Sierra soundtracks - on CD?

[pepak]

After a long long time, I found my way back to Quest Studios. Let me say, I am fascinated by the amount of soundtracks that got recorded since I was here the last time. But that leads me to a question: Do you, Tom, burn or plan to burn the music CDs yourself? I have three reasons for wanting a CD made by you rather than a self-made CD:

1) Sending you some extra money would be a way for me to say "thank you" for all the wonderful works you did on old game MIDIs (specifically, for Monkey Island 2, which I love very much).

2) If I were to make a CD myself, it would have to be created from OGG or MP3. But I have this philosophical prohibition against creating audio CDs from lossy sources. Call me weird, but I just can't stand the very idea, and if I did it with Sierra soundtracks, I am almost sure my enjoyment of the music would be seriously impeded.

3) I don't really want to hammer your site with a 1+ GB download...

[Tom]

Welcome back!

I totally understand how you feel with the lossy format.  I've been told by the Vorbis folks that encoding at a level of 5 or higher will produce digital output that is virtually indistiguishable (to human ears, anyway) to WAV files (even though you'll always find those who say they can tell.)  Nevertheless, as time goes by and server space has become less of an issue for me, I've tried to create newer soundtracks at no less than a vobris compression of 4 or 5 -- roughly, 160+ kbps.  The "CONQUESTS OF CAMELOT" soundtrack (which will be completed within the next few days) is compressed at a setting of 6 (~200 kbps...which would equate to ~230 kbps in MP3 format.)  They convert very well to CDA.  Perhaps in the not so far future, uploading the WAV's will become an option.    

My ISP is about to implement some bandwidth enhancements and other changes to my DSL service.  If these enhancements are as good as they promise, I may re-establish my own FTP server again.  In that case, I could easily place WAV's there, though I'd probably limit the amount of traffic.

[pepak]

I totally understand how you feel with the lossy format.  I've been told by the Vorbis folks that encoding at a level of 5 or higher will produce digital output that is virtually indistiguishable (to human ears, anyway) to WAV files (even though you'll always find those who say they can tell.)

Actually, it's not "what I hear" what is the problem - I would probably find it very hard to distinguish a 192 kbps MP3 from a WAV. The problem is the knowledge that the music was compressed with a lossy algorithm. For some reason it just makes me appreciate the music far less than a "real" CD :-(

Perhaps in the not so far future, uploading the WAV's will become an option.  

WAV may not be a good idea, but FLAC (http://flac.sourceforge.net) is a very viable option. It compresses music to about 40-60% of the original size, lossless. APE (http://www.monkeysaudio.com) yields even better compression, but I had to switch to FLAC after all - it's not supported on many platforms and its files are incompatible between different versions of Monkey's Audio.

My ISP is about to implement some bandwidth enhancements and other changes to my DSL service.  If these enhancements are as good as they promise, I may re-establish my own FTP server again.  In that case, I could easily place WAV's there, though I'd probably limit the amount of traffic.

I could donate a FTP, if you want. I have a 6 Mbit line (symmetric) and some 10 or 20 GB should not be a problem.