This might be the case with some games (with some kind of reactive sound mixing), but not in this example. All the various game-rips for this track sound exactly the same as the official soundtrack release, albeit with different start and end points and sometimes longer or shorter/more loops. How many times the ripper lets music loop is probably the most common difference when it comes to game-rip tracks.
I’ve voted no on the your edits to split these out - if we find a consensus or the style lead makes a call I’ll of course be happy to vote accordingly. But at this stage I don’t see the benefit.
The way it currently is:
- The releases and artist are easy to browse and find
- We are grouping identical (the only exception is the ‘ripper’, if known) recording information/relationships
- Releaser intent is respected (these all intend to represent the same music, though some are ‘expanded’)
I’m not sure what the benefits are of splitting these, apart from technicalities/semantics. Perhaps it helps you with tagging or browsing the albums in a way I don’t understand.
I guess my broad question is, if I push for the style lead to make a call on this, and they decide that game-rips and official soundtracks are to be grouped (with exceptions, of course), would this be terrible for you and ruin your editing, browsing, tagging or workflow in some way? You must be one of the biggest editors of VGM on the site and I’m keen to get some insight.