When cds were first out, one label decided to issue a disc with two hours of music. They put one album in the right channel and one album in the left channel.
@@gmirwin speaking of Techmoan, he did one video about the multiplex CD with different audio on the left and right channel which is a classical music album and trimicron vinyl record.
I used to work for a record company called 'Revolver' in the UK back in 1990 and a band had finished an album (I think it was Atom Seed's 'Get in Line'), it went for mastering and then the master copy was shipped to DADC in Austria for the first batch of test pressings on CD (I remember a few boxes arriving at the studio for listening to). For some reason, the mastering had stripped off the lead vocals, so the LP was entirely instrumental! We had to destroy all the disks - I remember having a copy as a drinks coaster in the studio on Goldthorn Hill for quite a while and I did have a copy at home fully boxed. Interestingly looking at Discogs it doesn't look like any mispressings ever leaked out which is interesting!
You should certainly list it on discogs yourself. And in a true spirit of charity, you might even be inclined to provide a lossless rip of the CD! Hahaha
There were errors on Thomas Dolby's "The Singular Thomas Dolby" that actually got me in trouble with Thomas Dolby himself. The CD is a complication of single mixes, remastered by Dolby himself from the original master tapes. Unfortunately, several of the tracks have the volume of one of the stereo channels much lower than the other. I pointed this out on Dolby's official forums, but no one else could hear it. I suggested listening through headphones, but still no one there would back me up. So, I ripped the audio from one of the tracks, "I Love You, Goodbye", along with the same song from the original CD single, and loaded both files into Audacity to view their waveforms, one above the other. It was clear one of the channels on the remastered versions was half the volume of the other, and that it was not that way on the original single. I posted a screen shot of the two waveforms, and Thomas Dolby actually broke radio silence. For the first and, as far as I know, only time, he posted to his forum. He sad that he was following the thread, "but when enthusiastic amateurs start posting JPGs of waveforms, it's time to put a stop to it." He said that I lacked an understanding of how songs are mixed for singles, and that I couldn't compare a single mix to an album mix, as they can be very different. I was about to post that I used the original CD single, as there would no point comparing the single mix to the album version, as they were different lengths, and wouldn't match up... but I discovered my account had been deactivated. I'm not sure how the tracks got screwed up as Dolby did the remastering himself. And I can understand him trying to cover it up, as this was just after the album was released, and he surely didn't want to lose potential sales.
It's also possible that he has gone slightly deaf in one ear and is compensating for it by making that channel louder than the other. I've seen it happen when an older musician is involved in the mixing or mastering of a re-release of their material it ends up sounding bad, because their ears are shot from decades of loud concerts and they're boosting the loudness and treble to make up for it.
@@vwestlifeVery possible. Never thought of that. Which is funny, because I made a comment yesterday on the Oddity Archive about our local radio station not actually broadcasting in stereo. When I talked to their head engineer, it turned out he was deaf in one ear, and couldn't actually hear stereo! I think they had somehow split their stereo signal, and was sending one channel to their AM transmitter, and the other channel to their FM transmitter.
@@FlopsyHamster I was once in a doctor's office that did something like that. They had one channel playing in the waiting room and the other channel in the room where the doctor sees you. It was very noticeable when a Beatles song came on and I couldn't hear the vocals!
It's one thing to have a debate over whether your observations were correct or not, but the fact that your account was deactivated immediately afterwards suggests TD told them to shut your account down. Personally I wouldn't have let *that* one slide. I have other email accounts and would have created anew account just so I could go back on the forum and rip him a new one. And then suggested how I didn't have to worry about how his CDs sounded anymore, as I was done listening to them, and my ONE regret was that he made any money from me from when I bought them. (thinking of it now, the one record of his I have, note I say record rather than CD, is a copy of "The Golden Age of Wireless" from *before* they added "She Blinded Me with Science" onto it)
@@SenileOtaku Despite my run-in with him, I'm still a fan of his work. It was his forum, and I was posting information that could hurt the sales of his CD. I think deleting my post, and sending me a DM asking me to keep quiet about it would have been a better way to handle it. Besides, I think most people who bought the compilation already had all the songs on it, and really bought it for the bonus DVD of his "Live Wireless" concert. I know I did. Funnily enough, his forum was called "The Flat Earth Society", which was derived from his song "The Flat Earth", which was about a metaphoric flat earth, meaning this planet is what you make of it. The forum was taken down right around the time the actual flat earth movement started on the internet. Not sure if that was by coincidence or design.
