Theres nothing wrong with a yahoo group. It's free, if you keep it moderated and watch your members then you won't get spammers, you have file space, it's easy, where's the downside?

I like this idea ( its suprising it hasn't been done already ) and am willing to host it on my site. As a starting point I'm setting up a phpbb system, but need to head out right now. I'll post the URL to the forum tommorow. Assuming it doesn't become 'too' popular I will also be able to host the files to allow for easier download/review. Since I don't plan on being very actively involved, are there any opinions on who should be the primary administrator for the site?

As both a composer seeking feedback and one always willing to hear new music, you can count me in.

Haro, that sounds great! I'll happily help in moderating and whipping up some basic rules for how the system would function (to avoid just making another forum where everyone asks for critique rather than give).

You can contact me at:
Email: boreez@hotmail.com
or
Messenger: belgarion1@hotmail.com

I'd definitely be up for this idea, as a fellow composer and player I think it'd be an invaluable resource of new material and a great community to part-take in. I have experience with mySQL and PHP if you'd like me to help set up a critique system similar to deviantart.com's, it's just that I'm not too hot with design work as far as webpages go.

We might want to start discussing how the system would work. I don't have a deviantart account, so I don't have a clue how that works - but there should probably be some sort of ratio between how many tracks you need to rate before getting to have one of your own rated.

Can we enforce this automatically, so that the server registers how many crits have been given / requested, or do we have to do this by the honour system? Personally, I think the latter would lead to a lot of new people registering just to have their own stuff critiqued, without ever bothering with anyone else's.

It wouldn't be too hard to keep track of what everyone's rated. Each person would have a field in the datebase for their username, and it would just need to be incremented whenever they critiqued someone, then checked when they try to post a song.

I like the idea of encouraging users to post reviews if they want their own music reviewed, but I'm not sure enforcing it is such a good idea. Maybe you could just give each user a rating based on their ratio of works posted to works reviewed and give users with a better rating a higher priority in pointing visitors to their music, or something along those lines.

Well, as I see it, if we don't enforce it, what's the point of creating a whole new community instead of just sticking with this GD.net forum? My intention was that this community would be a place to sign up if you were serious about improving your music, and didn't mind listening to / reviewing other people's work in return.

I don't see any downside to enforcing it; it would just make the whole thing more efficient and give it purpose.

I have setup the board and assigned Vaevictis as administrator for the site. I will leave it to him to announce when the site is ready. Users will be able to actually attach their songs to the thread they create announcing the song. The songs will be stored server side and then any user viewing the thread, will be able to download the song directly from within the thread.