Wow! I see that GOG has suddenly updated the Heroes of Might and Magic setup from 68 MB to 354 MB! This can only mean that they have replaced the ultra-low quality audio with a rip of the CD quality audio! I've been wanting to play HOMM 1 lately but I haven't been able to since I couldn't find my old CD and the music\sound quality of the old GOG version was horrible. I love my GOG!

I noticed that too. Is this is true that would be awesome! Today is a banner day for classic releases, the Settlers 2 and Balls of Steel. Great stuff.

While I may be ragging on them for the state of the Larry collection(i.e. ripping out the SVGA files) they do their best to fix the quality of their releases which is always nice to see. Such as what they did for Heroes and most recently for Police Quest when they added the missing orginal EGA/AGI engined version of Police Quest 1 to the pack.

I'm pretty sure it has something to do with this sticky in the Heroes of Might and Magic forum.

I would be cool to fix Heroes 2, the broken sound for Dimension Door or Town Portal.

As I said in that thread: "Brilliant! Send a thanks to the GOG team for continuing to work on games even after they're released. :)"

I've heard that sound, it is atrocious! You can fix that by replacing the Dosbox version that is included with the game with a newer one. One thing I hope they get around to is getting a better rip of the CD audio in HoMM 2. I'm not totally sure about this (as I still use the CD version) but as far as I can remember the quality of the MP3's used was low (112 or 128kbps) and there were some pops and cracks like what you get from a bad CD rip. The HoMM 2 soundtrack is a good contender for the number 1 spot for video game soundtracks so a more dignified treatment would be nice. Even better would be if they also included the soundtrack for the Prize of Loyalty expansion disc. The latter is a very popular demand. And you know, the GOG crew is just that kind of nice people that it wouldn't surprise me if they did that :-)

And now over to the opposite situation. HoMM 3 has really nice music too, although with a very different approach to Classical music. Compared to that of HoMM 2 it is closer to later types of Classical like Debussy and Holst as well as the Film music composers they influenced. The mp3 files that comes with HoMM 3 are just 128 kbs but they are in stereo and a sample rate of 44100. For some unknown reason however, in-game, they are played in mono at a sample rate of 22050. The difference is easy to hear, just try to play one of the mp3 files with your music player.
Why the game was released this way I don't know. If it was an error you would think it would have been discovered and fixed later in a patch.

Recently I came across this thread were somebody apparently has just changed a few parameters in a dll file and now HoMM3 can play it's music in stereo:
http://www.celestialheavens.com/forums//viewtopic.php?t=8031&start=0&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=

Be warned however that although the fix worked as it was supposed to, my outdated Antivirus program picked up nothing, and I noticed nothing fishy with my computer after I installed it, it could potentially be infected with some unknown trojan. The fix seems to not very well known in the HoMM3 community, so the potential for some hidden payload is greater than with a well used fix. In the thread there actually was mentioned a couple of warnings from anti-virus programs. Whether that was just false positives or something else remains unknown but since the fix is over two years old there has at least been some time for someone to discover bad code. This mp3 fix has supposedly also been incorporated into the HD mod, so if you have a recent version of it you also have this.

The GOG version of HoMM2 originally used redbook audio (mounted CD image). At some point they changed it to use .ogg (I think) instead. I never understood why.

I hope GOG reads these two topics, restoring the sound in this game would be wonderful as it is a masterpiece of game music.

Aah, OGG it was. I don't really mind GOG using OGG. OGG on GOG is fine with me, but such nice music deserves a higher bitrate and a good rip. But yeah, I wonder why they changed their method of playing off the music. As far as I know other releases use CD images through DosBox without problems? Or perhaps there is some advantage to using OGG\MP3 files over CD images with DosBox?

It deserves a CD image with the original redbook audio, like it used to be ;-)

Yeah, fortunately I still have the image from the original GOG release. I think I may even have an image of the original expansion disc lying around somewhere on my harddrive, so I can swap that in to get the expansion music.