That's what it was.  I was trying to remember where I heard the beginning part of State of Emergency and it's the first few bars of the Coexistence (Liberation Army Version) track...which I just realized also has a bit of The Dalmasca Estersand in it as well as a soft statement of the main theme.  It's all very subtle and the themes seem to reappear less and less as the score approaches its end, which to be fair I think has something to do with the pacing of the game itself.  Disc 3, the most popular disc, seems to have many more stand alone tracks than not.

Listening again, I found where the end climax for the Salikawood is from.  It's from the Dream to be a Sky Pirate track on Disc 1.  Kind of an odd bit of recurrence there.

My favorite rendition of the Empire theme is definitely the town theme for Archades.  On the soundtrack it starts at about 1:30 of the Empire theme track on disc two.  I like that he was able to turn such a powerful and intimidating theme into a pleasant and peaceful one.

Maybe too cleverly?  Oftentimes the main theme is only very noticeable in the battle themes.  I have fun looking for the different motifs when I listen to the music, but it probably helps a lot that I simply enjoy Sakimoto's uniquely percussive and rhythmic style.  I always have ever since the original Ogre Battle.

Indeed, Matsuo's work didn't seem up to par this time around.  Iwata, as always, does very well with darker tracks (Baroque OST, anyone?), just as with his darker tracks in FFT.  Sochen Cave Palace and The Feywood both have a dark mood going for them.

I couldn't have said it better myself. 

All training does it give you a title to boost your ego.  Music isn't necessarily about training: it's about passion.  What happened to simply enjoying a piece for its melody?  That, to me, seems to be the standard arguement of any of Uematsu's Final Fantasy scores versus Sakimoto's FFXII. 

I really don't want to get in the middle of this arguement (probably too late), but can we all just agree to disagree?

Naw, that be too easy. These boards would be boring if everyone got along and agreed on everything. You need some sparks (conflict) to keep things interesting - sparks keep the board warm.

Fair 'nuff.  *sits back and awaits anxiously*

All I have to say about the soundtrack is that the awful synth killed it.

Talking about in-game or the OST here?

I'm talking about the music as heard in the game. Is there a big difference in sound quality?

A vast difference, yes. The OST is what was apparently planned to be streamed in game before they decide to downconvert all the music to sequences for whatever reason.

Apparently too many channels used, ps2 couldn't deal with it.
Later,

Alcahest

Maybe I'm just totally confused, but wouldn't it take fewer channels and less processing power to have one pre-rendered music stream? (Excluding the channels required to play the audio used to cover the loops, of course)

I haven't played FFXII, nor do I have any plans to do so, though I did pick up the OST, so I don't know what changed, exactly.

But loading time must get longer (perhaps it might be a good reference to compare DQVIII JP version with the US version?) and more disc space will be required.

I also hear streaming requires less CPU power than hardware sequencing,  but the developers say they gave up streaming the soundtrack because of the CPU load.

What's CPU load?

Well said.

I don't see load times as being much of a factor.

I mean, sure, it's an extra second when changing environments, but how often does music change within dungeons or towns? And, when in a dungeon, it would probably be easy and cheap enough to maintain a reference to the start point of the battle theme, so streaming that should just be a matter of seeking.

As for cutscenes, I doubt the music buffering/loading time would really add much to the animation/dialogue loading time.

The only thing that might make sense is if, somehow, there just isn't enough memory to manage a pre-rendered audio buffer, but other games have done it pretty well, and the per-model polygon counts in FFXII have been reported to be reasonably low, relative to some of Square Enix's other titles, so I somehow doubt that's the problem.
Of course, I'm a compiler/interpreter-focused programmer, not a graphics library expert, so maybe that doesn't make as much of a difference as I think it does.

Disc space may be a reasonable excuse, but I'm sure Square Enix has developed or licensed some pretty efficient compression algorithms over the years, so I'm skeptical about that, too.

It's a measure of how much work a processor, like the Intel or AMD or PPC chip in the computer you're using, is doing at any given time.

While the load involved in rendering Vorbis, PCM, or MPEG audio might be entirely trivial in this age of multi-gigahertz, multi-core chips and on-soundcard acceleration, whatever all that stuff means, the PS2 has a rather modest 233mHz MIPS processor that has to compute not only the music that you're hearing, but also the events going on in the game.

Basically, when load gets high, things get slow.

(I'm not familiar enough with the PS2's component architecture to know whether the Emotion Engine has an independent processing unit or if it's linked to the MIPS core somehow, but it's entirely possible that the PS2's processor has to handle some of the video rendering, too)

Thank you Red Hamster.  Would CPU load be similar to the CPU Usage % indicator you can see in Windows Task Manager?

