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Final Fantasy Music on iTunes
Final Fantasy Online Warcry has the news that iTunes is now carrying Final Fantasy scores and music from the Black Mages. Square Enix has a listing of all of their iTunes offerings, which includes music from FFI - FFXI, a live concert offering, and two albums by the Black Mages (Nobuo Uematsu's rock band).
The OSTs for FF1 and FF2 are listed as being released May 10th, 2005? Had the OSTs been released before this?
Final Fantasy VI (3 in the US) still rates as my favorite game of all time. No game before or since has actually caused me to dream about the characters.
Even hearing the 30-second previews on iTunes brings back memories of that bastard kefka, that fucking octopus who always screwed things up and spending hours hoping I could keep general leo alive.
My only complaint is that the versions for download are direct releases from the SNES cart. Why couldn't they orchestrate them instead of using the 8-bit sound system?
-Ryan
AUWYHSTOT (Acronyms are Useless When You Have to Spell Them Out Too)
This is a great move, but the pricing scheme is ridiculous. For most of the games, you'd end up paying half of the game's original retail price just to get the soundtrack. That's unacceptable when you take into account that most of the music was written for and preformed by a Z80.
So, when's this going to end up on the Canadian iTMS, I wonder?
Duct tape is like the Force. It has a light side, a dark side, and it holds the universe together.
...there's only the OSTs for now, and not much else. And every serious video game fan knows that OSTs are worthless because you can rip and convert them from the games yourself (or someone else already has). I already paid for the game, and I know the music is buried somewhere there =)
There has been some wonderful reworked orchestral and piano adaptations of these things. I'm more interested in finding those - good that they're releasing some of those as well.
In this post-OCRemix world, we need to think of the power of interpretation!
Six is the Empire Strikes Back of the FF series, in my opinion - its' easily the best of the series- deepest (again, imo) character development, most compelling characters, most fluid combat system, one of the better magic systems... I spent hundreds of hours with it as a teenager and got so deep into it that I eventually hand corrected innacuracies in the strategy guide I'd purchased (when it had become apparent I'd missed a few things).
Then VII came along, completely and utterly failed to be better than VI in any way (in fact, amping up to a high level pretty much every shortcoming of the series), and my high hopes for the future of RPGs were rapidly deflated.
I spent somewhere around 250 hours with FF VI - multiple runthroughs and couching with friends who were playing the game. I couldn't stomach VII or VIII for any more than 40-50, and never replayed either - they'd lost the magic that made VI so compelling for me.
I don't know about that. I have no problem ripping or downloading the music for a game I already own. If I bought the game, don't I own the music on it already as well? I don't see much difference between taking it off the CD manually and grabbing it from someone's website. To me the cost of most OST's is a little inflated, and not justifiable if I've already got the original medium.
Just go to Overclock Remix site's, there are plenty of outstanding FREE mp3s to download.
And with respect to the underlying musical works embodied in the video games in question, how is ocremix.org any more lawful than allofmp3.com?
This is certainly a great idea (I love alot of game music, Final Fantasy by far not the least), but Square Enix has alot of other good game soundtracks they could release. Chrono Trigger/Cross and Final Fantasy Tactics come immediatly to mind. Of course, those are by different composers, so that might have something to do with it.
If I hadn't just bought the CDs, this would be enough for me to have some interest in iTunes (ignoring the fact that it's not open in Australia yet...). I strongly recommend the 2 albums (The Black Mages 1 and 2) to anybody - rock arrangements of tracks from across the Final Fantasy series, by Nobuo Uematsu and a couple of other squaresoft musicians. Definitely worth the money.
-ReK
md5sum -c reality.md5
reality: FAILED
md5sum: WARNING: 1 of 1 computed checksum did NOT match
Someone I worked with bought an iPod, and I hooked him up with the Final Fantasy Tactics soundtrack soundtrack, with one slight addition. I renamed and retagged the disco song, "It's Raining Men", to match the rest of the soundtrack and burned it to cd. He had a nice little suprise waiting for him to listen to...
Agreed. I've bought many a game soundtrack in my time (including quite a few Final Fantasy ones), and believe me, the iTunes prices are nothing to sneeze at. This is especially true for the arrange albums ($10 as opposed to $25-30).
Pachelbel's Ganon. Mmmmm.
The infamous "Nickelback vs Nickelback" remix going around the net is the perfect example. There's two different songs that "everyone" knows have basically the same music. Except, if you start doing that it's amazing the things you can make line up, particularly in pop/rock where there's probably only ten basic beats that 90% of the songs use.
Besides, you can sing any of the lyrics to "Waltzing Matilda".
