TW and TW2 OSTs available in FLAC now on GOG

[Aditya]

TW and TW2 OSTs available in FLAC now on GOG

As the title reads, the music from both games are now available in high quality FLAC for your hearing pleasure. So if you own a copy there, them download away! I usually don't care for them personally and find mp3 enough but for very specific cases (such as his of course) I do dig in :thumbsup:

Here is the announcement post. Looks like another requested feature has made it up on gog. Awesome!

 

[Aes Sídhe]

Good Old Guys eh.

Its great to have flacs available... orchestral scores in particular will benefit.

 

[Gilrond-i-Virdan]

Thanks for pointing it out! I always prefer open/free codecs (mp3 is not one of them). FLAC is free, and it's good for encoding to other codecs (Opus, Vorbis and etc.) since it's lossless. And thanks to GOG and CDPR for adding these.

 

[Luxorek]

I don't know if this will help that much. TW1 score is much better than the TW2, but unfortunately it's also the one with several mixing problems that the second one doesn't have. I don't think FLAC files will help with that - hear it for yourself, the whole piece called Kingdom & Betrayal for example. And no, it's not me - it's the problem with mixing, and yes I have both soundtrack from GOG.

 

[DonSwingKing]

The physical soundtrack discs countain wav which i think is high quality enough.

 

[Gilrond-i-Virdan]

Physical discs contain raw audio really, not WAV: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc_Digital_Audio
But FLAC compresses it with lossless algorithm, so you can reuse it to convert to other lossy codecs or use as is if you prefer to.

 

[Aditya]

Physical discs contain raw audio really, not WAV: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc_Digital_Audio
But FLAC compresses it with lossless algorithm, so you can reuse it to convert to other lossy codecs or use as is if you prefer to.

Ah Isee, thank you for that

 

[Gilrond-i-Virdan]

Aditya: The main benefit of FLAC is that you can keep it as a master record, and use that if you want to convert to some other lossy format. It will save space in comparison with using WAV for the same purpose. However if you only have a lossy format (such as Vorbis, Opus or MP3), reencoding that to another lossy codec will degrade quality, because each codec has its own optimizations, and lossy parts combine (i.e. you can roughly compare it to making a photocopy twice, using the first copy as a source for the second). That's why it's good when various stores allow buying audio in lossless codecs such as FLAC, it allows you compressing it further any way you want.

And by the way there isn't much audible difference between the FLAC and good lossy codec such as Opus for example, so for the end result it makes sense to use a lossy compression. Just avoid reencoding lossy -> lossy like explained above.

 

[Aditya]

Okay a small heart warming tale for you guys.
In the TW1 OST, track 24 The Dike had some small issues. No biggie just some cracking noises in some instances, so it was bothering I guess.
One person reported it in the forums (before I could download the thing myself personally) on the forums, you can view it here (gog forums)
So pretty quickly, one of those guys fixed it up and even PMed me with just that track so that I wouldn't have to download the entire (hugeee) thing again. It really bought a smile on my face I should say.
These are just very small things which probably no 'big companies" or professionals would care about, but this is exactly what counts, and makes CDP/gog so great.