[Wesley]

Honestly, I am not a fan at all of fan edits. Even though from time to time I heard some nice fan made suites of scores on YouTube, I always found that kind of disrespectful against the original work and the composer. If I want to do something creative I rather write my own music, however lame or primitive that is. But it is my own and not a cannibalization of somebody elses work.

Yes your hobby is much more interesting than mine; I have no imagination for writing my own music. But as you said it can teach you a lot about how the music is structured and how a lot of very long scores are founded on some really basic ideas that the composer relies on to get all that work done. I do the same with books, I have no aptitude for writing my own stories but enjoy reading non-fiction stories and writing summaries of them. It has taught me a lot about how good books are edited and conceived, and I remember a lot more that way.

To me, it’s no different from what Conrad Pope did with the “Tribute to Film Composers”: just a fun way of playing around with music you enjoy.

Since it’s not usually something I enjoy to do, whittling in my case basically means removing tracks to get it down to a decent length. Once in a rare while, I also shuffle a couple of tracks around to make for more fluid listening. But I don’t mess around with it further, like micro edits or AI removers (which cost money, anyway, don’t they?). Above my paygrade.

There are free ones like MVSep. If I have two string tracks which I want to string together, but one has percussion, I might use it to strip the percussion out and get one long string track. That of course is more involved than what you do with your reshuffling.