Quite clearly you don't.

The purpose of buying a soundtrack is to enjoy that on its own merits, rather than being just background noise in the game.

Yes, in some cases you can do some magic to extract those files or whatever. But a soundtrack is a piece of creative work on its own, and the creator may choose to include some songs which are not part of the game, or exclude some parts which are.

I have bought a 10 CD Outrun music compilation. It would take quite a while to extract those 10 CDs worth of music. Getting all that in a box with a nice Japanese booklet about all that is definitely worth the money, at least for any Outrun fan.

http://segaretro.org/OutRun_20th_Anniversary_Box

There are some other nice sountracks too which allow you to experience things in new ways.
One that I believe is OOP, but strongly recommended if available some place, is the soundtrack for Euro Mir (a roller coaster in Europa Park).
http://www.discogs.com/Project-Euro-Mir-Liftoff/release/506224


Buy them from Bandcamp or some place.
At least Disasterpeace's works are there available as FLAC.
http://music.disasterpeace.com

And almost anything from Disasterpeace is highly recommended.

I would, and have. Music is a crucial part of games for me.

Not actually true in many cases. This is usually when you'll see a soundtrack as a seperate purchase.

I've bought a number of game soundtracks (or the original album the game music came from) starting from a long time ago. In my own collection I have the following CDs:

Zuntata - The Ninjawarriors
The Gone Jackals - Bone to Pick
Guy Whitmore - Shogo: The Soundtrack (special ordered, very rare)
David Bowie - 'hours...'
65daysofstatic - No Man's Sky: Music for an Infinite Universe

I bought them because I like them, I wanted them in higher quality than the in-game music and I wanted the convenience of being able to listen to them without playing the game.

Soundtracks which were produced via synthesis (eg. SID, OPL2/3, OPN2/3 and other sound generators) were great because you don't have to deal with low sample rates, lossy compression and some of the older games had built-in sound tests. Module-based format soundtracks were nice because you could usually copy the music out from the game directory, although due to memory and storage limitations many of those suffer from using low quality samples, especially Amiga game soundtracks. Games that use redbook audio were also great because they doubled as clean, lossless soundtracks.

It's very easy to find the soundtrack, especially online, especially for free.

But I don't know the technical ways of extracting it from the game, nor do I care to learn how.
I also don't feel like searching the web for each track separately (often without metadata, etc.). I don't like having to remember whether 07.mp3 is what I'm looking for or 07-1.mp3 - I'd much rather just have the given track title to.

Even better. If you have the expansion (Immortal Throne) too, you will find around 4 hours and 44 minutes of music in the game files. The "official" soundtrack has a little over an hour (and it is only for the vanilla game without the expansion).

Here is a link to the actual complete soundtrack, which you can dig out from the game files.

Again, you can (in most cases) already do so without buying it if you have the game already.

Since when is using RAR considered magic?

And if the soundtrack you can buy contains more, additional or different versions of the songs, outtakes etc., then I would have no problem with buying those soundtracks too. The thing is, they are usually partly or hugely incomplete (see my Titan Quest or Darksiders 2 example), usually only contain tracks you already have on your hard drive with the game installed and cost a lot considering the 2 issues I have just mentioned.

I see nothing wrong with that. You got something extra (box, booklet etc.). Where I don't see much logic is paying again for something you already have or even worse, paying again for less than what you already have (but may not know about).

It is crucial for me too. I'm just saying that buying separate soundtracks seems pointless (at least to me) supposing you own the game already.

True. I guess that is one absolutely valid reason I have missed as you don't usually get a FLAC from the game files.

Getting the lossless version may be an incentive to buy the soundtrack again and I can see this being reason enough for someone to go for it.

As I have mentioned numerous times, the "technical way" in most cases is just opening files in RAR. Some companies like to hide behind custom formats but you can usually get a utility that can open and browse them (usually modding communities for the said game and such).

