BUY_SHEET.md

music/exemplars/BUY_SHEET.md

EXEMPLAR BUY SHEET — the rung-1 measurement rig

Assembled 2026-08-05 from seven verified research lanes in build/audio/exemplars/buy/*.json, against

the 182-row corpus in build/audio/exemplars/CORPUS.json.

Consumer: docs/proposals/music/MASTERPIECE_PROGRAM.md rung 1 — the measurement rig. Files land at

D:/audio/exemplars/. Legal posture is unchanged and binding: analysis for understanding only, the bytes

are never model input, nothing is redistributed.

Organised BY STOREFRONT, because checkout happens once per store.

PHONE-FIRST PUBLISH (the standing law: a board is not done until it is phone-viewable):

https://claude.ai/code/artifact/f742194a-d04b-4b13-ad5d-0bb3bdcd8493

That page is generated from this file plus buy_sheet.html; it carries the same rows with a running

starter-ten total that remembers what has been bought.

---

TOTAL COST

• STARTER TEN (buy tonight, ten tracks, all seven purpose classes): $64.59

— of which $44.61 is verified to the cent and $19.98 is an estimate across two Apple albums

whose purchase price Apple's web player does not render to a fetcher. Real range $64.59 – $84.59.

• EVERYTHING CLASS A (every route that actually puts a file on disk, best route per album, 88 albums):

$1,065.08 — of which $945.20 is verified to the cent and $119.88 is estimated across the

twelve Apple albums with unrendered prices.

Movers on the Class-A number, all real:

• Minus about $40 if The Witcher 3 is already in the GOG library. Its soundtrack is a free extra there

and it carries four corpus rows.

• Minus about $28.70 if Devil May Cry 5 is NOT owned — the $29.99 Steam FLAC route needs the base game,

so the honest fallback is the $1.29 Apple single for Devil Trigger.

• Minus $17.99 if ELDEN RING Digital Deluxe is in the Steam library (app 1896300 exports all 67 tracks).
• PLUS about $21 if the Steam Square Enix half is bought after 2026-08-11 — a 10 percent publisher promo

was live on 2026-08-05 and ends that day.

• Class B, C and D are not in that number. Physical/import adds roughly $190 for the four discs worth

buying now, and the used-import hunt is open-ended and should be bought on price, never on urgency.

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THE STARTER TEN — buy tonight

Ten tracks, all seven purpose classes, chosen for maximum GRAMMAR spread rather than fame, weighted to

the cheapest DRM-free routes, with four from the 90s/2000s console-nostalgia core Josh asked for.

Substitution note, stated up front: the Nintendo first-party cues at the heart of that ask — Gerudo

Valley, Stickerbush Symphony, Dire Dire Docks, Song of Healing — have NO class-A route anywhere. Nintendo

sells nothing digitally in the West and the 1990s Pony Canyon discs are 25-year-out-of-print imports. So

the four core slots are filled by same-era, same-platform, purchasable equivalents, marked CORE below.

STARTER TEN TOTAL: $64.59 ($44.61 verified, $19.98 estimated on rows 1 and 6).

Class coverage: TITLE_CHARACTER 1 · EXPLORATION 2 · BATTLE 2 · BOSS 2 · MELANCHOLIC 1 · TENSION 1 ·

CREDITS_TRIUMPH 1. All seven represented. The three doubled classes are the three where the archetype

space is widest, and each double is deliberately a pair of opposite poles (chip vs ambient, chip vs FM,

chip vs live orchestra) so the first formula cards measure a RANGE and not a house style.

The six checkouts that is, in order

• Valve, free — https://www.thinkwithportals.com/music.php — grab the complete 64-track zip. $0.00.
• Bandcamp, C418 — Minecraft Volume Alpha, take the FLAC. $6.00.
• Bandcamp, Data Discs — Streets of Rage 2 (Remastered), take the 24-bit/96kHz. $7.60.
• iTunes, singles — The Best Is Yet To Come and Snake Eater off Metal Gear Solid Vocal Tracks. $2.58.
• iTunes, albums — Bloodborne The Old Hunters EP $3.45, Pokemon Diamond & Pearl $9.99, Tales of Phantasia

SFC Version $14.99. $28.43.

