The whole DJ Pretzel/virt 'hate' thing was swept under the rug many years ago. If you aren't familiar with virt's other FX albums, I invite you to check out Noise Channel's last show.

He was on the show with me discussing the past three FX albums he worked on and I played FX 1-3. Here is the link - http://kngi.org/p=3083

Quite psyched for this. The guy is so naturally talented, it's quite ridiculous. I suspect he is a traveler from the future who has a device that somehow absorbs some of the latent talent of every human alive around the world and funnels it into himself.

I find virt's music dull and boring. For some truly great original chiptune compositions I suggest the following:

Big Giant Circles - Impostor Nostalgia
RushJet1 - Out There
Rushjet1 - Sounds of the 2A03

The first costs some small amount of peanuts and is available on Bandcamp. The latter two are available free from the artist's website. Google will quickly turn up both their homepages.

I'm sure pretz still resents virt, at the very least for being infinitely more talented and successful than he'll ever be.

UnMod Material fo' lyfe sucka!

Shnabubula knows a thing or two about chiptunes himself. His "Dueling Consoles" still gets played in my rotation from time to time.

@gradstudent I totally respect where you're coming from. Before I continue let me say I've heard all of the things you've linked to many times.

I also appreciated that you "really wanted to like" virt. I've found myself in that position with music often.. seeing something receive praise yet not being able to enjoy it myself and wanting to.

I would advise against rationalizing your tastes to the degree where you codified precisely why one group of artists or type of music is better than another.

I come from the other end of the spectrum as you. It took me a long time to be able to appreciate the music of Rushjet1, who I've grown to love, where as virt immediately blew me away practically from the first 5 seconds of the first chiptune of his I ever heard. This is not to discredit Tadd, but to try to give you a different perspective. Thanks to my persistence I can now enjoy a much wider variety of music, including that of BGC, who, by the time is album was released, I had already acclimated to listening to that kind of music.

HERE'S THE BOTTOM LINE: I urge you strongly, give FX4 a chance... a real chance. Listen to the whole thing with as open of a mind as possible. If you feel yourself thinking "this is too busy" or "this lacks transition", remember, that's your mind trying to prevent you from growing. Change is painful. BUT it's soooooo worth it, if you let yourself get into virt and be transformed, you'll find a whole new dimension of music to enjoy and you won't regret it.

I tend to like virt's music less as it gets more technically complex and becomes less hummable, as he puts it. FX1 is amazing, FX2 is great, FX3 is half & half, FX4 .... actually from what I've heard so far (First Flight), I will probably like FX4 a lot more than FX3.

Oh and Sam, the reason you grew to like my music is that it was crappier when you first heard it :P