The rare Sonic Adventure Music Experience Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 albums joined the pantheon of community preservation efforts after it was uncovered and released to the public in high quality for the first time.
A group that has asked Tails’ Channel to be named “S.A.M.E. Squad” released clean, lossless rips of both albums to the public, marking the first time the general populace ever got to listen to these albums in full, as they were intended.
After scouring the internet and enduring years of finding individuals who owned the CDs, the “S.A.M.E. Squad” told Tails’ Channel that they managed to acquire and preserve archival copies of these rare albums. The albums featured interpretations of tracks such as “Windy and Ripply”, “This Way Out”, “Boss: CHAO ver. 6”, “Be Cool, Be Wild, Be Groovy”, among several others.
The Sonic Adventure Music Experience proper is a band comprised of Jun Senoue on guitars, Takeshi Taneda on bass, and Act. on drums. They performed several shows throughout 2016 to 2019, though most notable were the two shows in Japan in which they handed out copies of albums containing brand-new recordings of notable Sonic Adventure and Sonic Adventure 2 songs. They handed out Sonic Adventure Music Experience Vol. 1 during their 2 April 2016 show in Tokyo, Japan, and Sonic Adventure Music Experience Vol. 2 during their 9 January 2017 show in Osaka, Japan.
Since their release, they’ve been an enigma in terms of audible availability to those who didn’t own copies of the albums. S.A.M.E. Vol. 1 was the only one ever available to hear online, but it was very low quality – encoded at 128kbps, a less than ideal bitrate for music – as it was sourced from YouTube videos. On the contrary, Vol. 2 was never uploaded online, much to the chagrin of Sonic music enthusiasts.
The uncovering of the two albums joined the discovery of the beta Windy Valley from Sonic Adventure, the Sonic Heroes GameCube E3 demo, and the v0.02 prototype of Sonic CD on the pedestal of rare community findings.
The .FLAC copies of Sonic Adventure Music Experience Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 can be accessed on the Internet Archive.
