Reason for Recording
No amount of quality in the production, however, could lead to anything special being released for Astal. The game's biggest success, marginal as it is, was that unlike many other JP Saturn games, this one got a North American release. But that was it. No art books, no soundtrack--It's frankly surprising that the two vocal tracks in the game (removed from the NA release) were even put on a CD compilation in Sega in 1997. I liked the music enough to record a poor version for myself, but knew that others also liked it, so I made it an actual UOST.

Method
Two versions of this soundtrack have been released. The original was released in 1997 and used what was at the time the height of my recording and editing prowess; that is to say it's primitive. I used a Soundblaster 16 card and had the sound cables channeled through an external mixer into the computer, which diluted the sound before it even hit the audio program. The original version has been made available for download on several sites, including DarkForest Software and SegaXtreme.

I decided in November of 2004 to remaster the original soundtrack, to capture maximum quality of the music. This was done to coincide with the November 22 2004 Sega Saturn 10th Anniversary celebration on alt.binary.sounds.mp3.video-games. The music for Astal is stored on the game disc in .P16 files. I wrestled with these for several days, but was unable to get them to import correctly into an audio editing program (they read as 22khz stereo 16-bit Motorola PCM, but come with a strange warble that I could find no way of removing.)

Instead, I re-recorded each track in the game using a Soundblaster Audigy breakout box, with good quality cables going directly into the device from the Saturn; unlike the previous recording, I also had all other electrical appliances (including television) off to reduce interference. While searching for images to use on the soundtrack covers I was making (side note: there is an extreme dearth of Astal images out there), I discovered that two vocal tracks had actually been eliminated from the North American release, which I had not known 7 years earlier. After some searching and requests on Soundtrack Central I was able to obtain the tracks from a user named Brandon who owned the Sega Vocal Entertainment soundtrack.

As far as recording the music goes, Astal is relatively straightforward. The only trick needed here (apart from a debug code to unlock some tracks in the sound test) was the Saturn spin-down method--waiting for the Saturn's CD-ROM drive to stop spinning after you're done accessing something. This is because each track played in the sound test is preceded by a sound effects chime, which would run into the music. By waiting for the drive spin-down, the drive would have to start spinning again before the music could play, causing a silent gap to appear between the chime and the music.

One thing I could not accomplish was a clean recording of the music that plays in the interludes between some stages. Even during the sound test, this music plays with character vocals speaking over it, and I couldn't find any way to remove the voices that didn't destroy the feel of the music as well; so these tracks were not included.

If the front of the CD cover looks rather plain, it's because I just couldn't lay my hands on any images to use--there's very little on the web for Astal, and even the manual with the game is in black and white. I managed to decrypt the blue background with insignia (and a file containing the game's Logo) from the game CD and used it to form the front cover. The back cover's track list placement probably seems a bit weird, but it was unavoidable--the image used on the back of the CD was also decrypted from the game disc, and appears during the ending credits. But in the game, it starts with the section in the upper-left of the cover (with the moon appearing in the upper-right corner of the game screen), scrolls down, and when it hits bottom, begins scrolling to the right--the black area in the cover is there because there was no picture to include there. This was actually pieced together from two separate decrypted files on the game disc.