My name is Austin Wright, and I'm the system administrator and overall software engineer for Radio Hyrule and Zelda Reorchestrated. When the server catches fire or just starts streaming Fairy Fountain in a loop, I'm the guy everyone runs to. I build the systems that gets the songs from song gets from our library to your computer speakers, maintain the database of songs, and do day-to-day maintenance to make sure the systems keep chugging away.
Several months ago we enabled tags on songs so you can search through music by game, melody, song, genre, theme, or specific content. So it turns out tagging 55 hours of songs is something of a daunting task! But, we think we've tagged the bulk of the songs. If you have any corrections to make, add a comment and/or drop us a line using the contact form.
For a while we've let you favorite your favorite songs. And slightly more recently, we published a page showing the list of most favorited songs, available on the re-vamped Songs page. Our song database also includes all the songs that have been requested and played in the last year (since a complete re-vamp of the system). With this information I thought it would be cool to take a look at some trends:
In the year since we've brought up the new server, we've played over 193,000 songs, and processed over 25,000 song requests!
The top-favorited song is Bucky Studios - The Legend of Cool, followed closely by one of my favorites, zyko - Rime of the Wanderin' Seafarer. These songs are also the most requested songs. However, from there the list diverges: Second Chance - Nothing Set in Stone is the third most requested song in our library, but only the sixth most favorited. Also note that users may request songs as many times as they like, so long as you return whenever it's available for requesting (you can request a song 5-6 times per day if you're persistent, have no life, and don't need sleep). Some users account for as many as fifty of their requests! (I'm not innocent here, I'm probably half the reason Fox Amoore appears three times on this list.)
Can you guess our top-played song? It's about 6 seconds long. And it has vocals. It's scarcely been requested, because it's not visible in our public library (it probably should be). Unlike many of those entries, it gets regular air time. In fact, it's the current Station ID! Our stream generator ensures it gets played about every 40 minutes, along with a fun fruit-flavored commercial, part of this complete breakfast.
