ANNOUNCEMENT! The OST Section has been put up as of 5th May 2012! Click here to go there! Please spread the word! I believe I'm hosting some of the OST that you can't get from anywhere else on the internet!
Well, as you can see, I'm quite a fan of MapleStory. I have dedicated a section of this website to it simply just to share the MP3s and score sheets that we at MapleSheets.net (used to be .com at one point) have transcribed. Not all scores are transcribed by me, although there are a large number of them that I did. The MP3s here are obtained through recording the BGM from MapleStory. I play MapleSEA (and still do now and then), and my MP3s of the BGMs are all recorded internally which means good quality, but it means that I only have the MP3s of MapleSEA. It also means that I don't have the latest MP3s because I haven't been playing much. However, I will get round to finding out which ones I don't have, and upload them sometime in the future, so that this section will turn into the number one source for downloading MapleStory BGM MP3s.
MapleSheets was up and down for a period of time due to lack of hosting, and it's finally gone down. Feel free to come back to this site, which is the only site on the web with a section in support of MapleSheets. I'll never take this site down, since it's showcasing my other personal stuff, and this section hardly takes up space to begin with! As usual, If there are any pressing problems, please contact me via the guestbook.
I'm sure many of you would be familiar with who I am on MapleSheets. I am Levin Tan, transcriber and arranger of 15 scores (one more coming up as of 13th May 2012), and also one of the moderators and administrators on the forum who assisted anyone who needed help. This is my personal site, and I am sad to have seen that the MapleSheets that we know has gone. Nevertheless, I'll continue to host the score sheets for everyone to enjoy.
Just in case some of you wonder about the guy who comments on some videos on YouTube claiming to be the transcriber of some of these scores, I'll confirm it here. My alias is "Wizongod" on Youtube. No mistake, and no imposters around =D
About MapleSheets
For those of you who do not know what MapleSheets is, it started off as a personal website in 2006, then known just as "Volcayno's site" (by Jo Anton), on his freewebs page. He used to charge $0.99 per sheet he transcribed, but then offered it for free some time later. I got involved in May 2007 when I found that he started offering the sheets for free, and began correspondence through the guestbook and through email. I put up a few of my sheets through his website then, and along with that his guestbook activity started to rise as a few others joined in the discussions both generally about MapleStory and specifically about the Background music.
About 10 people were participating actively in discussions on the guestbook before he decided to create a forum for us on invisionfree on 3rd June 2007. It still exists now, although it's totally dead (not to mention the board was taken offline. I can still access it because I'm a mod). Just 3 weeks later, on 21st June 2007, we moved our forum to a vBulletin one hosted by a friend's friend of Jo's and that was when the whole thing kicked off. MapleSheets was officially born. Although we had already made it to 40+ members on that small forum, Jo also purchased the domain maplesheets.com and started working on some publicity (i.e. posting through forums and stuff) to draw more traffic to our forums. It was during then that we actually hit our prime, having over 700 members, and alot of activity regarding Maplestory stuff and the like. It was rather short though, only lasted for 6 months.
On 11th Dec 2007, the admin team now consisting of Jo and two of his friends, only known as Cybar and Fero, decided to restructure and move the site again. The aim was to make it easier for non-registered users to download the sheets through a homepage like a typical website, and create a new forum all over again for the rest of us. Main problem was the endless discussions and resources created in the old forums just disappeared. Even as a forum admin with access to the old forum, it was just too much to bring all the topics over at a copy&paste level (since I did not have server administrator rights). With that, there were quite alot of complains that it was very sudden (most of the members being left out of the loop) and that the new forum did not feel right. Activity started to drop as not many new members registered. With that, I also stopped creating new sheets since this coincided with my 2 years of Junior College (grade 11 and 12 equivalent) and I had started taking the IB programme. I was probably the key member there since I single handedly produced the most number of transcribed MapleStory scores and on a regular basis too. So with me reducing my activity it probably had a large impact on the others as well, and everything just went downhill after that.
