Reminds me of when I ripped the Ace Combat 4 and Ace Combat 5 soundtracks off the game DVDs. I forget the details, but basically it was possible to stick the DVD in a computer and play part it as ADPCM data and record it. The result was one big recording consisting of all the music tracks separated by short bursts of very loud static. The static was presumably the track metadata, which I didn't know how to decode, but it sure made it easy enough to find the track boundaries. In AC4, each mission's music was already looped out to the length of the mission (e.g. if the mission timer was 13 minutes, then the song was looped as many times as needed to go over 13 minutes), so I just had to find approximately where the first or second loop ended and fade it out after that to make an appropriate-length "album" version of the track.
For AC5, there were a lot more missions, so I guess they didn't have the disc space to do this and had to get creative. Instead, each track cut off exactly at the loop point, so in order to make it loop and fade, I had to find the point near the beginning that it was meant to loop back to, copy the track, and manually line up that point with the end of the track and do a short cross-fade to hide the seam. Then I could fade it out a few seconds into the second loop to complete the "album" version.
I believe at some point they released official OST albums for both games, but a few special tracks were missing from both, so my versions are slightly more complete. (Specifically, the AC4 OST was missing the version of the hangar music for the final mission that included someone giving a speech over the loudspeaker, while AC5 was missing the track of everyone singing together over the radio in the penultimate mission.)
For AC5, there were a lot more missions, so I guess they didn't have the disc space to do this and had to get creative. Instead, each track cut off exactly at the loop point, so in order to make it loop and fade, I had to find the point near the beginning that it was meant to loop back to, copy the track, and manually line up that point with the end of the track and do a short cross-fade to hide the seam. Then I could fade it out a few seconds into the second loop to complete the "album" version.
I believe at some point they released official OST albums for both games, but a few special tracks were missing from both, so my versions are slightly more complete. (Specifically, the AC4 OST was missing the version of the hangar music for the final mission that included someone giving a speech over the loudspeaker, while AC5 was missing the track of everyone singing together over the radio in the penultimate mission.)