The wrong CD being labeled has happened before….back in 1987, when the first four CD titles on The Beatles were issued, some copies of “A Hard Day’s Night” has not only a completely different album on the disc, but a completely different artist!
I worked at Zavvi (Formally Virgin Megastore) and wrong data on CD's wasn't uncommon. A man returned a Beatles CD because it sounded like Shirley Bassey. We didn't know what he meant at first so we put it in the CD player and the first thing we noticed was it said there was 16 tracks when it should have been 12 and sure enough Shirley Bassey started. it was odd seeing the CD label with The Beatles on it with well produced inlay and book... to hear Shirley. It wasn't very common but happened. Sometimes customers were very unreasonable though... getting rude as if we made the CD ourselves... "Yeah we record the music in the staff room(!)"
Not music exactly, but I had a copy of the 2 CD PC game Imperium Galactica, with English content on the first disk, and the French version misprinted on second.
About thirty years ago there were media reports about a mislabeled Lawrence Welk CD which actually contained death metal, confounding senior citizen buyers.
Along with what was said above, (and which I also agree with), I would definitely also add to that list the following channels; "Project Farm" and both "Technology Connections" and "Technology Connextras" (both of the latter 2 are from the same guy), as they are all channels that are very informative and interesting, and more oftentimes than not, about things that you never knew you needed to know about, lol! (But presented in such an interesting and useful informative way that they're very easy and fun to watch.)
@@Deadeye313 For the most part those have stuff I'm actually interested in to some degree. vwestlife literally does videos on miscellaneous calculators or light bulbs and I'll happily watch it cause I find him entertaining. I couldn't care less about learning about either of those lmao. And to add on I've watched The 8-Bit Guy in some capacity since he was the iBook Guy
As someone who does album art and graphic design as a job it is quite common for labels to have lost the original artwork. They often send me scans of original albums and ask if I can clean it up for a new release. The example you showed had obviously just been rushed together with no concern for the quality. And regarding the spine orientation, I did a couple of CDs for a specific French artist who insisted on having the spine text going the opposite way to the norm because it is 'his thing'.
I lived in France for about a year and a half and all the CDs, books, tapes, etc. have the spine text oriented the opposite way from how it's done in the US. I'm not sure if it's that way in all of Europe, but it was the standard in French-speaking countries. Perhaps the one CD you showed is from Europe? The Cinema CDs are obviously just a mistake.
When I quit my old job a few months ago, I was the only person in the company with graphic design experience, and I think they still haven't found anyone to replace me. I'm almost certain that as a result, they're now using JPGs of the company logo and other assets that I shrank and compressed for email proofing, rather than the source vector files that they have no idea what to do with. lmao
We need Quality control back in this world, no wonder there are so many mistakes being made. Either there careless mistakes, or they do this on purpose.
I like to imagine Ryan O'Neill watching this video all these years after he and Tim made the CDs and being sent into a frothing rage over getting left out of the CD text author credits. His relationship with his brother ruined, years of his life in blissful stupid ignorance of this transgression, all upended now. As though somehow despite how important this was to him, he'd never checked before.
You may have already covered it, but the Columbia/BMG CD and cassette mastering/packaging anomalies on their own could easily fill a series of videos. Unfortunately, many of my club CDs succumbed to the infamous outside-in rot that plagued unsealed edge-cut discs with exposed aluminum data layer edges. The club cassettes were crude high-speed multi-generational bin copies that had no high end and fragile sonic-welded shells
for some releases they say on the back, " manufactured FOR...", meaning the record company printed them FOR whatever record club it was (don't remember offhand) also, i have a record club copy of soundgarden's badmotorfinger that sounds much heavier than my original a&m cd release. you just never know...
for some releases they say on the back, " manufactured FOR...", meaning the record company printed them FOR whatever record club it was (don't remember offhand) also, i have a record club copy of soundgarden's badmotorfinger that sounds much heavier than my original a&m cd release. you just never know...
@@ChristopherSobieniak I can hardly blame record clubs for having shitty practices. Even in the early 1990s they were pressing and distributing stuff for bottom-dollar, knowing that a lot of customers would be dubbing their CDs and cassettes off and unsubscribing after just a few months, cutting into their margins.
Oh, I do have one CD story...I once bought a copy of "Lather" from Frank Zappa that was still factory sealed with the sticker with the CDs name and artist still on it, but they forgot to put the CD itself in the case.
