History:Game Soundtrack Style Proposal

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Status: This page describes an active style guideline proposal and is not official.



Proposal number: RFC-19
Champion: BrianFreud
Current status: In development


Trac ticket # 2146

This guideline applies to soundtracks for computer or console games, including related musical releases.

Basic Guidelines

  • The ReleaseArtist should be the composer, not the performer(s), nor the publisher.
    • Where performer information is available, it should be indicated using AdvancedRelationships.
    • In cases where popular music available on other releases is used in the soundtrack, the performer should be the Artist for those tracks.
  • The ReleaseTitle should be the same as the game unless it has a distinctly different title. The title should exclude secondary information such as "Original Soundtrack," "Music from," "Inspired by," or "OST", etc. except when
    • it is clearly part of the title of the soundtrack and
    • it is required to distinguish the release from other variations of the soundtrack.

When "O.S.T." or similar abbreviations are to be retained in titles, the preference is to expand abbreviations to their full wording to avoid ambiguity and to help with translation efforts at a later time. Secondary information that is to be excluded will mostly look like a sub-title as per SubTitleStyle. "Soundtrack" is a single word, and should never be spelt out as "Sound Track" without good reason. For example, the OST of FFVII is called "Final Fantasy VII: Original Sound Track" whereas the OST of FFVIII is called "Final Fantasy VIII: Original Soundtrack", as clearly indicated on the packaging.

  • The ReleaseAttribute for actual game CDs which have both data and audio tracks should be Other; for all others, including game rips, it should be Soundtrack.
  • The ReleaseStatus for game rips should not be Official - they may or may not be Bootleg.

Examples

Discussion

The guidelines above are a starting point; there was a lot of discussion about release attributes, titles and extra title information on the MailingList and I honestly don't remember how it was left. @alex