• iTunes, the two unpriced ones — Chrono Trigger DS OST and Final Fantasy VI 1994 original. Open both in

the Apple Music app for Windows to see the real price before buying; budget $19.98.

Free riders — what those seven purchases ALSO put on disk at no extra cost

• Chrono Trigger DS OST carries six MORE corpus rows: EX_007 Frog's Theme, EX_022 Wind Scene, EX_033

Corridors of Time, EX_102 Magus Castle, EX_113 To Good Friends, EX_162 Schala's Theme. Seven rows across

four classes for one album price — the single highest-yield purchase on this whole sheet.

• Final Fantasy VI 1994 carries three more: EX_032 Terra's Theme, EX_161 Aria di Mezzo Carattere,

EX_179 Ending Theme. Four rows, three classes.

• Pokemon Diamond & Pearl carries EX_053 Cynthia Battle Theme, plus 147 other files.
• Metal Gear Solid Vocal Tracks pairs each vocal with four re-arrangements (Jazz Lounge, Trip-Hop, Tango,

Tender) — one melody in five instrumentation states, a free arrangement-delta test set, if the album is

bought at $14.99 instead of the two singles at $2.58.

• Bloodborne The Old Hunters EP also lands Lady Maria and Orphan of Kos.

So the ten tracks arrive as sixteen corpus rows plus roughly 400 files.

Runner-up, if an eleventh purchase is wanted

UNDERTALE Soundtrack, Bandcamp, $9.99 in FLAC — three corpus rows in three different classes on one

album (EX_045 MEGALOVANIA, EX_072 Hopes and Dreams, EX_086 Undertale). Best raw value on the sheet. It is

out of the ten only because Toby Fox's grammar is deliberate chiptune pastiche and the SNES rows already

carry the real thing.

---

BY STOREFRONT

Legend. Route A = DRM-free digital purchase, file on disk. B = physical, file after ripping. C = streaming

only, no file. D = no legitimate route. "search — deep link unverified" means the lane could not fetch a

product page and refused to fabricate one; the link goes to the store's own search with the exact query.

iTunes Store (US) — 39 albums

Format on every row: 256 kbps AAC (.m4a), DRM-free since 2009. Buy from the Apple Music app for Windows

(its iTunes Store section), or append ?app=itunes to any album URL. Files land in the Apple Music media

folder; copy to D:/audio/exemplars/.

iTunes Store (JAPAN) — 3 albums, region-locked

These need an Apple account with a Japanese billing region funded by a JP gift card. A US card is

rejected. Do all three in one sitting if the detour is made at all.

Steam — 12 albums

Steam soundtracks download as loose files into steamapps\music\<album>\ and play outside Steam. A 10

percent SQUARE ENIX MUSIC promo was live 2026-08-05 and ends 2026-08-11; promo prices shown, list in

brackets. No Steam page states its audio format; FF VIII lists 498 MB for 73 tracks, consistent with MP3

~320k, not FLAC. Treat Steam as lossy-clean. The Capcom rows DO state FLAC 16-bit.

Qobuz (US) — 11 albums, LOSSLESS

The only lossless digital storefront on this sheet with real breadth. Qobuz states on every page that

downloaded files belong to the buyer without usage limit. FLAC / ALAC / WAV / AIFF at download.

Bandcamp — 9 albums, mostly composer-direct and mostly FLAC

The gold route wherever it exists: FLAC / WAV / 24-bit, DRM-free, instant.

GOG — 2 titles

Valve, direct and free

CDJapan — 2 discs, both in stock, both worth buying

Black Screen Records — 1 disc

Fangamer — 2 products, both instant FLAC

nin-nin-game — 1 disc

Laced Records — 2 products, decide deliberately

Light in the Attic — 1 product, out of stock

iam8bit — 1 product, not recommended

Used market and imports — 24 targets, all SEARCH links

Every link in this section is a store SEARCH with the exact query, deliberately, because eBay, Discogs

and VGMdb return HTTP 403 to fetchers and used-CD inventory rotates too fast for any deep link to

survive. No product URL here was invented. Everything below is class B: it yields a file after ripping.

None of it is time-critical — none of these will ever be reprinted, so buy on price, not on urgency. Use a

Yahoo Auctions proxy (Buyee, ZenMarket) for the Japan-only discs.

