View Full Version : Thread 222698">The 4 Heroes of Light ~Final Fantasy Gaiden~ OST [SQEX-10173] FLAC ��FIXED!!



radorn
02-10-2018, 08:11 PM
https://vgmdb.net/album/15177

Apparently this album has been sort of missing for some time. I myself have had quite a bit of trouble to get this right, but here it is!

https://mega.nz/#!pkwA3QTb!Pw_Ee3YYO396ldXOXd-6FT2o29rZNWyKExE72XMerAM

Now, the story...

While TheHeroOfMobius, another forum member, has already made a FLAC rip available at Thread 209701, unfortunately, that rip seems to have been mangled (not TheHeroOfMobius' fault, I'm sure, who probably already found it like that) by cutting it into tracks with one of those nasty trimmers that cut portions of silence between tracks. Regardless of how useful anyone may think these are (generally not useful at all, if you ask me), the truth of the matter is that they mess up the disc layout and renders the rip impossible to verify against such databases as AccurateRip, CUETools, and even the log file that contains checksums for the audio data, made by tools like ExactAudioCopy.

Seeing that was the case, I tried to find a proper FLAC rip that wasn't tampered with, only finding dead links and a chinese torrent for an FF collection where only the CUE and LOG file seemed to be seeded. While this was far from ideal, I eventually could use those to get the exact disc TOC, gap information and checksums from the LOG.
By using CUETools, foobar2000, and Audacity (make sure you set the data mode to 16 bit and you disable dithering in the output settings if you plan to take on this kind of miserable task), I managed to slowly get every track aligned and finally get a perfect rip that compares 100% against the EAC LOG, AccurateRip, and CUETools DB.

The results are here for you to enjoy.

To anyone reading this and releasing CD rips: Please, rip properly and don't do nasty stuff and save me from going through this again. Have mercy!

As a curiosity, in the process of restoring this album to it's original form, I found that the transition between tracks #7 and #8 is slighty botched in the official release, with the gap and the very start of track 8 being cut 0.2s into the tail of the fadeout of track #7. Full explanation and alternative "fixed" tracks inside the ZIP.

dekamaster2
02-10-2018, 08:26 PM
Thanks a lot!

TheHeroOfMobius
02-11-2018, 01:05 AM
Oh hey, thanks a bunch! I ended up getting the rip of this particular album from a HikariNoAkari MP3/FLAC Final Fantasy discography thing. If there's any other issues that you find with lossless rips that may not be lossless at all, please let me know!