Random: Musician “recreates” Chrono Trigger soundtrack using uncompressed samples

Update: The video has been made private and it appears that Mathew Valente’s account has been hacked. We’ll be sure to update this post when the soundtrack is made available again.

For now, you can listen to some samples on his Twitter account:

Matthew Valenteknown as TSSF and who worked on the canceled fan game Chrono resurrection, has obtained the original samples of the Chrono Trigger soundtrack and shared them online. These original samples contain the uncompressed music before it was compressed to enable it to work on the SNES.

Shared on ResetEra by user AuthenticM, Valente has shared the project on YouTube, which features every single song on the original soundtrack of Squaresoft’s seminal 1995 RPG. Also included are the uncompressed versions of songs from Radical dreamersThe 1996 Satellaview text adventure that was exclusive to Japan until it was made available in English for the first time ever through Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition earlier this year.

Valente says he worked on these restorations for “about two to three years,” which involved collecting all the samples, putting them together and getting them to sound perfect. You can listen to his hard work below, and be amazed at how different – ​​or similar – some of these foundational songs sound.

This is essentially Chrono Trigger’s music as originally recorded, with actual instruments and synthesizers, pure and uncompressed. Put on your headphones and get lost in Yasunori Mitsuda and Nobuo Uematsu’s incredible score — songs like ‘Undersea Palace’ and ‘Secret of the Forest’ sound absolutely amazing, and you can pick out instruments in other songs that you might not have guessed was even used originally.

However, this isn’t the only SNES soundtrack Valente is working on restoring. The composer has also collected several samples from Final Fantasy IV, V and VI as well. You can check them out on his YouTube channel, and if you’re a fan of RPG music, we recommend that you do. [Update: Valente’s account appears to be down, so we have removed the link to his YouTube channel for now. Instead, we suggest heading over to his Twitter to check out his work until the issue is resolved.]

Last year, the uncompressed Super Mario World soundtrack was shared online by Church of Kondo, and the channel has been working to reveal even more classic SNES soundtrack samples without SNES compression.