Publishing Rayman soundtracks

[EmielBoss]

First of all, many thanks to Droolie and co for RayTunes! It's an incredible collection of songs, and very neatly organized; I love it

I've been thinking about contacting Ubisoft about publishing "official" soundtracks of the first three Rayman games to streaming services and Bandcamp and (hopefully, sometime) on CD and vinyl, with original cover art and everything. They're incredible soundtracks, and I think they deserve a proper, widely accessible release. I love RayTunes for its completeness, but, and no offense intended, listening to the tracks back-to-back isn't the best listening experience. I'd like to curate, sequence and mix the tracks into a more cohesive and "album-like" tracklist. In order to do that, I would need:

1) Publishing rights... I guess? I have no idea how it works with Rayman's music judicially speaking. Does anyone know who owns the rights? It's not in the public domain, right? Is hosting Rayman's music on RayTunes legal? Has this community ever been contacted by Ubisoft or anything? Does anyone have an idea who I would need to contact to get publishing rights or a license or something?

2) Music files. As far as I understand, the audio files on RayTunes were ripped straight from the games (and remastered?). But isn't the game audio compressed to begin with, so that a lossless format like FLAC still contains compressed sound? Has anyone ever been in touch with any of the composers, and if so, do you have an idea whether they may still have the original masters, or stems, or project files or anything?

As you may notice, I merely have been playing with this idea for some time, but have no idea how to go about this, so I am just soliciting suggestions or advice. Also, just to be clear, I'm not trying to take away from RayTunes or anything. I'd just love to see a streamlined soundtrack for each of the mainline Rayman series on official channels. I'm also approaching this as a hobby project, and although some compensation wouldn't hurt, I don't intend to earn any money off of this (and I doubt I will).

At any rate, thank you for your time!

PS: This was originally intended as a private message to Droolie, but he has PMs disabled.

[dr_st]

Whatever you do, please don't mention RayTunes if/when contacting UbiSoft.

They're incredible soundtracks, and I think they deserve a proper, widely accessible release. I love RayTunes for its completeness, but, and no offense intended, listening to the tracks back-to-back isn't the best listening experience.

RayTunes is widely accessible, and you can download full archives of anything you want in MP3/FLAC and listen to them in whatever order you want, create playlists, add album artwork...

Is hosting Rayman's music on RayTunes legal? Has this community ever been contacted by Ubisoft or anything?

There is a whole lot of gray area going on between Ubisoft and RPC. I would rather not rock the boat, even if it means that there won't be any "official" streamed soundtrack anywhere.

[deton24]

There were some attempts on contacting with Eric Chevalier, but to no avail.
Also, seems like he might still have those tracks, because he released few of them in decent quality like a year or two ago. Maybe not necessarily he still possess masters, if they were made by Ubisoft at the time, which actually might be the case judging how his recently released tracks sound and how the rips from the games sound.
https://ericchevalier.com/jeux-video/
Theoretically Ubi still may have rights to his music, and don't care about his legacy.
The only official release of his soundtrack for Ubi, was made for DVD version of Tonic Trouble which contains 5.1 48kHz AC3 tracks, which we downmixed to 2.0 and they're on RayTunes as well. Game rips have more tracks, but in muh worse quality. Links in my sig.

Tracks for Rayman 2 and Rayman 3 on RayTunes are ripped from the games without much of interference beside arrangement of game segments.

For Rayman 3, Droolie only applied cutoff at certain frequency which doesn't exist in original in-game files, but above that frequency there wasn't so much of information most likely due to game codec level of compression, hence he did that.

FLACs for Rayman 2 and 3 are made out of lossy codecs, saved losslessly to avoid recompression.

Rayman 3 remaster was made by Ubisoft and was taken from PS3 game files.

Soundtrack for Rayman 2 in decent quality is only available in PSX version, but is abridged and RayTunes has full PS2 soundtrack instead.
I made a release of only Rayman 2 PSX tracks arranged from game segments, untouched in matter of quality, and also separate release with remasters of tracks from various platforms.
Links in my sig.

Generally there is no content id lock for this music (R2/3), and some people already uploaded all of these tracks on their channels without any strikes. E.g. RingofGenosis channel, or even RayTunes YT channel.

But about Bandcamp, or Spotify we should rather forget.

If you want all of these tracks arranged in a different way, I made it for some tracks for Rayman 3, but it's not complete, because we split with Droolie arranging that soundtrack at some point, and he eventually released his fully own arrangements and I gave up doing it further
https://yadi.sk/d/OMAqNeMgrQnJ9
https://yadi.sk/d/C1R-yE5crQnHA

Someone else not long ago rearranged the whole Rayman 2 and 3 soundtrack to sound more albumish. You might to check it too.
https://youtu.be/FTaEwWy7B9A
https://youtube.com/watch?v=oy0YDXRmhU4&feature=share7

As for Rayman 2, my arrangements also differ from Revolution rip made by Droolie, but in lots of cases it's based on abridged segments from PSX versions, but it also contains more tracks from Revolution separately remastered as well, based on Droolie's rip and his arrangement for Revolution.

Also, there were some interviews/info from creators of Rayman 3 soundtrack and their work for Ubisoft.

Ubisoft didn't care about RayTunes, or soundtracks of the old Rayman installments for like 15 years.
Late Remi Gazel at some point made a remake of his soundtrack for Rayman 1. You might want to listen it too. He was even with us here at some point. Such a loss.
https://raymanpc.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=12425

[Droolie]

For Rayman 3, Droolie only applied cutoff at certain frequency which doesn't exist in original in-game files, but above that frequency there wasn't so much of information most likely due to game codec level of compression, hence he did that.

I agree with everything else but where is this coming from? Just wondering. The Rayman 3 tracks on RayTunes were converted directly to WAV PCM from Rayman 3 HD PS3's at3 files without any sort of frequency cutoff. I wonder if you confused this with the leading & trailing silence in the samples being trimmed using the sample lengths of the PS2 version?

[deton24]

You didn't make cut it on purpose across the all files? Apologies then.

[Droolie]

You didn't make cut it on purpose across the all files? Apologies then.

No apologies necessary I was a bit confused about this first but it seems no cutoff happened at all. Because the tracks on RayTunes are looped for longer the frequency spikes - which are extremely short - aren't shown on the graph. If you take the first 1 minute and 57 seconds of the flac file you compared and take a spectrogram of that, you get the same result as your file: