I do not have, and probably will never, own a PSP, but I will still be interested in the music from such games as Crisis Core and Silent Hill Origins, depending on the answer to my primary question: What is the quality of the music on the PSP? Are soundtracks for PSP games (and even Nintendo DS games) worth listening to and/or buying?

Sound quality is quite high, as one might expect from optical media.  I would say that you can expect most OSTs for the PSP to be no better or worse than the sound for a console game.

I was curious about this as well until I heard rips for Mega Man Powered Up and Mega Man Maverick Hunter X. While I was pretty pleased with the quality of sound but the composers made me realize why the NES and SNES versions of these scores are better than these new-age counterparts.

I though Mega Man Powered Up was pretty unbearable since that "cutesy feel" infiltrated the music to match the graphical approach the game used (which was an interesting idea in theory but failed when executed) while Maverick Hunter X really attempted to mix the MMX OST with the style of the Command Mission OST.

Sadly, neither really strikes me as anything that should be pressed on disc.

The only PSP soundtrack I have is the LUMINES remixes album, and it sounds like a normal electronic album. No synth or sound limitations whatsoever (and the CDs are awesome, too).

There's no inherent reason PSP soundtracks have to be bad -- they can have streaming music like any CD game. Outrun 2: COast to Coast is pretty much the same as the OST, which was for the X-Box IIRX (well, actually CtC has more tracks, I think). I agree about the Mega Man stuff though...

=Joshua

As opposed to DS, music of many PSP games (maybe most? the only exceptions I know are FFT The Wars of Lion and Moster Kingdom but I'm sure there coule be more) just stream thier soundtracks from UMD. Thus, theoretically, there is no difference between PS2 and PSP in sound quality. However, PSP (and some of PS2 games) basically uses low bit-rate ATRAC format (.oma) which is often regarded as one of the worst  lossy audio compressions (even worse than LAME) and many people tend to claim PSP's speaker is no less bad than DS. Furthermore, I'm not sure if Crisis Core and Silent Hill will have thier music in streamed format. As you know, many SQUARE-ENIX games often still real-time execute thier music on the console's sampler in 21th century, rather than streaming pre-recorded music.

Well, thanks a lot for the information, guys. I will definitely be looking forward to when these soundtracks become available, and perhaps there are some handheld game soundtracks to purchase already (that I had not previously considered).

The best PSP soundtrack is absolutely Goku Makaimura OST (Ultimate Ghosts 'n Goblins). Orchestral, very dramatic, very high quality. Dirt cheap at Play-Asia, too. The new FF I&II remakes seem to have some great music as well, especially FFIII to VI boss battle remixes. Hope they get a soundtrack at some point.

I thought Lumines Remixes sounded strangely muffled. Doesn't sound prerecorded at all, I could expect something like this stuffed onto a DS game card. Actually, I think several DS games have better sound quality.

I, too, am wildly anticipating a soundtrack release for Crisis Core, but right now, they're only releasing the soundtrack for Before Crisis (the cellphone game? WHY? The sound chip of a cellphone isn't that great).

If I can remember my SN for Sendspace, I'll put up a sample for Crisis Core; I'll tell you right now, it's awexome; I know I've posted it here before.

Did you download it off the 'net, or do you have a physical copy of the CD? The album doesn't sound like a (typically gritty) DS soundtrack at all. Maybe it's just the abstract style of the album that sounds different to you.