Sorry as I am not as well versed on music as I am on other elements of the game. I listened to this yesterday and noticed there were variants and differences with well known songs, I assume based on higher quality bitrate and sound quality. I understand the music in Dreamcast version was compressed as all hell, but the remasters didn’t have higher quality audio as in these renditions?
If not I wonder if this could be modded in PC version by putting this higher quality versions in game?
As far as I know, the music was originally produced with standard synthesizers and recorded as plain wave audio (as any MP3 or wav file), with high quality samples and no limits to length and with possibilities of effects, and such. Then, during the programming of the games a couple of the most important tracks were stored and played this way by the DC (albeit with more compression). But, in order to save disk space, the rest of the tracks (which were the majority) were reprogrammed to be played by the Dreamcast sound chip as something more alike to the MIDI format (with custom samples, but the composition and effects being generated by the Dreamcast in real time).
In parallel to this, some of the most important tracks were re-recorded by live orchestras for promotional reasons, and I'm not sure if some of those orchestral versions ended up in the games too (as compressed wave audio)
The songs in the Shenmue I&II Sound Collection that has been uploaded to Spotify are a mixture of the original synth compositions and some of the orchestra versions, I think. Thus, most of them sound new and sound better than the ones we are used to (the MIDI-like Dreamcast ones). In fact Shenmue III (and Shenmue Online) also uncovered those "original synth" renditions for a lot of the old tracks (and it was a wonderful thing, one of the reasons I'm glad the game exists).
The Shenmue I&II remasters didn't use any of those original synth versions. Instead, they emulated the Dreamcast/Original Xbox sound engine and played the MIDI-like renditions as best as they could. That's why early versions of the games (until patches came) had issues with distorted samples and off-key instruments in some of the tracks. Specially in Shenmue II, where the use of that MIDI-like engine was more prominent. And that's why it's not easy at all to mod the releases to integrate those wave-like tracks, since their nature is fundamentally different.
In an ideal world, all those original compositions should be released by Sega, with their proper song titles, credits to their composers and, ideally, context and order for each track. There are numerous tracks from other videogame OSTs that are accumulating more than a million plays, and I guess that must mean some money from Spotify, and promotion for the games. It should be free money for them, and a way to recoup some of the investment they did in the game.
