The search for good music soundtracks

For about eleven years I have been building up a steady yet expansive library of videogame music. Then last September it all went to hell when the Mac hard drive went dead. While I'm certain they could just repair the contacts on the disc, put it into a new unit and it would be all good, they wasted no time in telling me it was a total failure and I had never bothered to put a backup drive in place after bad memories of one in the past where external hard drives were very bulky and worst of all, required an external power source.

I spent 15k dollars into getting the contents of the drive extracted and what I got back was a range of JPEG's and PNG's, all with generic numbered filenames and all with their info stripped away, and only a small selection of MP3's- only 474 songs were preserved compared to the 27,000 or so songs I recall having before the crash. Many of the songs were composed of self-made rips with the good majority of them not being put up for download online (which I plan on re-ripping from scratch), others were downloaded from various sites.

That last point deserves a bit of a closer look. Over the past decade, there existed many, many sites that hosted videogame OST's in mp3 format, some rips of one game being better than others of the same title, and as time went a lot of these links either died completely or the sites that hosted them went offline, meaning no one could access the links. This is a problem as one specific website which hosts a slew of videogame soundtracks that people submit (or just take from other parts of the web), except a good few of the OST rips are riddled with problems, including bot not limited to:

• Being outdated as heck, with no good replacements or re-uploads since then to replace bad, usually low-quality rips with better ones (instead of vice versa as I've seen the site do with certain OST's).
• Songs with loop points always running to exactly 3 minutes before fading out instead of the fade happening after the first loop (thus, two full loops are included)
• Songs containing leftover sound effects and voices from the game in question.
• Songs containing obvious skips in the recording or static/loud "chirps" scattered about.
• Songs lacking proper author/album tags or just being the track title in lowercase with dashes in place of spaces.
• An inverse of the above and the songs are just called "BGM #" or "Track #" with no effort made to give them proper labels. Or if they are labeled, they're all jumbled up.
• Outright misses songs.
• Being part of greater collection that ripped most of all of the games in all series but were then split apart and uploaded separately- only to neglect to upload certain parts of the "collection".

Paradoxically, a good deal of some of the ripped OST's hosted by the site were outperformed by external rips from other sites (including in one case, this very blog you're reading now), a lot of which fall under the "links removed or website taken down" pool I mentioned earlier. While not every soundtrack I have taken interest in falls under this trap, it's rather sad when it does, especially when better rips existed either on this site or externally before being replaced (or in my case, losing it to the hard drive "failure") and with how things are looking things may not get better.

Wile it's not much, I may go forward with an idea I've been developing due to the inability to recover my old music/mp3 files: Re-rip a good chunk of the OST's that I had once ripped in the past across NES, Game Boy, GBA, and a few other older consoles and upload them to this blog. If my memories do serve me right, I heard one of the sites I used to rely on for music downloads, so I might start some kind of project there to bring up or resurrect better versions of rips.