Background Music Downloads Without the Headache
Where The Saints Have Trod is a website that lets you search for soundtracks from games, movies, and other media, then download the music directly. It pulls from YouTube and converts the audio to MP3 or other formats. That's really the whole thing. I used it constantly while making machinima shorts back in 2018, and it still works, though the site has gotten slower and more ad-heavy over the years. Go to the site. Type whatever you're looking for in the search bar. It usually shows results sorted by relevance, but honestly the sorting isn't great and sometimes random uploads show up above the actual soundtrack. Click the track you want, and you'll get a page with a play button and download options. Pick your format. MP3 at 192 kbps is the default and fine for most uses. If you need higher quality, look for the 320 kbps option, though not every track has it available. I ran into a problem last year when trying to download the Undertale soundtrack. The site kept returning corrupted files, maybe four out of ten tracks came through fine and the rest were just static or half a second of audio. What I found works is to check the video length on the results page before downloading. If the timestamp looks way shorter than the actual song, skip it. Those are usually truncated uploads or bots posting placeholder clips. The good ones have timestamps that match the real track length.
There's also a browser extension people talk about but the site doesn't officially offer one. I wouldn't bother installing random extensions claiming to be for this. There was a period where the site got flooded with malicious clones and it took me about three weeks to figure out which URL was still the real one. Right now the main domain is wherethesaintshavetrod.com and it appears to be the legitimate site, but the admins don't announce anything when they switch. Just make sure you're not on a redirect.
What You Should Know Before You Start
The quality of downloads depends entirely on what's available on YouTube. If someone uploaded a low-bitrate rip of a soundtrack, that's what you're going to get. The site doesn't have a master library. It's scraping what users have already posted. This means rare or obscure tracks sometimes don't exist at all, and the ones that do exist might be recordings of a screen rather than the actual audio file. Another thing nobody warns you about is the legal gray area. The music belongs to the composers and publishers. Using downloaded tracks for anything public, like a YouTube video or a stream, can and will get you flagged. I had a video demonetized because I used a three-second clip from a Final Fantasy OST I'd grabbed off this site. It didn't matter that I gave credit. The content ID system caught it anyway. If you're just using it privately or for non-public projects, you're probably fine. If you're publishing anything, treat these downloads as reference material and look into licensed alternatives. The site also isn't particularly friendly to mobile browsers. The ads resize weirdly and I've had it crash my browser twice on an iPhone. Use a desktop if you can. The search function works but the results page is cramped and clicking the wrong ad is basically a hazard. I keep an ad blocker running just to avoid accidentally landing on a phishing page, which happens more often than you'd think with sites like this.
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Alternatives Worth Knowing About
If Where The Saints Have Trod doesn't have what you need or the site is down, which it occasionally is, there are a few other options. YouTube audio libraries are free if you already have a channel set up.sites like Pixabay Music and Free Music Archive offer royalty-free tracks, though they're not game soundtracks. If you actually need legitimate access to OSTs, streaming services like Spotify or Apple Music are the easiest route, even if you can't download the files directly. Some composers also release their music on Bandcamp for a small fee, which actually supports the people who made it. I'll probably stop using Where The Saints Have Trod myself eventually. The ad situation keeps getting worse and the download success rate has dropped from maybe 80 percent down to somewhere around 50-60 percent lately. For now it still works for casual use. Just don't expect perfect results every time and don't rely on it for anything professional.
