Amusingly, this seems to be the opposite issue of the "Mhakna Gramura and Fairy Bell" OST where I like this music (has bonus songs!) but it's marred by technological incompetence. (savvy VN readers may notice my username as the audio person for the Fate/stay night Ultimate Edition fan-patch project) This OST of vorbis@Q9 at 119 minutes is sized to fit a music CD which is likely why (almost) all 48kHz music is resampled to 44.1kHz, but the first song is still 48kHz and vorbis@Q10 which negates any reason to resample the other 48kHz songs... (if they were going to downsample most of the songs anyway, why not apply some r128gain/replaygain/wave gain while they're at it?) Fidelity is mostly equal or lower than the data files used in the VN—maybe this OST was transcoded in some lossy--to-▶lossy manner, or a mediocre resampler was used. A key example is the song "The Divide"／"Lines are Drawn" in the right channel around sample 1447000 with an Audacity project of 48kHz; on the spectrogram view you'll see more detailed audio data on the in-game vorbis@Q5 files yet there's also gaps in the upper-range not present in the OST version. The real kicker is that a lossless 24bit 48kHz WAV of "Lines are Drawn" is (accidentally?) included in the VN's data files, allowing us to see how much audio information was originally present (Spoiler: quite a bit more) And the question of "why OGG vorbis"? We know lossless was available, and they didn't directly use the VN's OGG vorbis data files. Windows and Apple products don't support OGG vorbis out-of-the-box, so this nullifies the convenience factor of buying this for many less-savvy users that don't want to extract the music out of the RPA data files (and the VN is required to buy this DLC anyway!) The bonus song "999 - Modus Operandi" has notably worse dynamic range than the short version used in fault one.
I find this moderately reminiscent of light-hearted/non-dramatic/non-adventure-y music found in Zelda Wind Waker. It's funny, reading about this OST being "JUST THAT GOOD" where people have payed full price and found it to be worth it. I view myself as an audiophile music enthusiast yet, despite buying this at half-price, I still don't feel like it's my cup of tea—maybe it's just me? Key examples of music that's "my cup of tea" (I noticed after they're just a few years apart): -Fate/stay night (VN; usually the non-2012 remixes) -Clannad (primarily the non-remixed found in non-HD VN & anime) -Metroid Prime 1/2 -F-Zero GX -BONUS: music by "I've Sound" from mid-2000s (savvy VN readers may notice my username as the audio person for the F/sn Ultimate Edition fan-patch project; I also used custom F/sn music on what I believe is the normal difficulty speedrun record for Metroid Confrontation v1.1—an AM2R game engine demo) All above examples only had OSTs in Japan, so I had to extract music files directly from the VN/game data files. On that subject, the VN is actually cheaper so I HIGHLY recommend buying that first and demoing the OST that way; it even uses the open-source Ren'Py (version 7) engine so there are freely available tools to unpack its RPA files and access the 256kbps OGG vorbis music files. Don't do what I did and buy the VN and the OST at the same time—GOG's VN sale was ending a day earlier than I thought so I couldn't use the 24-hour refund turnaround to spend on the sale. PROTIP! The date GOG lists as when a sale ends is the first day the sale will NOT be active, not the last day of the sale! At the very least I gave this 3 stars since I do appreciate lossless, yet it uses WAV rather than FLAC which seems odd when even Windows 10 supports FLAC out-of-the-box? (I say this as a Linux user) But even as an audiophile music enthusiast, I wouldn't dare claim to hearing a fidelity difference between lossless and the VN's extracted 256kbps OGG vorbis files.