Huuuuuuuge difference.  The biggest I've heard between in-game quality and original synth.  It's pretty staggering.  I hated the soundtrack when I first heard it for the exact reason that I was listening to a direct game rip.  It wasn't until I heard the original soundtrack and discovered the mammoth difference in the integrity of sound that I started to fully appreciate the music.  The in-game sampling destroys every bit of wonderful layering Sakimoto's original streamlined compositions.

It's kinda' like listening to the newly remastered Vagrant Story soundtrack and the original one... only much, MUCH worse.

-Jockolantern

I referred to loading time and disc space as general disadvantages of streaming music, since you didn't seem to exclusively talk about the case of FFXII either. I hold the FFXII soundtrack was largely sequenced in the game because streaming incurred too high load, which is what the developers said in the interview.

I don't think the disc space was a major factor either, as I was aware of the FFXII rom having about 1GB of free space (presumably even with much dummy data). Even though 1 gigabyte wasn't enough space for over 100 tracks to be compressed, as you say, SE had a license of using Sony's advanced ATRAC compression that had enabled the later FFXI expansions to have streamed music. So, they could manage.

Anyways, I wish FFXII had streamed music. In this regard, I adore Yoshiharu Gotanda and Tri-ACE for releasing PS2 games that never bother us with long load times yet have streamed music.

I'm not familiar with Windows, but I would assume it's the same thing.

If you see that value go up when you do something like rip and encode a CD, then yes, it is the same thing.

If you try to do anything else when ripping and encoding a CD to whatever format you use, like Vorbis or MP3, assuming you have an older, single-core processor, you will probably find that it takes a little longer. It's that slowdown that we're discussing here, since that could lead to lower framerates or more general slowness in games.

Of course, your operating system probably has some sort of "Uh, hey. The user is trying to do something, so slow down a little" handling that will cause the encoding program to use less processing power while it addresses your request, which is something that most PS2 games probably can't do, since it would add unnecessary complexity and overhead, which would in turn increase CPU load and memory usage, but you should get the general idea.

CPU load is also referred to as 'cycles', since processors perform some number of millions or billions of calculations per second, so something that "uses more cycles" consumes more of those operations. (Just in case you've seen that terminology before)

-Edit-
I forgot to mention why slowdown won't be so obvious with a multi-core processor, and I don't want to leave you with the idea that they're a magical way to double available CPU capacity or something.

Multi-core processors, such as AMD's Athlon x2 and x4 variants, Intel's Duo and Quadro, and some of IBM's G5s (I think. Maybe every system I've used just had two chips), assign one (or more) programs to each core, with the processor balancing how much each core gets based on how demanding the programs it is running happen to be.

For example, an encoding program will need more power than an idle web browser, but when that web browser tries to load fifty pages in tabs, it will require a significantly larger amount of processing time than it did when idle, so its load will increase.

The operating system can set hints about how to manage this, but the general idea is that the encoding program's share of the processor will be cut back while the web browser finishes loading, keeping everything looking smoother, even though the processor is actually no faster than a single-core version running at the same speed.

Thank you Computer Architecture 101!  I feel like I'm back in college.

I tried to keep it simple.

In any case, the "CPU load is too high" argument doesn't make any sense to me, and if there was a gig of free space, I'm not really seeing the problem, especially since this is a late-in-life PS2 game from one of the largest companies developing for the platform.

Great info.  Thank you Red HamsterX.

If however the software or OS is optimized to work with a dual core CPU, would it then be truly faster than a single-core?

I don't want to drag this discussion too much further off-course, so I'll give you the short answer: no.

The total amount of work that can be done by the processor can't be increased by the software that's using it. The software can just use it more efficiently.

If you have other questions or require a more technical explanation, since this is no longer related to rendering FFXII's sequenced music, start a thread on the Open Disucssion board.

Hmmm, I didn't realize there was such a big difference between the music in the game and the music on the OST, not having picked up the OST and all. I might try it out then.
I hope this is not becoming some kind of trend, FFX-2 also had significantly better audio on the OST.

I don't see why they can't just use the best sound in the game, shouldn't have anything to do with channels anymore in this day and age.

Wouldn't it have something to do with the limited resources available for sample quality, etc., in the now relatively underpowered PS2?  Regardless of the number of channels or its ability to process sound, I would think the in-game music would be competing, not just with the other audio (voices, sound effects), but with graphics and AI and everything else for system resources.  And from what I've heard at least in the U.S. gaming industry, audio is one of the first things to get bumped down a notch when things are tight.

So it's no surprise, to me at least, that those making the soundtrack, now having the freedom to use whatever samples and resources they like, can produce something that sounds markedly better.