I think what happened with that Caravelli CD from Columbia House was a production problem at the service bureau or printing facility. Back then, an APR (Automatic Picture Replacement) workflow was often used. Using that workflow, low-resolution versions of artwork are used by designers, while the high-resolution versions are stored on the servers of the printing facility. Because of the limited power of desktop computers used by designers at the time, it was more efficient to work with the smaller low-resolution files. When it works as designed, the low-resolution files are automatically replaced by the high-resolution files during the final RIP to the image setters. The Columbia House disclaimer ripped correctly because it was a separate line on the designer's original document while the rest was the low-resolution image that didn't get subbed out. Perhaps the production department didn't notice the mistake, or more likely didn't want to take the time to troubleshoot it and reprint the job.
Early computer video editing worked in a similar way. The analog tapes would be fully digitized at low resolution. Edits and effects were laid out using the low resolution video. Then when the project was done the computer would automatically fast forward to the parts of the tape actually used (required time coded tapes and serial controlled tape decks) and digitize only those parts at high resolution then "print" the edit plus rendered effects to a tape or create a high quality digital file.
Years ago, Macromedia had a Photoshop competitor called Xres (IIRC) that worked the same way, letting you work quickly on low-res proxies, then rendering out the full-res photo in the end.
Here's a big screw up, Track 8 on the Lords of Thunder Sega CD release has constant tiny skips where the track completely cuts out, sounds horrible. And no other source like a soundtrack release to grab it from. Luckily the gaps are tiny enough to interpolate, It took a while to fill all the gaps but I made a restoration of that track that's on romhacking for anyone who wants to fix the game.
That CD copy protection era was kinda sad. Some cd players worked some didn't. And then they put bad mp3 files and other "extras" in the cd so the albums didn't contain that much music.
CD copy protection was wild... some CDs were intentionally butchered so badly that Philips forced the studios to remove the "compact disc digital audio" logo from their jewel cases. And Sony even went so far as to try to infect customers' PCs with a trojan virus / rootkit when legal downloads like iTunes were already surpassing CD sales. 😞
I remember back in late 1986, CD buyers were returning some act's latest release because the music on the disk was from a different band. The record store loaded up the CD to verify the customer's complaints. Their complaints were correct. The music wasn't as advertised on the packaging. The music was A Hard Day's Night soundtrack. Capitol Records was in the process of finally releasing all of the Beatle's recordings on CD to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the release of Sgt. Pepper. Capitol Records was going to release the first 4 Beatles albums in January of 1987. A Hard Days Night was one of the first four. I was 21 years old in 1987. I was surprised by the ignorance of people my age not knowing about The Beatles.
One of the most annoying mastering errors I had was on the They Might Be Giants - Apollo 18 CD. There are about 17 very short tracks that if played in random make a pleasing mix of long & short tracks. The UK mastering company put all of the short tracks into one long “track 17”. Argh!
It's the song "Fingertips," and the Japanese release had the same error of mastering as one long track. It's that way on digital download/streaming as well, although now it's on purpose due to royalties and is typically labelled "Fingertips (Combined)".
@@marsilies I always wanted a "proper" copy to hear what it should have sounded like. I suppose I could do it manually now all my tracks are MP3s on a hard disk.
@@BigCar2 having owned the US CD since mid-90s, I'd say it sounds like you imagine, with random short "jingles" interspersed between full songs. If you had a CD changer, you definitely didn't want to enable random/shuffle between all discs, as it'd be frustrating to wait for the changer to switch discs, play 5 seconds, then wait while it switched discs again. Honestly, it was interesting as a novelty, but I personally prefer to listen to full albums in intended order instead of shuffled anyway, so the fast majority of the time I listened to the tracks in original order, and I still anticipate the "proper" jingle to come up next.
I know they sort of intended Fingertips to come up randomly if you listen on random, but I never did that, and still don’t to this day. That album has a great flow to it. And when they started playing Fingertips as one song in concerts, it was awesome. 😁
Not a CD, but an album I found at a second hand store several years ago. Supertramps "Breakfast in America'. Side 1 was fine, but side 2 turned out to be side 2 of The Police " Ghost in the Machine". I was shocked when I played it the first time and "Too Much Information" by The Police started side 2 instead of "Take the Long Way Home." It was definitely a record club goof, just can't remember which one right now.
