You might be interested to know that a musician has started to "restore" the Final Fantasy 7 OST using the original uncompressed samples that he tracked down over a number of years. He goes by the handle TSSF. He had already made a handful of tracks some years back, but he's starting over from scratch now.
https://twitter.com/tssf/status/1590088718500892674
He made the rounds recently after finishing his Chrono Trigger project, which sounds amazing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cw_4DVI-5Vo
Since some of your work has been lost, perhaps it'd be better to wait until TSSF is done with his project, and you could work off of his files? It would sound way better than the official CD OST released by Square since the tracks on that are still the ones that have been processed and compressed for the game.
Just a thought!
FBX and I have known each other for a while.
I think this is a different kind of preservation. While the restorations I'm doing are nice and all, the preservations that he's doing is keeping original soundtrack quality alive
The reverbs sound different on hardware, emulation, and other things. I honestly would love to hear the originals preserved. I'm still trying to find the original soundtrack to find the best quality to compare to when I do my restorations
My restorations are also a personal taste, I could simply use the samples edited in the same way they were for the PS1 but then how different would it be ha ing the music play back at a higher sample rate with less PS1 frequency response?
So when I make my versions, I usually try to keep the patch (unless the whole patch sounds bad) playing from a spler that plays the sounds back similar to how original romplers used to play them, with a reverb that was released around the same time (ie: they're designed to sound kind of like how Uematsu could have made it sound off of PS1 hardware)
Good luck fbx! Looking forward to seeing this revived
