[IDEA] Music that builds up as the player progresses

When I recently spoke to my audio team, they suggested the same thing.

Apparently it's common practice among game composers. They compose music in layers anyway, so they figure they may as well separate the layers and use in-game cues to bring them in one by one

Impulse Tracker (.it) files are particularly good at this, as their sounds are divided into channels from the start, and you can set up looping parts.
Please login to see this link. by DavidN has plenty of sounds like that, but I don't think it employs muting the above way.

Have you used OpenMPT? It can export IT files. (And don't dismiss it just because it's free: It was used to compose the soundtrack for Bejeweled 3, according to this: Please login to see this link.)

Also, FL Studio is technically a paid program, unlike Impulse Tracker, so there's that. And before you say you can use the demo for commercial purposes, so it doesn't matter:

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Quote from Please login to see this link.. And it's not exactly the cheapest program out there, so that's another thing to note.

Point being, there IS, in fact, a reason why some (or a lot of) people are sticking with free programs.

Quote from RoelofButer

It's often better to have files in a more raw form so the person who's gonna use them has more freedom

Not sure what you meant by that. More raw form than what?

Anyway, what I meant is that the idea you mentioned is already common practice. Songs are split up into separate tracks (in whatever format), which you can then enable/disable/fade any which way you want.

Many AAA games use this method, though not all. Off the top of my head, Witcher 3 does, Skyrim doesn't. The ones that do often separate music into at least three tracks - an ambient track (default, just exploring), a semi-intense track (enemy is near), and an intense track (combat has started) - which they'll stack on top of each other as needed.

At the moment, I don't personally use this system in my game because my levels are short and the player dies a lot, so it'd end up sounding too choppy (returning to a default/ambient state every time you died). But I'd definitely do it this way if I had larger levels or lots of scripted story content.