This has nothing to do with OCRemix, because the OCRemix remixes all explicitly acknowledge where they got their material from. This is more like Paul Simon taking the music of "If I could..." from Los Incas version of "El Condor Pasa" *. There's no secret "inspiration" involved, if anyone's going to sue they're not going to have to wait for a judge to decide if they sound the same, legal or not it's all out in the open...
That's unacceptable when you take into account that most of the music was written for and preformed by a Z80.
Hey, most of the music out there was written and performed on instruments that had NO CPU AT ALL.
And, actually, wasn't most of the music written for and performed by a 6502 or 65816, sometimes assisted by a synthesizer chip like an AY38910 or SPC700? The only Z80 in the Nintendo lineup was in the Gameboy.
Got some good music, though.
The infamous "Nickelback vs Nickelback" remix going around the net is the perfect example.
For one thing, it's the same band, and it's likely to be the same songwriter. For another, though the bass lines of "How You Remind Me" and "Someday" are similar, bass lines aren't nearly as strongly restricted under copyright law as melodies are, and the melodies in this case aren't even close to the same.
Besides, you can sing any of the lyrics to "Waltzing Matilda".
For one thing, the copyright in "Waltzing Matilda" by Banjo Paterson has expired in almost the whole developed world, except possibly in the European Union, which restored copyright to PD works last time it extended copyright terms. This page claims that the song was written in 1895, meaning that the song was almost certainly first published before 1923 (the U.S. boundary for copyright expiration, which is on hold for 13 years). Banjo Paterson died in 1941, which was before 1955 (the Australian boundary for copyright expiration, which is on hold for 20 years). For another, non-commercial public performances are largely exempt from copyright restrictions.
This is more like Paul Simon taking the music of "If I could..." from Los Incas version of "El Condor Pasa"
Three possibilities:
None of these three possibilities applies to video game music. Few songs from video games are from folk melodies ("Polly Wolly Doodle" in Pokemon is an exception), video games were invented long after 1923, many video game copyright owners don't just hand out permissions like candy, and there's no way to recover 8.5c per download if no charge is made for the downloads.
You seem to have read my message as making the exact opposite of the point that I was intending to make. I apologise for the confusion, and I'll try and clear it up.
First of all, I was contrasting the Nickelback and Waltzing Matilda examples with Paul Simon to hilight the main difference between the Harrison case and OCRemix... and that is that Harrison didn't credit his source, and OCRemix's members do.
Your Paul Simon quote implies that he might have got permission.
I'm sure he got permission, and I would be quite surprised to learn otherwise... or that he hadn't paid for the rights to use Los Incas' music. I'm not implying Paul Simon did anything wrong. What I'm getting at is that there's already all kinds of precedent for how the legal system deals with the direct use of another artist's recorded music in a new work.
But of course that precedent doesn't let OCRemix off the hook at all. Quite the contrary: when you have explicitly credited the original work you're in a whole different legal situation than when you're just dealing with music that "sounds the same". There's a whole lot of nonsense going around about remixes, but nobody speaking from experience suggests that remixes are exempt from paying for the right to use their source material. That's why the recent release of a NiN track in GarageBand format explicitly for amateur remixing is such a big deal, and why the silence on the part of Square and others shouldn't be considered approval.
I wrote: Harrison didn't credit his source
Of course I should have written "Harrison didn't credit his alleged source".
Sorry about that.
Why did this have to be exclusive to iTunes? Yes, they're the largest. But why not recognize all of the non iTunes users and release for all of the major online stores? :(
-David
I have real doubts about measuring or compairing one song to another. Does time = worth? How about how many notes are being used? Is classical worth more than pop?
I guess in the end it just comes down to the same concept that governs all monitary transactions. How much will the market bear or what is the song worth to you?
Because you have to start somewhere, and you might as well start where you get the most bang for your buck.
:)
If you really want your music in a Windows-only format, I suppose you can always burn it to a disk from iTunes and then rip it in WMA. That's a lot less hassle than Mac users have to go through to play the games themselves.
Does this mean I actually have to delete the MIDIfied version of all the FF's songs from my computer to remain legal? (Or was that illegal in the first place...) *sniffle* But I wanna keep pestering my friend with the techno chocobo song from FF7...
I don't find the prices to be that out of line. For example, while the soundtrack to FF X is priced at a whopping $24.99 for the album, you'll notice that the album contains 89 tracks. And while a few of those tracks are a bit short in duration, at what amounts to approximately 28 cents each, I think that the price is reasonable.
I really hope this sparks some interest in the OST market. I'd really like to see them offer OSTs from their other games (current and past games, including those not released here) as well as seeing other companies follow suit. It'd be nice to buy these albums without having to pay the usual amount due to import costs, etc.
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