Did someone plagiarize the Merlin soundtrack?

[morganlove]

I posted a rough draft of a fanvid I did on Youtube (still private, it's not ready) using part of "The Age of Magic" from the Merlin soundtrack and I got a notice asking me to acknowledge third party content. But it wasn't for the Merlin soundtrack. It said the song was called Abandoned Toys: The Witch's Garden (Prelude). I thought it was a mistake but listening to it, they sound exactly the same in parts.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSTH-esyF40

1:40

www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4sHJ--fE0Y

1:40

[himiko]

There's definitely very similar sounding passages at the start of the Abandoned Toys... song, and from 1:40 onwards. Too similar to be coincidence, IMO. In fact, it sounds exactly the same, which leads me to wonder if that part of the song is actually sampled from the Merlin soundtrack itself?

I would be interested to know if this was actually done with permission from Trevor Jones/ Hallmark Entertainment (I can't find any evidence to support this, but it may well be the case), or if the guy behind AT simply hoped nobody would notice.

[morganlove]

I e-mailed Brett Branning of Abandoned Toys and asked him. He replied:

Good ears! For the witch's garden, I licensed samples from several tracks to get some genuine orchestral sounds into the album. Its a technique I would never use nowadays with how cheap home recording equipment has become, and how good the modeled orchestral sounds are for keyboards nowadays, but in the late 90s and early 2000's that was a popular technique with poor composers and bands. It was just 100 times cheaper to license a sample than to get in a studio and do session recordings. Of course that has all changed, and that is no longer a part of my work flow, thankfully. I wrote that album when I was 17, so am surprised people still give it a listen Thanks for the interest.

[himiko]

Ah, cool. Thanks for the update! I thought that it was too similar to be a rerecording XD