The soundtrack is lovely

[Sacae]

Just wanted to say.

[Reivan123]

Totally. I regret not getting the bundle...

[Shylaar]

It's amazing. My only disappointment is the low bitrate with the soundtrack. A few of the songs, particularly Morgana's Curse, Planador, and Michel Bollinger (Intro) audibly suffer from it.

[ARMITAGE HAWKSHAW]

This game has the finest soundtrack of any game I think I've played in recent memory. Especially the somber string / voice bits in Chapter 4 and the whole "Revolution" / ending scores. Amazing. I just wish the music in chapter one wasn't so painfully obnoxious.... the rest is absolute gold.

[galneon]

Can someone who has purchased the DLC soundtrack tell me if FLAC or another lossless encode is available? I will never pay for lossy music.

[ARMITAGE HAWKSHAW]

I bought the soundtrack - unfortunately the soundtrack is very lossy. You're better off buying the Yusuke Tsutsumi albums from iTunes directly (one of them is "Cheap but it Glows" - it's most of the super-emotional music from Fata Morgana, I bought the whole album and am very very happy).

[galneon]

Thanks for the information, although it's very disappointing. What were they thinking? :/ There's really no excuse.

I'm especially partial to the vocal jazz tracks... Do you know what album they're on?

[ARMITAGE HAWKSHAW]

no - sorry - but the track / artist information is in the musical extras you get when you beat the game / get the true ending the first time. (think the extra option was called "concert hall"?). You can play high quality sound from there, and capture the audio lossless in your computer perhaps?

[galneon]

Great, then once I beat it I'll at least know the titles of the songs I want. The data archive for the game is only 360mb, meaning the audio quality is probably even worse in-game than it is on the DLC soundtrack.

[ARMITAGE HAWKSHAW]

strangely the music sounded far better in-game than in the extra soundtrack.... *dramatically* so - not sure how this can be.

[galneon]

That's very interesting, and it leaves a scary possibility... Perhaps the DLC soundtrack was transcoded from the already lossy game files. *shiver*

[Sacae]

Hmmm, I think it sounds fine.

[Shylaar]

Originally posted by kit.allen:

strangely the music sounded far better in-game than in the extra soundtrack.... *dramatically* so - not sure how this can be.

You're imagining it. There's no difference.

Yusuke Tsutsumi having a different album with the music on it in higher quality is good to know though.

[yukino]

The game audio is ~128kbps Vorbis, and the OST is V2 MP3 (with a few exceptions, such as "The Symphonic House in Fata Morgana," which is 320kbps CBR). I would have loved to offer FLAC, but unfortunately, that wasn't possible. I can promise you, however, that the OST was not transcoded from the game audio. Most of the tracks on discs 3 and 4 are entirely different mixes/arrangements created specifically for the OST.

[galneon]

I appreciate the detailed official response, but given you have the source materials, why is it not possible to release FLAC? Please tell me this isn't a space concern, i.e. you don't want the 'DLC' to be 4 times the size of the game installation.

[ARMITAGE HAWKSHAW]

back to the OP, I do continue to be astonished by the power and beauty of the soundtrack (particularly the Tsutsumi-composed bits). I think many of the most emotional moments in the game would've not had nearly the same mighty impact had anyone else composed the music for those bits... The story and artwork were original, well constructed, and amazing indeed - but it's oddly the music which has enabled the characters to haunt me for days and days afterward.