I'm a big fan of Final Fantasy music, and at this point, I have most of the official releases I'm interested in.  As a result, I'm ramping up my search for quality doujin albums.

In doing this, VGMDB has been a great resource for finding albums.  However, many doujin albums listed there have no reviews, and with no way to preview the music, it's hard to know what's good.  Also, the people in VGMDB forums seem more interested in track names specifics than in the music itself

This being the case, I'd love to hear any FF doujin recommendations you all have.  In general, I'm partial toward acoustic and MIDI-style arrangements, and less toward hard rock types of music.  Just to give you an idea of what's already on my radar (and what I like), there's:

EtlanZ
Dangerous Mezashi Cat
mintjam
Taylor Davis
Daniel Brown
Magical Trick Society
TAM ("FF Violin" albums)
TPR ("Melancholy Tribute" albums)

and stuff I like less includes:

OCRemix (not enough cohesiveness of tracks)
Crow's Claw (too much toward the rock end of things)

Any thoughts or recommendations?

Try Preludio. It's hard rock, but it's not an endless wall of distorted guitars like the Crow's Claw stuff. There's some real thought put into the arrangements.

This album is essential.

It's AT Zanarkand, not TO Zanarkand goddammit

I second Goldfish's choice. Preludio is awesome.
It's hard rock, yes, but it's really good and better than a lot of the official stuff.

Sorry, but I just had to laugh at how you phrased this...

...however, on a serious note they are outside of the Zanarkand ruins when this plays in the intro so, point taken.

If you like EDM remixes, I recommend Triple Triad and its expansion.

Third recommendation for Preludio here. Arguably the best arranged Final Fantasy album ever, doujin or otherwise.

For softer stuff, try Azu Piano. I really liked his Piano Fantasy. Here's a demo.

Are looking to buy or download? That will limit your selections. These days Square isn't covered as regularly as it used to be, gotta make room for that Touhou/Kancolle insanity, so you're going to be limited to a lot of stuff released in the early 2000s or earlier.

That said, stuff that fits the taste you listed:
* Anything by JM's home
* Zephyr Violin  series; not specifically FF, but by TAM and daijin
*Serenade's shifting horizon and nostalgic memories
* Another vote for Piano Fantasy by Azu
* Unknown Dimensions' string albums

Thanks very much for the suggestions everyone.  For those of these I haven't heard of, I'll check them out.

Regarding buy vs download: I am looking to buy, as I have a good stereo system and much prefer lossless music.  YJA has been a good source, though some albums seem impossible to find (the FF Strings albums being some of them).

You'll probably have better luck looking for doujin albums using suruga-ya over yahoo.

It can be a gamble as to the condition of the item you're getting because the shop only displays a small thumbnail image and price. Usually the lower the price the worse condition it's in, but that's not always the case. I've also been surprised to get some gem mint and brand new sealed albums for pennies this way. If you're all about the music as opposed to a uber-completionist collector it can be a gold mine worth checking out.

Thanks all for the suggestions; much appreciated.  Now it's just a matter of finding this stuff   The Azu Piano albums don't seem that common, for example.

Zorbfish, thanks for the suggestion about suraga-ya.  I placed my first order there yesterday, and they had a lot of stuff I've been looking for (both doujin and official releases).

I do also find YJA to be a really good source of doujin albums.  The downside is that searches don't let you filter by official vs. doujin release, so you have to wade through everything to find the doujin stuff.

Yep. I keep these bookmarked instead: doujin and arrange. But like you said, you still have to parse through that yourself.

A year or two back I tried building a bot to watch for specific items I was looking for on yahoo japan but gave up after I found that there is no way to return a list of newly opened auctions using its web api.

I tend to avoid YJA altogether, unless I can't find it elsewhere, because more often than not now they're ridiculously overpriced.

Example: This came out not even a year ago for only 100 yen and it's still in print.