And I never much cared for metadata so there's that :P

FTFY.
(You answered your own rebuttal. :)

How? I still stand by my statement that most soundtracks are not worth buying if you own the game. I only agreed that IF it contains something more (lossless format, fancy box, bonus tracks etc.) than what you already have, then it might be worth buying.

Sadly, the majority of the offered soundtracks usually fall into the first category and not the second. Being incomplete is easily the greatest and most common offender (where I would still listen to the soundtracks on Youtube and not to the one I bought because it is missing 50% of the music).

Well let me tell you something, you !

I bought Zelda - Majora's Mask and Shenmue Soundtrack because I liked the games and I still don't know how to rip things from N64 cartridges. At least I never found a cartridge port on my computer. Also, internet wasn't a thing in my country in 2000 and youtube didn't exist yet. Ha ! Haven't thought of that now, have you ?

Wait...You're talking about modern digital games ? Yeah, I don't get that either.

I suppose it'd be a nice option to have if I really wanted to legally get a soundtrack without having to extract files (which could possibly go against the law of my country if I go by all those disclaimers I never read) but other than that ? I know some folks wanting to support devs and don't know how except for buying the game multiples times. So for them, buying the soundtrack is like a sugar coating.

What's worse, for me at least, is those "digital art book" or "digital comics". I like artbooks in a physical form, but digitally ? Can't see the appeal.

I was commenting on the logic of your interaction with the other contributor (Ancient-Red-Dragon), who noted that your general statement was not completely accurate ("all additional music is not worth purchasing") because there are exceptions (some music is better than that found in the game, through lossless FLAC encoding, symphony versions, and expanded and full versions of some that might only be incidental, for example), which you have subsequently admitted. :)

Horses for courses. A digital artwork can be manipulated digitally, so as to be added to a tee-shirt, say, or enlarged for a poster or even shrunk into an avatar for a forum. :)

In the future, no doubt, there will be those who lament the analogue ages past, probably lost forever, since the contemporary society will rarely bother to look outside a digital archive for anything, since anything worth keeping for posterity would obviously have already been added to the digital world by someone else. There will be scope for an analogue Indiana Jones, bravely risking paper cuts and grimy stains to selflessly add yet another lost analogue original piece of art to the digital community.

edit: Gogmerged.

Oh I'm sure creative people will always find a way to adjust things I put no value in to a point I'm interested in buying them. =)

It's true I only thought of myself, liking to rub the paper and sniffing the ink, and I'm sure digital artbooks can be as much a pleasure to some as physical ones are to me. Well, digital artbooks won't ever beat the physical Paper Craft from Witcher 2's collector edition. It's not like anything digital could ever print anything to life ;p

“No other library anywhere, for example, has a whole gallery of unwritten books - books that would have been written if the author hadn't been eaten by an alligator around chapter 1, and so on. Atlases of imaginary places. Dictionaries of illusory words. Spotter's guides to invisible things. Wild thesauri in the Lost Reading Room. A library so big that it distorts reality and has opened gateways to all other libraries, everywhere and everywhen...” -Small Gods, Terry Patchett.

Not sure it's relevant but what you said made me think about that passage :)

I haven't read any Pratchett (yet), though I respect what I have come across. As for Douglas Adams, the world is a lesser place without these creative people.

You can already see it happening, though; already some "journalists" don't leave their desk to investigate a story. Millennials need an Instagram confirmation to assure themselves of the truth of something (because seeing is always believing): "pix or it didn't happen". (I guess they believe that illusionists are pretending to pretend, and are actually really magical.)

To return to the topic, though, I would conceivably buy a sound track, despite its existence in the game. (I haven't yet.) It would need to merit the purchase, musically, to justify it, and be a reasonable price. Then again, doesn't everyone stream music nowadays?

Maybe the soundtrack is arguably better than the game it accompanies ? :D

Fyi.

https://retronauts.com/article/1036/episode-185-celebrates-the-playstations-finest-tunes

Depends. Depends. I would buy the soundtracks of the first C&C and Red Alert in 2 seconds.