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Final Fantasy Music on iTunes

Posted by Zonk on from the japanese-love dept.

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).

15 of 78 comments (clear)

  1. Does anyone know why... by rekenner · · Score: 2, Informative

    The OSTs for FF1 and FF2 are listed as being released May 10th, 2005? Had the OSTs been released before this?

    1. Re:Does anyone know why... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      It might be because this is the first time they've been released separately. The FFI and FFII OSTs were originally released on one CD, which began and ended with orchestrally-performed medley tracks.

      At first glance, it looks like the FFI and FFII OSTs are a good deal (at the album price--$5.99)--until you realize that they were originally released as one album. The individual FFI and FFII OSTs themselves are only about 20 minutes each--for $6, that's not much; though it's definitely a better deal than paying 99 cents for a single track that's less than a minute long.

  2. cool by rritterson · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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)
    1. Re:cool by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      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.

  3. Rediculous pricing by inio · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Rediculous pricing by 2nd+Post! · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Doesn't that imply that the music is worth approximately half the game's retail price?

      Perhaps to you the music is worth less than that, but to me (and others who have purchased game music) the soundtrack is worth MORE than the game, once you've played the game.

      --

      GPL Deconstructed
    2. Re:Rediculous pricing by superpulpsicle · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

    3. Re:Rediculous pricing by metalligoth · · Score: 2, Interesting

      It's a steal. The local Japanese store here in the Ann Arbor area sells some of these albums for $40. On iTunes they only want $25.

    4. Re:Rediculous pricing by Blondie-Wan · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Well, it's the same with movies, of course. A fairly typical movie DVD might sell at lots of outlets for about $20, and its soundtrack album CD might be anywhere from half to three quarters of that. I know of a number of movies for which the DVD of the movie is cheaper than the soundtrack CD.

  4. Not in Canada yet? by mh101 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.
  5. VI is still the best... by solios · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  6. Re:Good good, but.... by 2nd+Post! · · Score: 2, Informative

    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
  7. Re:Ocremix.org legal? by tepples · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  8. Re:Good good, but.... by WWWWolf · · Score: 2, Informative

    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 =)

  9. Re:Why iTunes? by Chucker23N · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.