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STREAMING ONLY — what he would be paying for, and why it does not serve the rig

The rig reads audio FILES from D:/audio/exemplars/ and computes lane interlap matrices, drop/raise

event magnitudes, tempo as a function of time, complexity step maps and harmonic/instrumentation

pairings. A stream yields no decodable file, no stable byte-identical reference across runs, and no

offline batch. There is no version of "subscribe instead" that produces a formula card. These are worth

exactly one thing: AUDITION — confirming a cue's identity, or confirming you are hunting the right

pressing before you spend money on a used import.

---

NOT OBTAINABLE — 17 corpus rows, each with its substitute

Said plainly rather than dressed up. Every row below has no legitimate route to the ORIGINAL audio at any

price today. The honest posture is to buy the named substitute where one exists, card it as SUBSTITUTED

or ARRANGEMENT-TIER on the formula card, and let the rig DECLARE the rest as ABSENT rather than measure a

cover and call it the source.

Two more rows are not unobtainable but are DATA DEFECTS, listed here so they are not mistaken for holes:

• EX_076 "Born of a Wish" (Silent Hill 2) is not an official track title. It is the name of the Maria

sub-scenario in Restless Dreams. Verified against the 30-track 2001 album, the 93-track 2024 album, and

an iTunes song search that returned nine results, all covers. Buy the $11.99 album and re-key the row —

"Betrayal", "Promise (Reprise)" and "Theme of Laura" are the obvious candidates.

• EX_116 "Way in the Ghost" (Transistor) is not a track on either Supergiant release — both full

tracklists were fetched and neither contains "Ghost" or "Way". The credits cue is "We All Become",

runner-up "Paper Boats". Buying the album makes the question moot.

Also unresolved, from the same sweep: EX_014's "Opening Theme" (Tekken 2) has no matching title on the

only official release; EX_020 "Grizzly Hills" is released as "Totems of the Grizzlemaw"; EX_021 is

"Stormwind"; EX_035 is "Aloy's Theme (Part 1 - Motherland)"; EX_184 is "Rising Sun"; EX_120 is "Dracula

Castle"; EX_054 credits Iris, who is champion in Black 2 & White 2 rather than Black & White; EX_094 is

credited to Christophe Héral AND Billy Martin. None of these cost money — they cost a wrong file name in

the rig if nobody normalises them.

---

ALREADY OWNED? — check these libraries before spending anything

Fourteen cases where the audio may already be paid for. Working through this list costs about fifteen

minutes and could remove roughly $100 from the Class-A total.

---

DO NOT BUY — traps that outrank the real thing in store search

• The impostor Banjo-Kazooie Bandcamp page selling a 52-track album for $9 under a near-identical artist

name. It carries an AI-written review in its credits field and a fabricated 2025 release date for a 1998

score; the real grantkirkhope.bandcamp.com lists twelve albums and zero Banjo, Perfect Dark or GoldenEye

content. Rare and Microsoft own this music. Deliberately not linked here.

• Super Mario RPG Original Soundtrack, CDJapan SQEX-11150 and the €29 Black Screen Records CD — 2023

REMAKE arrangements only. Only the 4-disc Sound Box SQEX-11154 has the 1996 SNES recordings.

• Everything on Black Screen Records' Nintendo shelf that says Recreated, Resynthesized, Remixed,

Demastered or LoFi — Donkey Kong Country "Recreated" (€139), Super Metroid "Recreated" (€34), "From the

Depths of Zebes", "All-Range Mode (Star Fox 64 Remixed)", "Power Star - Mario 64 Demastered", "Timeline

Divergence". All licensed FAN re-performances. Useless as measurement exemplars of the original grammar.

• Steam's FINAL FANTASY IV / V / VI soundtracks — PIXEL REMASTER re-recordings, not the SNES masters.

Re-recording changes exactly the instrumentation and lane quantities the rig measures.

• FINAL FANTASY IX Original Soundtrack PLUS ($8.09) — a supplement disc. Vamo' Alla Flamenco and Rose of

May are on the $21.59 MAIN album.

