I thought people might be interested in an audience recording of the June 26, 2011 "Distant Worlds: Music From Final Fantasy" concert in Chicago. There are 25 tracks, some of which were never released before on the "official" CDs, such as Nobuo Uematsu himself playing "Dark World" and Susan Calloway singing "Kiss Me Good-Bye."

I also think that this recording in some ways is better than the clipped versions of these same songs present on the official CDs, where the brass overpowers everything. The audio is 16-bit, 48Khz, AC3 5.1 at 384Kbps. About 2.5 hours of music is included along with the announcers' comments.

Updated on 7/18/11: The original trackers went down. I reuploaded the torrent with more trackers at
Distant Worlds: Final Fantasy - Chicago - Live - 6/26/11 - AC3 5.1 Torrent - btjunkie (http://btjunkie.org/torrent/Distant-Worlds-Final-Fantasy-Chicago-Live-6-26-11-AC3-5-1/2426f7ae35fea032c168238a2126c8c0027cae70d55d).

FYI, in case people are wondering why some songs are split, the technical answer is that the camcorder records at 26.5Mbps. The FAT32 file system can't handle file sizes greater than 4GB, so the camcorder splits the video files at 22 minutes (26.5 million * 22 min * 60 sec = 4GB). Concatenating the two audio files together would require re-rendering the files in AC3 and the lossy re-rendering would result in a further loss of audio fidelity. The files begin right where the other leaves off, so you can simply add them to a playlist and play them as if they were one song.

Comments welcome.

Thank you so much for sharing! I can't wait to listen to this!

Sorry to double post, but I haven't a clue how to use this. Might you upload this to Rapidshare or something please? I don't mean to be picky but I don't want to give up information by signing up for something. Thanks again!

thanks very much!

Wow, nice quality. Still doesn't beat being there, though.
Dark World is so epic, it's not even funny! Love it! :D

Man, that song is one of the only pieces (including the original) that have ever made me feel so emotionally tugged. Seriously, something about the organ is so emotionally moving that I feel literally depressed...and that's what the piece is portraying: a broken, hopeless world, soon to disintegrate and vanish over time. But yet...there's that small...very small hint of hope when that violin comes in. Almost like, "......[we] aren't done yet...we can't give up yet. We still have to stop Kefka, no matter what!"
Words can't describe the effect it has.
Favorite game piece of all time.

I hope I can hear this piece in the concert, sometime in the future. :3

Sorry to double post, but I haven't a clue how to use this. Might you upload this to Rapidshare or something please? I don't mean to be picky but I don't want to give up information by signing up for something. Thanks again!

I'm always surprised to see people who don't know how to use BitTorrent. Read this (http://lifehacker.com/285489/a-beginners-guide-to-bittorrent), please.

OP, thanks for the recording. Final Fantasy concerts are starting to run together due to their repetitive content, so here's hoping the new material is good.

I agree that the concerts are becoming stale; however, the "Distant Worlds" series always seems to come up with at least one or two new things at each concert. "Dark World" is amazing and I was shocked to hear how creative and different it was from all the other pieces. As you can hear, both performances of it received two-minute standing ovations.

What's funny is that Uematsu didn't do much of anything - I could have played those few chords as well as he did. Roth, on the other hand, was incredible on his violin, and he was the one who the ovation was directed towards. He played down the violin as if it was Uematsu who was doing all the work and he was just accompanying him when it was the other way around. You really need to play it on a surround sound system in a quiet room to hear the full range of the recording.

Finally, please seed. After the holiday, I'll be returning to a place where there are bandwidth caps, and will no longer be able to seed.

I was actually planning to attend (mainly for Dark World), but wasn't able to. Thanks for this!

Hopefully I can download this later tonight, very excited to check it out. I was at both shows, and loved them. I've been to a bunch of these now and I agree, they are starting to run together with the content. But the playlist has expanded a lot so far and I'm hopeful for more. Unfortunately the "favorites" like the FF7 tracks and FF8 tracks will probably continue to make up 50% or more of the shows. Great music to be sure, but I've heard them so many times.

Dark World was a great new piece, Arnie was awesome with the violin. But nothing beat Maria and Draco, that was the only full standing ovation short of the end of show ovations.

Thanks! But the trackers are down?

pls upload on an one click hoster....like megaupload , rapidshare or uploadet

cause this is so great music^^

I'd also love it if someone could start seeding this torrent...seems to be dead. Or maybe MU it?

Uploaded it to megaupload. Would be nice if u would seed it afterwards too though.

link (http://www.megaupload.com/?d=J21XZ3IE)

oh it's a torrent. those are the things that don't work.

I've got an iPod I want to put this on. Can someone convert this to mp3?