If you're sure it was "a record club goof" then it was Columbia Record Club. Normally CBS did not press for A&M, but if it was sold through the club, then CBS did it. Same story with Capitol records- normally they pressed their own, but not a record club release. I know this cause in 1978, I toured the CBS pressing plant in Santa Maria, Ca.
The CD-Text issue is definitely common with smaller studios. It happened to my band on our last album, where the engineer didn't bother to fill it out properly.
I remember buying a CD of Elvis Presley's "Hound Dog" at the local supermarket and it sounded like it was recorded from a live concert recording being played from a badly beat-up vinyl record. And the CD wasn't a bootleg, it was a normal factory-pressed CD. The only good thing about that disc was it's box art which was of pretty decent quality.
I think VWestlife did a video on that, "Reissue" or "Best of" CDs sold cheap on discount store racks. They were not made up of the original hit recordings (or maybe just ONE licensed genuine hit on the whole CD). These would contain unfamiliar songs sung by a big artist but "before they were famous" , or indeed one original aged singer (out of several) but a newer recording giving a sub-par performance, or the original band in a live concert parlance that was poorly recorded, or mixture of all those.
Your "Hot Movie Hits" CD reminds me of a "TV Hits" CD I got many years ago. I knew it was one of those re-recordings-by-a-studio-band jobs rather than the original themes, so that didn't phase me. What did aggravate me was that the second half of the track listing was mostly wrong (what was listed as the "South Park" theme was actually the theme from "Dharma & Greg" and it went downhill from there), after the first half being accurate. Even more annoying was that it was a CD on the Varese Sarabande label, which is known for their quality output. Someone REALLY dropped the ball on that one.
Such a great label. I collected Varese’s soundtrack CDs as a teen and I’d write them letters with technical/artist questions… And they’d write me back! I’m sure I have them in a box somewhere.
I remember all country labels used HDCD back in the ‘90s. They also went digital early on in the ‘80s. There were only a handful of studios and producers in Nashville, so when one changed formats, they all did.
Yes, quite a few Nashville studios in the '80s embraced Mistubishi's open-reel "ProDigi" digital audio tape format with almost all country albums at the time recorded on ProDigi tape in the studios there. Meanwhile, the rest of the recording industry outside of Nashville at that time was using Sony's competing open-reel digital tape format, "DASH" (Digital Audio Stationary Head), or just traditional analog tape formats like 2" 24-track.
@@RyanSchweitzer77 Also worth noting that ProDigi made such an impact that it was also the inspiration for the name "Digidesign Pro Tools" which is/was the industry standard DAW software used in music studios
I’ve got one for you. I was purchasing sound effects CDs to use in my hopeful possible career of dramatized audio. Well, I have this track of a tornado. This was on a cd called “ tornadoes and other sounds of destruction“ by Laserlight Digital. So I go to I believe it was track four which was absolutely gnarly with lots of trees cracking and debris flying everywhere and I’m listening to this and in the background very softly beneath the track I hear this guy go “so effing what“, and then this rock song starts to play. At the end of each track, there are a little snippets of more rock songs but it’s very very very soft. Only if you turn the volume all the way up and pressed your earphones to your ears could you hear it, but if you are using the track in your digital audio workstation, it comes through very clearly. What the heck guys?
Welp... I wonder if someone posts a comment about having a CD where at one point you can hear pleading and howling, like a trapped soul crying for help x3
@@KRAFTWERK2K6 oh dear! Well, I had it happen once on a Hanson CD. It wasn’t exactly soles howling in pain it was very very soft like softer than the track that I heard. It sounds like Gregorian chant or some thing you might hear in a cathedral. I don’t know it was very odd.
@@georgeprice4212 yeah. No kidding. Lol! My friend Heather said that she thinks it’s a song by “guns and roses“. I’m more of a soundtrack and classical music lady so I really don’t know. Lol!
I've had the 'wrong cd' problem several times. I bought a Cranberries CD that actually had 'The Celts Soundtrack' by Enya (at least they're both Irish --close enough I guess) and AC/DC Back In Black that was actually Phil Collins Hello I Must Be Going (Welp!). As in your case, they had the correct label printed on the CD, correct packaging ... but someone in the plant grabbed the wrong stack of discs to shove into the silkscreen label printer.
I remember a friend of mine buying the "Come on over" CD by Shania Twain in a Mexico City Tower Records store (June or July 2000). The last track was abruptly cut down, so he went and exchanged it for another. Turns out that all of the pressed discs from that batch had this defect on them. He ended up braking the disc as well.
