In a dazzling fan project, the ZREO team has rerecorded all of the music from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time as if it was played by a full orchestra.
Update: Streaming is no longer available as the ZREO website is currently experiencing a lot of traffic. You can still download the songs via the mirrors provided here.
Zelda ReOrchestrated began six years ago in October 2004, when a 14-year-old boy used his musical talents to transform a few tracks from the soundtrack from the classic game into sound that resembled a full orchestra. That boy, referred to as FireGS, and a team of dedicated volunteers released the full soundtrack of over 80 tracks on Christmas Day, 2009. The 192kbit MP3s are available download from several different mirrors at ZREO Music but if you just want a taste, streaming previews are also listed there.
Please Note: No actual musicians were harmed during the recording of this album. They just weren’t used or paid union salaries or fed from the Craft service table.
Judging from what I’ve heard on their site, the music is incredibly detailed and does indeed sound as if it is being played by live at the Carnegie Hall. If you’re a fan of Koji Kondo’s music from Ocarina, it’s definitely worth a listen.
I’m not enough of an audiophile to geek out about the process FireGS and the team used to make these tracks happen. But to be able to produce this kind of sound from MIDIs took an incredible amount of time and dedication. In fact, the project shut down for a while in 2006 due to the amount of money and time it was consuming. But in 2007, FireGS became more financially secure and was able to start the project again. It wasn’t until Christmas this year that FireGS called the project complete.
We are now reaping the full benefits of the team’s hard work over 6 long years. By offering the tracks for free, they bypass some of the legal wranglings of profiting off someone else’s compositions, but they do seem to have a Paypal donation set up. If you liked the music they’ve shared with the interweb, it might spread some Christmas cheer to drop a buck or two their way. (Although they may have taken down that page with all of the traffic they are currently getting.)
Source: Joystiq