I've got an iPod I want to put this on. Can someone convert this to mp3?

I've got it converted to Apple Lossless now (2channel only though), want me to upload that?

Though i haven't downloaded the files, BeSplit (http://besweet.notrace.dk/besplit.html) should join them without a problem and without re-encoding.
I could never get the frontend to work, though, so you might need some Command Line know-how.

Though i haven't downloaded the files, BeSplit (http://besweet.notrace.dk/besplit.html) should join them without a problem and without re-encoding.
I could never get the frontend to work, though, so you might need some Command Line know-how.

Well I just found a similar program, BeSweet with BeLight (contains BeSweet's GUI interface), so I was able to convert the AC3 files to WAV (loosing the 5 channels to 2 channels though), and then converted the WAVs to Apple Lossless. I'm uploading the Apple Lossless version right now! :)

Torrent files work great when there are people seeding. Of course if there are no seeds, every torrent becomes useless.

@The_Codefinder: did you downmixed the channels (this way sound from other channels will be directed to stereo channels, so some of the original multichannel sound can be preserved), or just separated stereo channels (this way encoder extracts only stereo channels and the rest of sound data is thrown away)?

Sounds like they're made by the same people :)
You're going to end up with some pretty bloated files, though. BeSplit will simply join the files together, keeping all six channels, original quality and small filesize.

Sounds like they're made by the same people :)
You're going to end up with some pretty bloated files, though. BeSplit will simply join the files together, keeping all six channels, original quality and small filesize.

Well, it seems that after converting to WAV and then to Apple Lossless there's an extra ~80MB in the total upload, but at least it's not a huge bloat of file size (unlike the temporary WAV files). I'm still keeping hold of the original AC3 files for home playback, but it's nice to have some iTunes/iPod compatible files as well :) I figured that at least with the Apple Lossless format I won't be losing too much quality, compared to compressing to AAC or MP3.

Would you mind uploading the originals, too? The trackers are down for the torrent.

Torrent files work great when there are people seeding. Of course if there are no seeds, every torrent becomes useless.

@The_Codefinder: did you downmixed the channels (this way sound from other channels will be directed to stereo channels, so some of the original multichannel sound can be preserved), or just separated stereo channels (this way encoder extracts only stereo channels and the rest of sound data is thrown away)?

I'm not sure which method I used to convert to WAV...in BeLight/BeSweet there doesn't seem to be an option to choose...just 16 Bits 5.1 WAVE or 16 Bits Stereo WAVE. Since my laptop only has 2 speakers I can't heard a difference between the original AC3 and converted WAV/Apple Lossless either... :/ Maybe I'll just upload the original AC3 files, and let someone else with more audio-tech knowledge convert them :P

---------- Post added at 03:01 PM ---------- Previous post was at 02:23 PM ----------

I'll be uploading both the original AC3 files (from the TC's torrent), as well as the Apple Lossless formatted version later this evening.....sucks having a terrrible 3MBps DSL connection in rural Illinois :/

I've got an iPod I want to put this on. Can someone convert this to mp3?

The Apple Lossless version finally got uploaded....looks like it's not quite available yet, but should be pretty soon (just got to wait for MegaUpload to update on their end). It's compatible with both iTunes and iPod playback, although it is in stereo, instead of the original 5.1 recording :/

MEGAUPLOAD - The leading online storage and file delivery service (http://www.megaupload.com/?d=CRG8KGPF)

---------- Post added at 01:29 AM ---------- Previous post was at 01:28 AM ----------


Would you mind uploading the originals, too? The trackers are down for the torrent.

Seems that Dreassic's MU upload with the original files is finally working, so looks like I won't have to upload those as well :P

MEGAUPLOAD - The leading online storage and file delivery service (http://www.megaupload.com/?d=J21XZ3IE)

super thanks.

Oops. I'm not sure what happened there - openbittorrent.com changed their tracker's URL, I think. I re-created the torrent file with more trackers, and updated the initial post with the new link.

As to the 2-channel conversions, you can do that, but it sounds really flat when you listen to it with two channels. That's why it was uploaded with six channels in the first place :)

Oops. I'm not sure what happened there - openbittorrent.com changed their tracker's URL, I think. I re-created the torrent file with more trackers, and updated the initial post with the new link.

As to the 2-channel conversions, you can do that, but it sounds really flat when you listen to it with two channels. That's why it was uploaded with six channels in the first place :)

Yeah, I've noticed that....unfortunately I can't seem to figure out how to play .ac3 files on my ps3 with surround sound yet...might try converting to 5.1 WAVs (though they'll be pretty large files)

good shit man, keep'em coming

Oh man! Now this is sweet!