A finales de los 90's los discos nacionales eran hechos por CINRAM, en particular esos tenían problemas con los últimos tracks, aunque el CD se encontrara como nuevo, éste parecía defectuoso al llegar a esos últimos tracks.
My CDs are packed away for a move, but several things come to mind. "Earth, Wind, and Fire - Original Album Classics" 5 CD set had mismatched audio and labeling. The one star reviewer on Amazon apparently found the same error. My copy of the compilation "Jimi Hendrix - Kiss The Sky" had no label on the actual disc new out of the shrinkwrap. I considered returning it, but it plays just find if you figure out what side is UP, and this is my only glass mastered CD with this error, which makes it interesting. This may be a mastering error, not a CD error, but one of my two Captain Beyond S/T versions has a phased reversed channel. If you mix the left and right channels, you get phase cancellation on bass and instruments mixed center. After phase reversing one channel, and re-burning, it sounds much better, so I inserted a double tray, and listen to my homemade fix of this title now. According to folks on the Steve Hoffman forums, the Black Sabbath - S/T licensed to Creative Sounds had pre-emphasis applied to the signal but without the de-emphasis flag for playback, resulting in an over-emphasis of treble. And one time I opened a new, sealed Compact Disc just as I left Hastings and found NO CD inside. I don't remember the title, but fortunately the folks at Hastings believed me, and let me exchange it.
My worst CD is Future Trance Vol. 24 released 2003 in germany. I got several messages via Discogs if I can verify track quality because I have the CD listed as owned. CD1 Tracks 8 and 20 are confirmed to come from a lossy source, probably MP3. I verified it using a spectrum analyzer (everything above 16khz is cut off), and also by hearing through my best headphones, its clear as daylight, thats a lossy source.
Sometimes they might even burn MP2s onto them as well. I have some CDs from Southeast Asia where one or several tracks that were either from MP2 or some other lossy source. Like yours, they too have a sharp cutoff at around 16-19 khz. I also have CDs where all of tracks have a sharp cutoff at 15-16 khz which is a sign that the source was either a 32 khz sampling rate or 128 kbps MP3
@@brentfisher902it's worse when you buy FLACs online. There are times where the distributor would upload upsampled MP3 files instead of the original source!
I have a bunch of trance/techno CDs with major errors in the published track list (metadata). A lot of labels just didn’t care... There is also a Billy Holliday CD that sounds like it was mastered off a scratchy vinyl record... you can hear lots of pops and crackle from dust.
I went down the HDCD rabbit hole a while back (a favorite album of mine from the 90s, Orgy’s Candyass, has it) and in the process learned that apparently a lot of CDs that trigger HDCD ‘mode’ actually only show up that way because a piece of equipment (a compressor, maybe?) that had it enabled by default was popular at the time and the engineers just never turned the HDCD mode off. Also, nothing as extreme as anything in this video, but I bought a copy of Korn’s Follow the Leader *brand new, at release* and inexplicably, despite the CD looking pristine, it would skip on a certain track no matter what player I used. A friend of mine bought it on the same trip from the same store and it worked perfectly, damndest thing 🤷♂️
Yes, any disc made using Pacific Microsonics' analog-to-digital converter will be detected as an HDCD even if it doesn't take advantage of any of the HDCD features.
My father loved The Alan Parsons Project, especially their Edgar Alan Poe Album "Tales of mystery and imagination". After buying his first CD player he wanted to upgrade the album from vinyl to CD. But on the CD there was a compilation of piano instrumentals instead of Alan Parsons. My father was so confused about this - he thought the band had changed the whole album for CD re-release. It took him some time to realize the real reason why the CD sounded like this.
I wonder if any "lost" recordings of things where ever accidently included in mastering as unlabelled extra tracks, then had something happen to the masters or session recordings. Has anything like this ever been found?
Not on CD, but on Vinyl, there is the infamous "Shelley" pressing of The Rolling Stones Hot Rocks. Some east coast pressings used the wrong mixes of Brown Sugar and Wild Horses. Early rough mixes that are very different to the final mixes. The name Shelley appears in the runout. This was corrected quickly, so these have become collectable pressings. Gotta check the matrix numbers too because the corrected pressings from that area also have the name Shelley. To my knowledge, those rough mixes have never officially appeared on any other LP or CD since. On CD I know of only one instance of something being put out by mistake. It's the pre-Tears For Fears band Graduate. There is a reissue of their album and it has odd mixes of one song that doesn't match the track listing.
