"Meet Me Half Way" - Kenny Loggins

This was a tougher edit than I expected! The problem is the keyboard chords underneath the intro start at one volume & s-l-o-w-l-y fade to a lower level by the time the lyrics kick in... meaning, wherever you cut, there's a sudden volume drop (or, taking the intro piano notes & jumping past the 1st time through, it sounds "interrupted," perhaps because of sustain left over from what you just cut).

Working off a YouTube video of a video cassette of an MTV broadcast (*SIGH*) I think I found where they "cut their losses." ;-)

I trimmed the silence off the beginning, so your time may be a hair later than this; add 225 ms & see if that gets you closer:

If you take out 5.383 to 13.584 it isn't quite as noticeable a drop. This is editing at the "clack" of what I think is a wood block... but I'm no percussionist, so don't quote me. :)

I say "at" the clack because I couldn't find a place within the clack that matched up between the two hits. I could, however, find the beginning of each hit, & trimmed there.

Other than the trimmed into, the album version seems to match the official video; make that one cut, & you have the video edit & I suspect the 45 edit, too.

I came up with a length of 3:30.721, so to be EXACTLY right I guess you'd need to trim the last second & 3/4 to match the 45.

This is to play on my 'net station, so that last couple of seconds won't ever be heard, anyway. ;-)

my commercial 45 issued as columbia 06690 for the kenny loggins song "meet me halfway" states the run time on the label as 3:31 but actually runs 3:29 and is an edit of the full length 3:38 version....this 45 run time info s/b added to the db.....thanks aaron for re-creating the edit years ago.....THANKS!!!

Can you tell if "Columbia Record" came from vinyl or tape? Often times, these promo samplers that contain a song or single mix/edit that have never been on CD before - use a vinyl dub because the right version isn't already available on CD elsewhere.

Well said, Jim.

I'd also add that in 1987-88, not many stations were playing music directly off CD. The early on-air CD players were notoriously unreliable. Our station added remote-start capability to a Magnavox unit. It sounded great on-air when it worked, but it skipped more often than it should have, and the remote start left unpredictable gaps between when you pushed the button and when the music actually started. Great new toys, especially for a college station, but the top 40 guys weren't on board yet.

Most stations at the time were running music off carts. (Short for cartridges; sort of like 8-track tapes with cue tones that allowed the tape to re-cue itself at the appropriate point.) The production guy would dub the the song onto a cart from whatever source was available - promo 45, promo 12-inch single, full-length CD, promo CD single, promo samplers, or in rare cases, from a reel-to-reel tape for homemade edits or edits from other stations.

The promo samplers from the labels were superb at rounding up the hit version that didn't appear anywhere else on CD. They're extremely hard to find today, as you'd expect.

An informal list of the labels' promo samplers that I have from that time frame:

1987
Columbia Record
Columbia Record Vol. 2
Audio Buffet
Audio Buffet 2
Singles Scene
Son Of Singles Scene
EPA With Our Compliments

1988
Music So Good It Must Be ATlantic
AC CD Sampler
Blink And It's A Hit
More New Stuff
CBS Records Ltd. Ed. Radio Sampler
EPA's New Year's Solution
Virgin Singles Sampler

There was an Atlantic's Year In Review released at the end of every year from 1987 to 1998. Those were great.

Hitmakers started around 1988, as did the TuneUp series, Schwartz Brothers samplers, and a few other promo services that rounded up tracks from the labels and sent them to radio. Hot Hits and Spotlight On Hits started around 1990 that did the same thing for jukeboxes.

I'm sure there are others; I don't have everything... :)

Yes, thank you all, for the great info!

BTW, I wish there were 1987 Universal Records samplers that included the single mix of "Special Way" by Kool & the Gang - and "Love Lives On" by Joe Cocker - both big AC hits.

Edited by EdisonLite