Single Versions on RARE US CDs

Another one that has been recently discussed in the Billy Joel thread is "Keeping The Faith" (Special Remix). It can be found on one of TM Century's Gold Disc libraries.

Before anyone tries to seek out a TM disc for a single version, I should point out a couple things. As an owner of one of their libraries, I can tell you that there are two types of Gold Discs. The original ones with red print on the disc label, and Gold Disc 3 with black print on the disc label. I will refer to them as "red" discs and "black" discs.

Most tracks on the "red" discs originated from vinyl. These discs were put together in the late 80s when many cuts were not available on CD, making them very attractive to radio stations who wanted to start playing everything from compact disc. Since there was no cd source for many of the songs, they dubbed from vinyl and did noise reduction & click elimination to make them sound better. (In fact, one of my good friends provided the vinyl sources for one of the oldies libraries that they produced.) Also, there are many cases where the red discs have "single edits" of songs, but they were edited by TM Century INCORRECTLY. I have heard several cases where this happened.

The "black" discs (Gold Disc 3) are much, much better. Almost ALL of the songs originate from CD sources, and the "single versions" were more carefully edited by TM. HOWEVER, I have still heard instances of incorrect single edits on the "black" discs, and there are still songs that were dubbed from 45s. Although I can't say for sure, I'm 95% positive that TM did not get masters from record labels to make their discs; so if a song hasn't been available on a commercial or promo CD, but it appears on a TM disc, it probably came from vinyl.

This is the case with Billy Joel - Keeping The Faith (Special Remix). I will say that it sounds VERY good, since they cleaned up all the clicks and surface noise; however, it still has that "vinyl" sound, especially noticable on the high frequencies like snare and cymbol hits and "s" sounds on the lyrics.

So, just beware of trying to track down radio promo discs that did not come from the record labels. Chances are the source is not the master tape, but whatever was available at the time the CD was produced.

Hi EdisonLite,

I would kindly like to make one clarification to your post:

"Bad Boy" by Miami Sound Machine is from very clean vinyl on the TM Century GoldDisc.

The ONLY place where the single mix exists from a TAPE SOURCE is the rare Epic promo CD ESK 1336 'Gloria Estefan & Miami Sound Machine - Hits' which (by the way) also contains some other hard-to-find single versions such as "Falling In Love (Uh-Oh)" "Betcha Say That" as well as the Spanglish single version of "Anyhing For You".

I own the CD; the last time I checked there were none on eBay.

Andy

Andrew, is it possible for you to include track listing with version included for each?

Wow, my transfer of info from the CD really looks weird...

But I think you'll get the gist.

Andy