Trancefussion Tell me this is real. Are you …?

Well, I guess those that know me saw this coming. This is nothing but a rant, if you don’t wish to read complains, you can close this page. Else, grab some popcorn and read, this will take a BIG while.

So, why am I ranting?

First, some background.

About a month or so ago, a contest was announced on the famous trance radio show, A State of Trance. The contest was open to everyone who wished to submit a mix, of 60 minutes or less, and the winner would have his mix broadcasted in episode 450 of A State of Trance. Simple, right?

So far so good.

When I read about the contest (I’m saying “read”, cause I’ve long stopped listening to ASOT as frequently as I used to) I got all excited with the idea and decided to make my best mix EVER. I really REALLY set my mind to win the contest, not to participate, to WIN. So, I went and grabbed the best tracks I had at the moment, and sat down to mix.

I heard about the contest somewhere in late february, and saw that the deadline to submit the mix was the 21st of March at midnight. Since the deadline was weeks faraway I decided to wait until the last week to submit my set, just in case I found any little mistakes I might wish to fix, and in the process get some feedback from my closest friends.

After 7 or so mixes I made, I finally got to the point where I was completely happy with my mix, so I then decided it was finally time to submit the mix (this was around Monday 15th). After so many listens, and nervously trying to give a brief description of myself (since the contest required you to fill up a question that said “About yourself”) I started to upload my set. To my surprise, I got welcome by a big error that said something along the lines of “Invalid page instruction”, or something like that. This only meant that I may have done something wrong, and that my mix wasn’t being uploaded correctly.

I was confused at first, as I thought I may have taken too long to fill up the “About yourself” portion of the upload, as I know I’m notorious for taking my very sweet time to type stuff. So, I simply went and started over, this time simply copy pasting what I already typed before. But, I was greeted by the same error AGAIN. So definitely the error wasn’t on my end, there was something going on with their servers.

I assumed, initially, that I may have tried to upload my set at a very saturated hour. I thought that maybe there were more DJs uploading their sets at the same time, or perhaps their servers were simply too full. So, I simply waited a few hours to try once more, but the same happened over and over again. At this point I totally got into panic mode, I had only just 6 more days to submit the set, and to my surprise, I wasn’t the only one.

After searching a little, I found out that there were many others having exactly the same issue, and if that wasn’t bad enough, they were having this problem since the contest was announced. Wow!

I tried desperately to get in contact with their tech team, at least to have them aware there was something going on. I sent a few tweets to #ASOT, hoping that someone would read it. I imagined that maybe one of their tech team would be paying attention to it. So naive of me, so naive.

Anyway, the final 2 days were here, and I was still unable to send my set, and so were many more that invaded the arminvanbuuren.com forums to express their frustration. Then this person showed up, that goes by the name of Ruben. He claimed that everything was fine on their servers, and that we should try again, to which we did, and again, NOTHING HAPPENED, same errors.

From this point it gets more and more ridiculous. After many more complains, Ruben shows up once more and mentions that if we’re still having problems, that we should send him a PM (forum Private Message) with a link to our sets, so he could download it and forward it to the contest. Again, we all went and did as told, but we got greeted by another error, this time we got an error message that said that Ruben’s Inbox was full. Oh well I said, maybe he got too many messages in such a small time frame, so I decided to wait.

I come back hours later to try once more, and his Inbox is still full. By this moment many have reported that his Inbox is full in the forums, and so Ruben shows up again and tells us that we should disregard that error message, cause he was still getting the messages anyway … what? … YEAH! he’d get them even if his Inbox was full. I said aaaalright, maybe the forums have some very stupid code in them, but then this crap was getting more and more evident. He wasn’t getting ANYTHING!

Again, people kept complaining (me included) that our messages weren’t getting through, and as a proof of that we mentioned that our mixes haven’t been downloaded yet (this was easily checked by server logs or the like). Ruben shows again, saying that he still got them, and if we were in doubt, that we could send the links directly to his email. And so I did.

So, last day of submissions was here, it was very early on Sunday (3-4am) and I still was awake. My mix was still not dowloaded, and I had less than 12 hours to submit it (I was at -5 GMT at the time, so midnight would be 5pm for me). I searched the forums thoroughly, trying to see if someone managed to get their mix in, but found nothing. Ruben kept insisting that he was receiving the mixes, but at this time I totally lost faith on him. The clock kept ticking, and I was getting incredibly tired, it was somewhere around 12pm when I finally gave up, and decided to try to submit the mix again through the normal method before I totally passed out, but again it failed.

Next day, I check my server logs, still no download, deadline was already way gone. Many others in the forums were reporting the same, noone was downloading their mixes, and it all seemed that we were pretty much screwed. As I kept reading, somebody found that the problem of the mix submission page was that the boxes for both the Tracklist and the About Me section were not allowing commas or apostrophes in them, such that if you included one, the whole page would fail. Too little, too late.

So what does this tell us. Clearly, whoever was organizing this, whether it was Armada or someone else close to Armin, had absolutely no clue of what they were doing, and weren’t expecting to have this big success. The contest attracted way more people than expected, Armin once mentioned that there were more than 2500 submissions, and that’s not counting those of us that failed to send it on time. For us, that couldn’t get in, we pretty much fell victims to the sucess of ASOT and Armin, there simply were too many people trying to get into it, which is both good and bad, but it was quite unrealistic to compete with so many submissions, and if that wasn’t enough, competing against a very bad infrastructure.

Anyway, to put an end to this, I’m totally and utterly MAD and frustrated at all of this. I’m mad at their organizers for not preparing for this, they claim they never expected to have so many people interested, but I wonder really, how smart do you have to be to predict that the most successful trance radio show in the planet that has more than 10k listeners on a weekly basis wouldn’t have this happened? Really, really? And in the very least, if things weren’t doing so well, how hard was it to let people know that there were CLEAR and EVIDENT issues with their submission system. I suspect, going with a mediocre mentality, that they simply didn’t care after seeing how many people were trying to get in, what gives to lose a few when they cannot figure out how to submit their mix? So what, right? We got plenty already. If that was the case, that’s simply and utterly bullshit.

I wouldn’t have minded to be told I simply couldn’t get in cause there were way too many already, I would have understood, I would have got mad for a while, but I’d have understood. Then we have this person, Ruben, who seemed to be trying to be helpful, but all he was doing was being utterly clueless, offering false hopes. Armin has him on such a high plane for helping him with the weekly broadcast, and I’m sure he’s good at it, but this was a really REALLY saddening display of incompetence.

I for one have totally lost my faith on Armada and Armin. I totally love his productions, and his radio show, but this utter crap is unacceptable, for me and for the fans. It’s true that we all can’t be happy, but for god’s sake, some professionalism wouldn’t have hurt.

This is the last time I’ll act as fan, from now on I’m just nothing but an expectator of his work. If he does good, excellent, if he does bad, excellent, too. Moving on.

Sean Tyas has a better show 😀