• NieR Replicant ver.1.22474487139… (app 3514150) — the 2021 remake album, not the 2010 Gestalt & Replicant

OST that carries Ashes of Dreams.

• "Metal Gear Solid (Original Game Score)" by Gigi Meroni — a third-party re-recording that tops every

search for the 1998 Konami album.

• "Metal Gear Solid Music Collection" and "Castlevania: Symphony of the Night Collection" by Goodknight

Productions; every "Super Castlevania IV" album on the US store; the "Silent Hill (The Headphones)"

series by Avith Ortega — all covers.

• "ネバー・モア-『ペルソナ4』輪廻転生-" (id 1546589363) — the 2012 Persona 4 ARRANGE album, not the original cue.
• "Myth: The Xenogears Orchestral Album" (2011) — an arranged re-recording.
• "Conspiravision: Deus Ex Remixed" — a 2020 remix record, not the 2000 score.
• "F-Zero X Guitar Arrange Edition" (1999) — a re-performance.
• The 2026 Super Mario Galaxy MOVIE soundtrack — a film score, different music entirely.
• Age of Empires II DE Soundtrack ($9.99) — carries zero corpus rows and is 192 kbps MP3, the weakest

format anywhere on this sheet.

---

PROVENANCE

Seven research lanes, all fetched live 2026-08-05, at build/audio/exemplars/buy/:

nintendo.json · square_enix.json · western_aaa.json · atlus_konami_capcom.json ·

namco_sega_fromsoft.json · rare_ps1_misc.json · indie_drm_free.json.

Every URL promoted into this sheet as a direct link was marked verified by its lane. Every route a lane

could not verify appears in the used-market section or the streaming section as a store SEARCH with the

exact query, labelled "search — deep link unverified". No product URL on this sheet was constructed by

guessing. Amazon returns HTTP 500, and eBay, Discogs and VGMdb return HTTP 403, to every automated

fetcher — which is why those stores appear only as searches, and why their prices are ranges rather than

figures.

The one structural finding worth carrying forward: the corpus's Konami chiptune rows and its Nintendo

first-party rows are the only genuinely closed classes. Square Enix opened a first-party Steam

storefront, Capcom sells FLAC soundtrack DLC, Bandai Namco Game Music is actively reissuing its whole

back catalogue, SEGA rescued Panzer Dragoon Saga from three-figure collector pricing, and composers sell

direct on Bandcamp. Five years ago most of this sheet would have been a Japanese import hunt.

---

THE FIRST-BUY PROOF PROTOCOL (Josh's ruling 2026-08-05, rig armed 2026-08-06)

The ruling: buy EVERYTHING Class A — but the first buy gets tested before the rest, so a decode

problem costs $1.29 and not $1,065. The rig (harness/music_gen/acquire_exemplar.py, canon commit

19e35636) is armed: its positive control synthesizes a known signal, pushes it through the same

AAC path an iTunes file takes, and refuses to proof anything if it cannot recover the planted answer.

• Step 0, zero-cost, optional: the Valve Portal companion soundtrack is a free public download —

drop it in D:/audio/exemplars/ and the rig proves itself on real bytes before a cent is spent.

• Step 1: buy ONE cheap iTunes single (any $1.29-class row on this sheet — iTunes is roughly half

of Class A, and purchase-DRM is THE untested risk). In the Apple Music app: purchase, then

"download all". Drop the files into D:/audio/exemplars/ exactly as the store dumps them — no

renaming, no foldering.

• Step 2, from C:\dev\humanity-forgotten, one command:

D:\audio\rig\venv\Scripts\python.exe harness\music_gen\acquire_exemplar.py --scan

• Step 3: exit 0 means decoded, measured, formula-carded, and the corpus row flipped

MISSING → ACQUIRED — buy the rest in this sheet's per-store order. Any other exit means STOP:

the rig prints the reason (control failure / unmatched-with-candidates / DRM-or-undecodable)

and nothing is guessed.

• Steam's twelve rows need Steam installed on the box first. The two time-sensitive physical

items — the Chrono Trigger Sound Box (CDJapan showed 2 copies) and the Shadow of the Colossus

disc (last-items) — buy on availability; the LG BD-RE at F: rips them into the same drop folder.

Generated by harness/site/structure_site.py — the URL path is the repo path. review root