: Woo hoo. Will definitely have to check this out when I get home - these both
: sound very much what I've been wanting to hear :-)
Caution: my head is a little swimmy tonight, so anything I say may be completely wrong.
Swirls Piano is very nice, and I think I'll probably use that in place of Swirls Woodwinds in Eternal. It's the closest in feel to what I wanted out of an "acoustic Swirls" of the three re-remixes you've made so far (Acoustic, Woodwinds, and now Piano). My only critique is that it sounds ever so slightly shakey (i.e. off-tempo) at a few of the sparser points... then again I'm told I have an exceptionally good ear for rhythm and tempo so maybe I'm the only person who can hear that. I was just listening to it in the background as I wrote this paragraph (and thus paying less close attention to the music) and nothing sounded off at all until the very end (where I gather it intentionally "falls apart", so no criticism there).
As for Splash, my two main points of contention are that the start seems quite a bit slower than the original, and the substitution of the big drums for more piano around 12-13 seconds in. These two together take away a lot of the "bigness" of this piece - it doesn't seem as urgent, epic and climactic as the original did. I would suggest that the opening/main piano track be more like the rapid-fire piano at about 14-15 (or similar to the short rapid piano segments like the one that begins around 29-30), and that the drums that originally came in around that point (12-15) be reinstated. I can see how that all might start to drown out the faster piano bits later on around 29-30 and such, but you could raise the pitch of those to differentiate them, and as Adam already suggested, fiddle with the volumes a bit too. You might even want to consider doing those bits in the guitar(?) that you've got in Leela Acoustic (first heard around 6-7 secs into that piece). And lastly, speaking of stringed instruments, I think having the main, slow melody of this piece (Splash) in piano takes away some of what made the original so great, which was the heavy, rapid fire background contrasted with the long, slow, drawn-out strings of the main melody. If you're looking to change things up from the original, perhaps you could use a horn or flute instead of strings (though bear in mind that there's a horn at about 2:08 in the original, so that could cause you trouble later) - but I think it'd definitely be better with some sort of instrument capable of holding a sustained note, which the piano, as beautiful as it is, just can't do.
I'm curious, do you have access to Seropian's original high-quality tracks (the audio tracks on the M1 CD), or just the MIDI tracks that play in-game? The former are much nicer than the latter and might make for nicer inspiration for you. We're technically not supposed to distribute them at all (not sure why), but... I may knows a guy who knows a guy who may be able to loan you his copy of them...