Cybar's friend who was previously was hosting our website, stopped his services. I do not know why was that so, but Fero just told me that on 24th Dec 2007. (Christmas eve. What a bummer eh?) Our site was down and everything we'd owned online. We basically didn't exist anymore. This continued for a very long time (in terms of online movement that is). A total of about 6 months! This had a serious damage in terms of publicity, since webcrawlers would take it out of the index (resulting in all credit gained with search engines to be lost) and links to our site would be dead for such a long period that just about everyone would have thought we were gone forever. It didn't help that there was no announcement or some way to inform the general public of the trouble we faced. In fact, if you google MapleSheets now, the search results still bring up forum posts asking where MapleSheets had gone and stuff. The number of people who know about MapleSheets is large enough that there are actually people who post on Yahoo Answers asking why is MapleSheets down. (Btw, Yahoo Answers is NEVER the place to find your answers, even if you are desperate. They take too long to reply, and the more obscure or difficult questions get wrong, bad, or irrelevant replies. I've installed a plugin that hides any Yahoo Answers that appear in my search results. It's that bad. As expected, the answer to that MapleSheets question was wrong too since obviously, only an admin would know the answer while the rest can only speculate. More on that another time =D)
Fero contacted me again on 3rd April 2008 I gather through my message logs. He was considering getting MapleSheets up again and somehow or another, managed to find some hosting. Apparently it was commercial paid hosting. Nevertheless, MapleSheets was finally revived somewhere in May 2008. Activity in the forums never picked up again as the sentiment from the last change carried over, and the history of unstability generally wore our members out.
In August 2008 one of the admins from the admin team forgot to catch the renewal of our domain maplesheets.com. Someone else bought it and was hogging it. Probably a cybersquatter since this was an extremely niche area anyway. According to his discussions with this guy, Fero told me that he was only willing to sell the domain back to us at $500 which was absolutely insane considering a domain registration only costs $8 per year. Fero worked pretty fast, so we managed to move to maplesheets.net in under a week. Again, publicising it was a big problem. To the internet world, we had just disappeared again, or even worse, have apparently closed down our site since the url was valid but the page was taken away (it returns a 404 error disguised under the domain registrar's ads if you know what that means.) The rest of the key members of our maplesheets community (those with us for about a year or more now) bunched together to create a new forum in remembrance of MapleSheets — Revivified. It was more of a lounge for us to gather again and nothing like what MapleSheets was. Not surprisingly, it did not gain much popularity, and remained rather exclusive. (It's still there if you wanna visit. Requires registration.)
The new site at maplesheets.net remained stable and probably got alot of links for quite some time. There was a problem though, the community was indeed dead. The forums was still there (again a new one), but it was largely inactive, coupled with the fact that there were bots busy spamming a few sections requiring quite a bit of vigilance to eliminate meant that it wasn't worth much effort to maintain. Not surprisingly, the forum was disabled on 8th March 2009, and the main site website soon disappeared by around mid 2009.
On 14th February 2011, MapleSheets revived once more held up for about a year. There was a forum for those who wanted to join, and of course, a page of downloads for MapleStory Music. I've stopped playing MapleStory for good, although my account could still exist... I don't know. Haven't logged in for a couple of years already. I might decide to visit it maybe to see how it has evolved, and see if the community is still as toxic as when I had left (or gotten worse, or better...)
(latest update) As of August 2012, MapleSheets is now being managed on a Facebook Page by FireAngel843 aka "Rima K" (someone I, unfortunately, don't know even the slightest bit since our whole community went down and basically completely died), and I'm really gone from the scene of MapleStory music transcription with no intentions of returning anytime soon. But, I'll of course continue to host these sheets from the original community (basically the group of us who helped MapleSheets take off, and knew each other), and I'm contemplating hosting the new sheets as well (free as always), since this page does receive some traffic from people wanting to look for MapleStory scores.
As of February 2015, there are no updates to the MapleSheets situation.
P.S. I might just create a wiki article on this for fun sometime...