Interesting tidbit regarding the availability of pop music cassettes circa early 2000s. While surprising, especially to much younger music listeners, it wasn't entirely uncommon. Cassettes were still available commercially up until 2003, while in developing countries, their limelight lasted a bit longer.
I only own a DVD misprint, the first EU issue of Babylon 5's "The Gathering". According to case and cover it's supposed to be multilingual 1998 Special Edition, but the content is the original, English-only 1993 version (with the Stewart Copeland soundtrack). I had preordered from Amazon, and shortly after delivery they sent an apology email on behalf of WB Home Video, offering to exchange the "faulty" DVD. I declined though and happily kept my collector's item…
I did have one of those - but I made the mistake of getting rid of it when I got the box set; assuming the disc would be the same. At the time I wasn't aware of it being any different. But now... That indeed is a great item to have still. As it won't ever be reissued - only the re-edited and special edition version was available shortly afterwards!
Monty Python, the final Rip-off album on two CD's. Tracks of CD1 are wrong from track 12 onward; the actual CD ends up with 25 tracks while all printed material shows 21 Tracks. Also in the 80's i was given for free a pack of CD's with wrong printed labels (wrong artist, wrong album), but they were going to be trashed so at least back then someone was doing quality control.
A couple of years ago I went to a music store and bought a UB40 Greatest Hits album. When I opened, the disc label looked legit as it was printed on but the data side clearly showed it was a good ol' CD-R. I put the disc on my player, the first son started and it was UB40 all right, but then I figured that none of the songs matched the ones listed in the track list. It turned out to be an earlier UB40 greatest hits album, but the artwork and everything was from the one I intended to buy.
Was it... a used CD? Come to think of it, I got a DVD from Amazon like that too, but Amazon has a huge problem with counterfeits... (especially memory cards)
The 2001 remasters of Michael Jackson's "BAD" (and some subsequent releases): 1. Missing "horns" track from the chorus of BAD (disabled in mixing?) 2. Beeping sound (absolutely shouldn't be there) as "The Way You Make Me Feel" fades out before Speed Demon. The re-issue of "Thriller" that has "Billie Jean" written as "BILLY JEAN" on the CD and in the lyric sheet but written correctly on the back.
It annoys me when albums are re-done. Almost as if they were somehow imperfect when originally issued. _I Just Can't Stop Loving You_ now omits the spoken intro, while _Smooth Criminal_ is missing that dramatic breathing at the start.
It even happens to the Beatles... Paul McCartney's first post-Beatles solo album, the one with the bowl of cherries on the cover, has an instrumental track called Hot As Sun Glasses, and on the CD I have, the track label is split into 2 incorrectly numbered tracks, as if there's a track called "Hot as Sun" and another just called "Glasses"....
Glasses was a wine glass experiment tacked on at the end of Hot As Sun, and during digital mastering they must’ve split it up. There’s a lot of albums that do that. The original pressing of Doggystyle has 19 tracks. The later re-pressings had 13. One song was omitted because they couldn’t get sample clearance, but the rest were skits tacked onto the beginnings of songs instead of being separated. This lead to a confusing track listing in the back of the CD. Darkside of the Moon - some pressings have 9 tracks and some have 10 depending on if they split up Speak to Me and Breathe or bundled them as Speak to Me/Breathe
I have the CD-single of "Children" by Robert Miles (manufactured in the Netherlands), and it has a mastering mistake on it. The SCMS (Serial Copy Management System) bits on CD's are normally set to 0 ("Copyright protected") and 0 ("Original") but on this CD the bits are set to 1 and 0. Any consumer-grade digital audio recorder (built after 1992) will check the SCMS bits in the SPDIF signal and will only allow recording if the music is (A) copyrighted and original or (B) not copyrighted (it may be an original or a copy). (*) Unfortunately, my DCC-730 Digital Compact Cassette recorder has a bug in the firmware and refuses to make a (digital) recording of this CD unless I put an SCMS defeater between the CD player and the DCC recorder. (I know, it's not much) (*) Actually it's a bit more complicated because the bits on devices other than CD players are inverted I think, but that's a whole different story.
This is great stuff! The "MaxiPlay" 60 minute CD is hilarious. The Night Shot "oh yeah!" is a classic moment too. Thanks for sharing, vwestlife. My favorite CD botch job is more subtle: the US reissue of Spiritualized's Lazer Guided Melodies from 1996. The song called "Angel Sigh" plays for 1 minute, but then it goes "whoops" and the track starts again and plays as normal. To this day, many US fans think it was deliberate.
