Reason for Recording
The music for Disgaea is excellent, and widely varied, with pieces ranging from classical and operatic to cheesy sentai to techno, and yet there was never an official soundtrack release for the game. The Japanese Limited Edition release of the game came with a 2-CD soundtrack set, but this is nearly impossible to get your hands on; MP3s can be had, but at varying bitrates and quality. Also, the North American release of the game added 9 tracks not present on the LE soundtrack, and even that soundtrack didn't loop the music in most cases, stopping after a single play, which is particularly unsatisfying on many of the game's driving battle pieces.

Method
This soundtrack surpasses the Devil May Cry Unofficial OST as my most complicated work yet. The music of the game is all stored on the Playstation 2 disc in standard compressed audio format, which means it can be extracted with tools such as MFAudio. Unlike more easily-ripped games such as DMC or Grand Theft Auto, all the music for Disgaea is set with individual pointers, meaning that after every track in the file is finished being extracted, it stops and you have to type in and specify the memory location of the start of the next track; if you've used MFAudio, you'll know what I mean. This meant trial-and-error fiddling with the memory locations as I approached the end of the current song and then overshot into the next song and had to backtrack to its beginning. This took about two hours for all the tracks, which, while time consuming and tedious, is still faster than line-in recording as I play through the entire game, and provides a perfect digital copy of the music.

Some artifacts are almost always present with MFAudio extracts, namely clipped segments, where a single piece of data among the millions that make up a WAV file suddenly goes off the scale of the recording range, turning the music's smooth sound into a microsecond-long pop or crackle. These are easily spotted in most audio editors because the wave will suddenly streak to the outermost border of its display field. Some tracks had none of these, and a few had up to three. I removed these manually.

The music needed to be looped. This was easier in Disgaea than some other games I've worked with because the music on the game's DVD ran a few seconds into the second loop before abruptly fading out, giving me more room to work with. In addition, the strong percussion line of the game made very distinct wave patterns in CoolEdit, and isolating good cut and paste points were usually easy.

I matched up my extracted/edited tracks with MP3s of the LE soundtrack and used Mari Yamagi's translations found in Xerain's Disgaea Audio Guide at GameFAQs to title them. Many of the new tracks on the NA release were instrumental or choral versions of old songs, to remove the Japanese singing in them, so I named them as such. Of the two remaining new songs, one was "The Invasion From Within" by Tsunami Bomb, and the other was a completely new piece that plays in some demo games and on the Stellar Graveyard stage. I named this last piece "One With the Stars" based on a line that the character Flonne says before you enter that playfield for the first time.

Then, as I was working on matching up the tracks, disaster struck. I found that several of the tracks with Japanese singing in them were shorter than what appeared on the LE soundtrack. I originally thought that Atlus had trimmed the music for the NA release, but Xerain of the previously mentioned FAQ informs me this is likely not the case, as Japanese websites list both the long and short forms of the lyrics, indicating the shorter songs were actually in the JP release. Regardless of the reason, segments of up to two minutes were missing out of the middle of these songs, making the versions on the LE soundtrack clearly longer and more complete. After much searching and inquiry, the user "Frost" from the alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.video-games newsgroup was able to post the tracks I needed, which I then edited to match up the volume levels, tested for comparable quality, and incorporated into the soundtrack, completing it. A happy ending for all.