If there’s one thing I loved – and still do – about the Warcraft™ franchise is it’s enthralling soundtrack. It was one of the first things I fell in love when I first picked up the series, and despite World of Warcraft™ being eight years old (and not aging all that well lately) it’s soundtrack is still one of it’s strong points, and some very talented people definitely work in their Audio department.
Russel Brower and Matt Uelmen’s amazing guitar twists (mostly in Diablo™ 1 and 2) are just two names from the top of my head. Yet, whenever I listen to one of the CD’s that come with the collectors editions, in the end there’s always some music missing, some takes, a lot of takes really. It’s that music you hear when playing the game, but you don’t recognize it from the official soundtrack CD because you’ve never heard it, or it sounds differently, something’s off. And after doing some mild research I found that in a lot of cases, the tracks we have in our esteemed CD’s are lacking content, the original work in some cases is far more extended.
Matt Uelmen on Guitar in 2006
I started rummaging around for the most obvious stuff that would be missing from the CD’s, the content updates. Despite the soundtrack of the original World of Warcraft being quite enriched with the song and music of Azeroth, things start to be different when we got to patch 1.7 and the release of Zul’Gurub, by patch 1.9 – The Gates of Ahn’Qiraj – the music library missing was becoming even more vast, and with 1.11 with Shadow of the Necropolis, we had three new raid dungeons with music we could only hear in-game. You can see where I’m going with this…
Eventually we got up to Cataclysm™ and the missing or different library was big enough to fit into a two CD set, provided you cut some track here or there.
With the easing up of digital distribution and broadcast, it became easier to gather all the out-takes, tracks and variances that I thought relevant, and with some time – you know, chillin’ – I started compiling all those tracks together to create a digital “CD”, of forty tracks…
It was amazing what I was finding as I went through all the tracks, extended cuts (like Reforged and Nightsong) that sound better and longer than the official CD counterparts, and even different cuts; Blizzard included two tracks in the Burning Crusade CD that were meant to be a representative of the music from Ahn’Quiraj and Naxxramas, but they were short and the Ahn’Quiraj track even had some remixed music found in the early areas of the Draenei race, far different from the audio you can rip directly from the source.
I also found that a lot of the tracks people ripped from the game and uploaded to, say Youtube, were basically a simple edit of those tracks into one, a copy/paste of several smaller music pieces into a large single file, leaving a lot of silence, in-between each music segment, which wasn’t very interesting to hear. Music got to a momentum, a climax, and slowed down to the point of complete silence, some long 20 to 30 seconds later it would start building up again, or just go straight to what should be it’s climax, it just sounded wrong, disperse and plain boring. So I adjusted that, overlapping, removing repeated bits, removing uninteresting climbs in sound and silences, so that three or four smaller music tracks would fit, adjusted seemingly into one bigger track.
Three-time Emmy Award-winner Russel Brower
By the time I was done Cataclysm was in it’s patch 4.2, and only by now, patch 5.2, did I find the resolve and spare time to actually consider ‘releasing’ this to other people who might also enjoy these works of art as much as I do.
So here it is, Ladies and Gentlemen, the – appropriately called – Warcraft: The Lost Tracks to download at will. I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I did assembling it.
– Download link (236Mb)
(all the legal stuff in included in the file)
Cover Art
unrealizing 