One of the most unfortunate things about the old site was that the ratings were hard to use and easy to game, making it pretty impractical to use them to choose contest winners. We have improved the ratings systems a lot. Also, you've got a lot of fun new features to learn and I know they will take a little bit of practice before you master them. For the first contest, we're going to take advantage of both of these things. No theme and no required samples this week - it's a clean slate and an open-ended invitation to simply create something that makes you happy. Best yet - we're going to let YOU pick the winner.

We're going to try timing this a little bit differently to help facilitate this approach. We'll give you seven days to create your song and enter the contest. At the end of the week, we'll stop accepting submissions and give you one week to vote on the entries (while working on the next contest.) This mean that even people entering the contests at the last minute still stand a good shot at being heard by their colleagues here, and we like that idea.

So, you have until Midnight on Thursday, August 2, 2007 to create your first song here and tag it with YCYV. Voting will remain open until Midnight on Thursday, August 9th, 2007. Our winner will receive an Altec Lansing FX5051 Powered Surround System, so that you can crank out future Splice compositions at an ear shattering volume. (Don't tell your neighbors it was us, OK?)

Good luck! If you need help or ideas, don't forget to drop by help to get some answers!

Entries are due by Midnight CST on 2007-08-02.