'Rings' Music on 9-Disc CD Collection

The soundtrack CDs for The Lord of the Rings movies are going the way of DVDs, featuring "extras" not heard in the theatrical versions, Britain's "Empire Magazine" reported Friday. Composer-conductor Howard Shore told the magazine that plans are in the works for a nine-disk set of music from the film, eight of them featuring the music from the theatrical versions and a ninth featuring "rare unreleased music" with commentary by Shore. Shore also indicated that he's hoping that the DVD of The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King will also include a 45-minute documentary about the making of the Rings symphony and a performance with the Montreal Symphony. Shore, who currently is performing the symphony on a world tour, told Empire: "I don't think there's ever been a full concert piece of this size devoted to one particular film or series."

Sounds interesting. We'll see.

If it comes on SACD (or DVD-A, but I prefer SACD), I may be interested. Otherwise, no sale.

hmm...wonder if it'll be similar to the "complete" FOtR score that was making the rounds on the 'net a couple years ago...

So what about the music and alternate takes used in the Extended Cuts?

Sounds awesome but I would much rather have it the regular soundtracks on DVD-Audio.

Sounds like they are releasing all of the music from all of the films. Kind of like what they did with Star Wars IV, V, VI a few years back.

I already have the regular versions of all The Lord of the Rings movies, and I like them quite a bit but they all are missing a substantial amount of music from the films. Could be interesting to hear.

Yeah, this would have to be multichannel for me to double dip. I really liked what they were first planning on doing: isolated scores on the extended dvds in dts.

So I was wondering: any word on this yet? I attempted to dig up some news regarding this but I had no luck.

Just wondering if I should hold off on buying the three CD box set and wait for this.

Thanks in advance.

I had heard that it would be out for Christmas this year, but still no word as of yet, which leads me to believe that it won't be until at least early next spring. I know work was being done on it, but I have no idea exactly what has been done or how far into the project Howard Shore is, so I wouldn't expect this probaby until March or so of 2005.

Is there a website for the tour and dates?