The Silent Hill 2 Complete Soundtrack Ultimate Edition is a project I had spent some considerable time on (over 100 hours from start to finish). It's a 3-CD set featuring nearly 3 hours total of music from the director's cut of the video game. Although there have been a few attempts in the past by others to make a complete soundtrack for this game, I was unsatisfied one way or another with all of them. Some were ripped from the PC version (a terrible mistake as I discovered myself the audio quality is considerably worse than the PS2 original), and others had poor editing workmanship consisting of recording live gameplay and then adding in fade points. Still others missed certain track elements and/or didn't include the right balance of playing time for each element. The final beef I had was that none offered a lossless version for download. My set seeks to remedy all those complaints.

Here's the advantages my version will have:

1. Full digital-to-digital transfers. At no point was an analogue source or recording method used. I used the PS2's digital-out port for recording the raw sound data directly into the digital-in on my sound card. The ONLY track where the PC version had the superior quality sound was the "Mansion Horrors" music you hear in the "Born from a Wish" scenario. As such, I used the PC version for that specific track. The PC version was stored at 48,000 Hz, where most all of the rest are stored at a terrible 24,000 hz and compressed with ADX technology (a lossy codec that adds in severe high frequency noise). All other tracks sound vastly superior on the PS2 version of the game.

2. Professional quality mixing and editing. This means I had to create perfect loop points and transfer each individual element of each track whenever possible in order to remix them using professional editing software. The sound wave patterns were aligned with 100,000th of a second accuracy.

3. EVERY recoverable music track in the game is featured on this set. This includes tracks from the Born from a Wish scenario. By "recoverable", I mean sequences where I could reconstruct the original track via wave analysis and splicing repeated sections where voice-overs did not overlap. The most difficult example of this was the guitar track at the beginning of the game when James contemplates the letter he got from Mary. My version of this track is the most accurate and complete ever made short of getting the original source from Akira Yamaoka himself. Any other voice-over tracks that could not be recovered (i.e. not enough clean segments) are omitted. Also omitted are the jumbled melody tracks from the incorrect placement of the music boxes. They have no musical merits on their own, and so I chose not to include them.

4. Flawless reconstructions of the peace and serenity ending sequence music tracks. Prior fan-rip attempts I've listened to were shoddy and of poor editing quality.

5. Professionally edited and remixed selections from the Original Soundtrack. This involves tracks that played during voice-over sequences like when James first runs into Maria.

6. A unique numbering system that sections the tracks according to major points in the game (similar to "acts" in a story line). Tracks 1.00 and 2.00 are the only tracks with a zero listing because I wanted users to have the option of removing them from their lists without disturbing the original track numbering system on the rest of the tracks. They are chronologically listed, but "Mansion Horrors" is from the "Born from a Wish" scenario. As such I did not want to place it after everything else. The tracks tell the story in the same order in which the events happen, so I wanted to keep it that way. This was the best compromise.

6. Lossless flac format download. Finally users can download a lossless set for burning to CDs, or to make their own format conversions to mp3, ogg, and so on.

7. 300-dpi covers and CD label artwork already print sized and ready to print off. The cover inserts include the standard 1/8th inch bleed-over for trimming once printed.