burkjon: In trying to organize my music collection and reduce clutter from fan releases and bootlegs, the issue I've been often running into are these GOG.com soundtrack releases I have from several accounts. While it's true they are indeed soundtracks made available for distribution under the knowledge of the content owner, it's quite often these releases seem like slopped-together afterthoughts.

The Thief 1&2 soundtracks for example are fan creations taken from a gaming message board, and to make it worse the GOG.com release for Thief 2 is even missing the last 5 tracks of this fan release (plus the album art is a Thief 1 image). How can this amateur work by any measure be considered official? The Deus Ex soundtrack is another example, the track Oceanlab Action cuts off inappropriately at the end, and the tacked on 11 extra tracks aren't even encoded at the same bitrate. And then there's the System Shock 1 soundtrack...

Since many of these soundtracks (that weren't already commercially or otherwise available) aren't sourced from the original authors, but instead seem to come from a guy at GOG.com sitting at his desk ripping CDs, sifting through files, playing with photoshop and doing internet searches, is it safe to call these soundtracks unofficial?