The "MaxiPlay" was because though CDs could hold at least 74 minutes of music, many early CDs were copies of albums only 30 minutes or less in length. The nomenclature was used so you knew when you bought that CD you were getting 60+ minutes of music.
A Frankie Goes to Hollywood CD compilation was released within the last ten years. Remixes were made available that were previously only heard on cassette single. Problem was that welcome to the pleasuredome was in dual mono so missing content from one channel in its entirety. Customers were entitled to a rectified replacement. Worryingly I've discovered the faulty copy of the track has re-emerged on a more recent Frankie compilation. Very poor care and attention. Your one channel only disc really takes the biscuit however.
Back in 87 when the Beatles CD's came out a friend of mine bought " A Hard Day's Night". When he played it it was Pink Floyd "Meddle". We just chalked it up as a factory screw up. He took it back but I wanted to buy it off him just for the novelty. Lol
I bought a Killing Joke "Night Time" CD in San Diego in the 90's only to find out that it was the wrong music and artist. The guy at the store had to actually play the CD [scan through it] to verify my claims. I ended up keeping that CD - as well as buying the REAL one too. Still have it.
Mine aren't mistakes but it is an interesting story. I lived in China for almost 2 decades and in the late 90's CD's by the millions started getting shipped into southern China to be recycled. I mean the plastic was to be recycled. But the CD's were cut along each box so as to damage the discs so they wouldn't be "new". It was either done by the port authorities or the music label themselves. Anyway, CD's are read from the inside out so if they didn't cut into the box deeply the discs would only get a slight cut or maybe 1/4" inch. Most CD's would play absolutely fine. I have several hundred CD's like this. Young people who knew people at these recycling areas would go in and buy boxes and boxes of these cut CD's and take them to their hometown and sell the discs in little 'secret' shops, this is authoritarian China, so they need to be hidden. Still many CDs wouldn't get cut at all. A lot of Japanese CD's didn't get cut. I got some really nice things, but they have little cuts in the discs. Right before the Beijing 2008 Olympics happened most of these shops disappeared. I am not back home in the US but I still have a lot of these CD's. I also got CD's that had the wrong artist on the CD and I even got some DVD's that have the wrong movie artwork on the disc.
720p? Edit: more like wrong label has been printed onto the disc (1:30) :))) Edit 2: A Matter of Life and Death (Iron Maiden, 2006), the material wasn't even mastered, but it sounded great compared to contemporary music (the squashed by dynamic range compression). For their follow up album, The Final Frontier (2010) same method was used as previous one. Except this time, the result was much less desirable. How come? Well, instead of checking everything with studio monitor speakers & headphones, Steve Harris (band leader, bassist & co-producer) listened to CD's on his car stereo! Came back to Kevin Shirley (producer) and be like: "Yeah, this is good, send this to pressing." Of course, when album hit the shelves & people noticed clipping & other undesirable artifacts, Harris replied with: "oops." :P
The only CD I owned that had anything resembling a defect was the 1986 EU issue of _A New World Record_ by ELO. Track 7, _Above The Clouds_ is not stated anywhere on the artwork, and instead appears as a long track 6 with _Livin' Thing._ With vinyl, I used to buy reissued singles on the *Old Gold* label, which was a great way of building a collection of 7" oldies. One I purchased was _Long Hot Summer_ by the Style Council, but instead of the wonderfully dreamy 1983 version, it was the utterly pointless 1989 remix with that annoying TR808 drum machine troweled on top.
Is it possible the 7th track is actually a "second movement" and was intended as part of track 6? In '86 they were still using indexing marks on CD, I have some Cds with tracks that have multiple parts, like Atom Heart Mother by Pink Floyd on CD, the tracks show up on my 1986 Akai CD-A30 II LCD display as "01 04", that would be track 1, index 4, where the original record had only 1 track on side A, split into 6 parts, but newer CD players won't show indexing, so you won't know when part 1 of track 1 ends and part 2 begins. Most CD players won't show index numbering, and it's been dropped from CDs meta-data since i think around late 80s, early 90s.
@@Daijyobanai Back then it led me to consider _Livin’ Thing_ and _Above The Clouds_ as two parts of a suite. As for CD indexing, I don’t recall the index counter advancing when playing that track. The only CD I owned with track indexing was _MCMXC AD_ by Enigma.
