I downloaded the soundtrack off of GOG earlier today (the one labelled "In-Game Soundtrack", not the one labelled "Original Soundtrack") and when I went to listen to it I immediately noticed that the audio quality on all the tracks was really low. Everything sounds VERY compressed: it's all crunchy and scratchy and fuzzy, like it was played through bad speakers and then re-recorded through a smartphone or something.

This strikes me as very strange because there are better, higher-quality versions of these tracks already available within the game itself. Once the game has been downloaded and installed they are located in C:/Program Files (x86)/GOG Galaxy/Games/Knights and Merchants/data/sfx/songs as .sng files that work just fine in VLC or any similar media player.

Seriously: listen to those .sng versions that come with the game itself and then listen to the downloadable MP3 version of the same song (I recommend track_06.sng and track_02.mp3, respectively) and you'll immediately notice the stark difference in quality.

And those nice clean hi-fi versions of the songs weren't some new addition for the GOG re-release either: they were already present on the game's original CD-ROM. I know this because in 2009 I put mine into my disk drive, ripped the soundtrack off the CD, and ever since then I have had clean high-fidelity versions of all 18 tracks that were included on that disk. I don't have that physical copy anymore, unfortunately, but I still have the files that I pulled back in 2009 and when listening to those side-by-side with this downloadable soundtrack the GOG version sounds significantly worse in just about every way.

So I guess my question here is directed to Joymania and/or TopWare: why is the downloadable In-Game Soundtrack so horribly compressed? You are literally already distributing better versions of these songs through the same purchase. There is absolutely no reason for this great soundtrack to sound this bad. Please fix this. I fixed it in under 10 minutes by throwing the .sng files into VLC and converting them into .mp3 and I'm just a random nobody on the internet. Please do better than a random nobody on the internet.

Because MP3 is honestly, kind of a bad format. You have to wrangle the sheep of bandwidth instead of just wrapping only the sound in a Vorbis container or enjoying FLAC goodness.

Except, like I said, you can literally convert the game's files to MP3s and they still sound WAY better than what's being offered in the download. The soundtrack currently available on GOG sounds bad even by the standards of MP3s. Format is not the problem here, please don't be reductionist about this.