Playing this game and experiencing the score was one of the coolest moments in my career. Everything I'd hoped for in the execution of the music was there: it was adaptable, random and yet followed the tense shape of the narrative, with an over-arching story arc and character themes.

Ironically, I got so wrapped up in the game, it became very easy to ignore the music, or at least ignore it on a conscious level. Which I suppose is a testament to how well it worked, since I was getting roped into the adventure instead of focusing on what the music was doing. (This happens rarely, especially on projects I've worked on -- it's impossible to shut off the critical brain sometimes).

Anybody else play through it and notice the music in action?

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-Bear

Much like Dark Void, I actually bought this game solely because of who was scoring it (Yes, I’m that kind of fan-geek). I’ve only played a handful of levels of the game but I love how the score works, how it adapts to the way you play the game. I haven’t played through all of it yet, though I intend to. I haven’t worked up the motivation to start playing again after my PS3 hard drive had a spaz and lost all of my save -games. I also loved that the levels I did play, I wasn’t actually paying attention to the music, it was there and I was hearing it and enjoying it, but I wasn’t thinking “I’m gonna have to mute you now so I can hear the music over your gunshots.” Admittedly, I did turn down the speech and sound effects so I could hear the music more. But it’s not a distracting experience, unlike with so many games (see X-Men: Destiny, Mass Effect 2 – and not in a good kind of distracting like “Oops, I got head-shotted ‘cause I was totally rocking out to that bass solo”)

Bear,

I am seriously thinking about purchasing the soundtrack to SOCOM 4 but I'm a little hesitant because of it being a download from Itunes / Amazon..and in an MP3 file format.

I'm also an I.T. tech so I'm pretty computer savvy but I once heard someone tell me that an MP3 file is a compressed file from (lets say a WMA Windows Media Audio file) and 1 tenth the size of the original file. SO, 90 percent of the data in the file of a song, is deleted..because MP3 files aren't as big as CDA / WMA files. And, around that time, those few years ago..I would listen to these MP3 files (which were condensed/reduced in size from WMA or CDA files) and they would sound like shit. There was hardly no quality, there was distortion problems..they were horrible.

So, I am still wondering if I got the right " technical " story / explanation as to what an MP3 file truly is and how it sounds.

The quality of your music is VERY VERY important to me. When I put your BSG music on my PC I set Windows Media Player to the highest quality (lossless)..and I don't care how much room it takes up on my hard drive. It sounds awesome when I play it back on my 5.1 system. I hope to one day have a 7.1 sound system.

I know I could have posted this in the main forum but I'm pretty sure I would have total strangers responding to it, and giving me conflicting information. and I'd rather have you, yourself, give me your thoughts on it. After all, you deal with this sort of technical thing everyday.

Marc

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Harrison5 - York, Pennsylvania

I am a) one of those total strangers and b) don't know anything about this stuff. I just want to mention that there is indeed a physical disk of SOCOM4 available here at Lalaland.

Woo Hoo !!...thank you !!

Marc

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Harrison5 - York, Pennsylvania

The bitrate of MP3 files varies, but anything of about 192kbps or more is indistinguishable in listening tests from CD audio, and most people will struggle to notice a difference until you get below 128kbps, even in a side-by-side comparison. People with high-quality audio gear and experience will probably be able to tell 128kbps from 192 (though this doesn't mean listening to 128kbps files is necessarily a problem, just that the difference can be picked out in a side-by-side test).

Amazon doesn't seem to declare the bitrate of its downloads, but it varies depending on what was submitted by the publisher in question. A quick check of my collection reveals everywhere from 128kbps to 256kbps in MP3 files from Amazon. Certainly I've never had anything from them where I've noticed quality issues. (I do use a discrete sound card and decent 5.1 speakers.)


Miscellanea:
All digital audio is, by its very nature, an imprecise reproduction of the original. Even the uncompressed data recorded by studio sound equipment is limited by the sampling rate. The point is, of course, that there are limits to the sensitivity of the human ear, and as long as the errors introduced by compression are smaller than that limit, it doesn't matter.
Lossless codecs, such as FLAC, WMA Lossless and ALAC, provide data which is decompressed to be precisely equivalent to the original (usually CD audio, and note that this will usually have lost information compared to the original studio recordings, due to the limit on sampling rate and bits per sample of CD audio).
Lossy compression formats, including Vorbis, MP3, AAC, WMA and many others, use a number of clever techniques to remove data listeners won't notice in order to bring the file size down, exploiting the properties of the sensitivity of the ear. The encoders for these allow a chosen output data rate, and will drop information as required to reach it. Particularly in the early days of digital audio, files of 64kbps or lower were common, due to bandwidth and storage limits which are less a problem in these days of broadband and cheap terabyte hard drives, and the quality of these should not be generalised to all MP3 files.

(As a sidenote, expectations of quality have a very large influence on perception of quality. If you're expecting higher quality, that's what you'll likely hear. This is why you see companies selling audio cables for hundreds or thousands of pounds which are indistinguishable in every way in a blind test to a common coat hanger, and similar ridiculousness.)


All this said, I do prefer CDs myself when they're available for a reasonable price, but that's mostly because I like having hard copies and album artwork and the option to rip them as Vorbis files rather than MP3 (Vorbis is a free, open standard; MP3 is not).
I hope this essay answers your questions.

Thanks Sentynel and everybody for clearing that up. You explained it better than I could have.

I prefer to own CDs so that I own the highest quality recording I can. However, I've found that for the sake of convenience I almost always listen to music from my iPod, just because it's easy.

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-Bear

Yeah, I don't think I've actually listened to a CD directly for years. As soon as they arrive, they get ripped to my computer, mirrored over the network to the house media server, and copied to my MP3 player (well, theoretically, but it hasn't had space for my complete collection in years. I need a new one, really... I spend far too long agonising over what to put on it). Even my car has a line-in for MP3 players now.

Awesome answers...Thank you,

Bear, by the way..did I mention that I frakkin love this forum ?? ...where else can one of your fans find such awesome info..?

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Harrison5 - York, Pennsylvania