consistently), and most members are not very active anymore.

So tonight is the end of TIMGUL as an active site. The entire website content will remain online at http://archives.mtv-music-generator.com/ for as long as his upcoming new host (Juju) will run his hosting service, but it will remain in read-only mode.

Any new music discussion will be moved to Omnimaga music section. To accomodate the few that still use the MUSIC software series, extra forum sections may be opened in the future on Omnimaga for help and support. Also, since TIMGUL will remain online, you are free to cross-post music that you have made on Omnimaga forums as well (although in the future, there are possibilities that both websites merge together). Remember that all songs uploaded on TIMGUL after July 5th 2011 were lost, so you will need to repost them there if you want them back online. Since the upload limit is 4 MB, you may have to use a third-party hosting site (such as Youtube, Mediafire or Soundcloud) to host new music you want to showcase on the forums. Keep in mind that the forum rules there disallows uploading music attachments that contains copyrighted material, however, so if you have a Rihanna remix, for example, then you will have to use an alternate upload site and link to the file instead.

We would like to thank every TIMGUL member who have allowed this site to thrive for many years, their contributions and of course CoLD SToRAGE, Codemasters and Jester Interactive for creating the MUSIC series, which allowed this unique site to exist."

The Omnimaga music section as well as the restored TIMGUL archives (which were an hassle to fix due to version 2.0 of SMF being a major PITA to move from an host to another) are available below:
Omnimaga music forum section
The TIMGUL Archives (read-only)

[annoyingcalc]

* annoyingcalc is sad for TIMGUL

at least omnimaga has a place for music downloads

[Juju]

Kinda sad, but at the same time, it's nice to see the TIMGUL users moving over here

[DJ Omnimaga]

Yeah true. Also we have to keep in mind that TIMGUL started 3 years after the MTVMG series got discontinued and 9 years after that series was created by Tim Wright (CoLD SToRAGE). Given that this series had a bad reputation due to many crappy tracks using it being uploaded here and there on the web back in the days and given there was Ejay and FL Studio around, it's a wonder that such site could get as active as it got sometimes.

[Koolassjoe]

R.I.P. TIMGUL. Met a few great artists, listened to some great music, had a few laughs & will always be remembered. I hope the TIMGUL crew keeps the music flowing cause u guys are true creative types and rocking out is the only way to go! TIMGUL 4 Life! (& Just when I was about to drop a FEW albums too!)

[DJ Omnimaga]

Yeah it saddens me that the site was going nowhere when there are still MTVMG users around. Hopefully this site can eventually have extra sections or even contests to accomodate the death of TIMGUL. Thankfully all songs from last year are still online, thanks to an old backup, but near the end of the site it averaged around 1 post a week and most members would only post once a month. Also on the new host, it would probably not work well because it's very weak, so as an archive it works, but with high traffic it would always have MySQL database errors.

It would be nice if in the future there was some special music downloader that was made that converted Omnimaga attachments to MP3 (if they're actual MP3s) remotely, so that if the TIMGUL posts and attachment links are ever appended to Omnimaga music section, people on mobile devices can still download music (SMF 1.1 doesn't support mobile devices for attachment links)

Welcome here by the way