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?
There are plenty of orchestrated and arranged versions of some of the songs from across the entire series, you just have to look elsewhere (they're probably on itunes as well).
Try "Final Fantasy VI Grand Finale" for starters. A bit older, but Final Fantasy Symphonic is also a great arrangement of Final Fantasy 1, 2 and 3 (japanese) from the Tokyo or London Philharmonic.
The soundtracks youre currently listening to are OST's or OSV's, which are Original Sound Track/Version. You're not going to get anything but the original music from those, and that's usually their purpose.
http://www.ocremix.org/index.php
Just go to Overclock Remix site's, there are plenty of outstanding FREE mp3s to download. Not only for final fantasy, but a ton of other games too. I have downloaded so much, I am amazed my cable company haven't killed my connection yet.
Ripping music from games wasn't always trivial.
Tell me how to 'trivially' grab the music for FFI, released on the original Famicom?
Now compare that effort with the $5.99 download from iTunes.
Tell me how to capture all the music, with tags and titles, from FFVII, vs the effort of grabbing it from iTunes for $24.99
I've bought my share of OSTs over the years because for a long time it wasn't trivial (lack of emulators, lack of rom rippers, etc) to grab music from cartridges or CDs. Even now I couldn't name how, though I'm sure Google would help.
GPL Deconstructed
Nothing you read on Slashdot is legal advice.
There are no lyrics, so no worry of copyright infringement there. And to the best of my knowledge, the actual melodies of the music cannot be copyrighted
Sorry, but the best of your knowledge is incorrect. Please read these cases and this analysis.
That's why I added "or someone already has". NES tracks and GBA tracks. Legally quite gray area, agreed... but personally I don't see much wrong with it, especially if I have the game.
Granted, I'm more of a PC-grown person, and on the PC the ripping is generally in form of "okay, another silly proprietary archive format, how do I extract these?" ... "weird proprietary file format, how do I convert it to mid/s3m/wav?" There's often a tool someone has written. And, of course, in modern days, it's fashionable to add modding tools to the game itself, which also allow music extraction in one way or other. Many games nowadays just have lightly disguised MP3 and Ogg files.
Ripping console formats is far more difficult, yes - transferring stuff from cartridge to PC is the first biggest problem.
Though, as weird as it sounds, I have actually ripped music from GBA games (just not from ROMs I had transferred myself, but actually ROMs from games I own =). Pointed an old DOS-era music ripper proggy at WarioWare ROM and I got a whole boatload of MIDI files right away, I was quite surprised they actually stored MIDI files in plain in the ROM. I also hear many use Amiga MODs =)
Hmm, could it be because
1) iTunes runs on two platforms
2) iTunes uses a standard format, instead of the proprietary WMA
3) iTunes syncs with the highest-market share MP3 player, as well as several other non-computer devices?
Hmm. Nah. I'm sure it's just because everyone loves Apple so much. Yup.