I once bought a bootleg CD in Wentworth Falls New South Wales - a bootleg version of an Albert Ayler live concert called "Live At Slug's Saloon" - a particularly extreme example of free jazz. Well, this CD turned out to have the most extreme error I have ever encountered on a CD. A large chunk of one track had been turned BACK TO FRONT. It was literally backwards. When I pointed this out on a jazz forum I frequented back then, someone said: "How could you tell??" Which is fair enough with Albert Ayler.😄
I can think of three offhand (that I didn't cover in my own video awhile back). My early '90's copy of The Byrds' "The Notorious Byrd Brothers" has the text on one spine upside down. My first (and now long gone) copy of Ozzy Osbourne's "No More Tears" had a copy of Disc 1 of Ozzy's box set in it (not mislabeled, just the wrong disc). And, my late '80's/early '90's copy of The Alan Parsons Project's "The Turn Of A Friendly Card" has the title suite indexed on the CD as one track (6a., b., c., etc.), but plays as five tracks.
I remember once reading that some cds sold on amazon was fake, i just found the report. "The music industry claims pirated CDs are once again an increasing problem, with research carried out by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) revealing that around 22 per cent of CDs that the industry body ordered from Amazon were fake. The RIAA ordered 194 CDs and found 44 to be counterfeit.31 Oct 2016"
Still a common occurance with SD cards - apparently they mix up the stock they get from resellers with the regular stock so even if you buy the card from Amazon proper rather than a reseller that happens to store their stuff in an Amazon warehouse, they just pick up whatever they have in the warehouse (whether it's the Amazon stock or the reseller's stock) and you still end up getting a bootleg.
@@toposebi95 it's called commingled stock. If multiple sellers (including Amazon themselves) stock exactly the same new in box item at an Amazon warehouse, Amazon by default will put all those items into the same bin (real or virtual) so that when the item is bought from Amazon or one of the other sellers, it could be pulled from the stock of any of them. What can happen with that is some sellers may send in items with boxes in rough condition, the items might be damaged, or counterfeit. Then when one of those is sent out by Amazon to fulfill another seller's order, that seller (who sent in all good items) gets shat on by the disgruntled buyer. To avoid that, sellers need to use the option to not commingle their stock. Amazon takes a slightly larger cut of the sales for that.
8:59 I absolutely LOVE those upside-down spine CDs! I store all my CDs vertically, so while going through I have to adjust my eyesight or whatever (I don't turn my head) to read the titles anyway, and those wrong spines add a little bit of diversity to an otherwise quite boring process
In my early 20s, I bought a used copy of Rush’s “Hold Your Fire” that turned out to be mis-pressed with some classical music. In what I now, as a collector, consider to be a real bonehead move, I returned it to the store for a refund 😳
The unforgettable fifties CD is right channel only probably because the music was originally recorded in mono and when this CD was made they forgot to change the audio setting/switch to dual mono so just a single channel it is sent to both channels. Leaving it on stereo will only output 1 channel. Strange that it is the right channel. The left channel is usually used for mono output.
Here in Mexico, I used to work for a wholesale walmart branch club, and we received a batch of new albums, and a whole lot of Lenny Kravitz album "Lenny" from 2001 was mismatched, it contained some sort of Colombian folk music instead. The whole container was returned, and the store manager was advised because I was the first one to buy one of those discs.
@@KRAFTWERK2K6 could have left pan at the middle then. What I see happen most likely is that they had a new guy or their guy forgot how pan knob works.
I used to work at a disc manufacturing plant that sounds like Pony. I remember at least 3 discs that got the wrong silkscreen on the disc. There is a razor branded CD that was supposed to have 6 or 8 random tracks on it, that after shipping 20 or 40k discs, we learned had a Playstation football game on it. 🤣🤣 The CDs were the near black Playstation color on the bottom...who missed that!? Oh, what about Japanese superbit "20" bit CDs? I know they are not standard redbook audio as almost no ripping software can do it properly. There is SOMETHING different about them.
My favourite band, Midnight Oil, released a new album this year called "Resist". However, the CD-Text has the title as "Show Of Hands" which presumably was the working title of the album, and it's also a lyric from one of the album's songs. The release was delayed due to the pandemic etc. so presumably they had already mastered the album, decided on a new title, but forgot to have the CD text updated to match. I also think "Show Of Hands" is kind of an appropriate title for both your RU-vid channel and mine.
Apparently the Spongebob SquarePants Movie CD soundtrack has HDCD encoded in the disc as well but there's also no indication of it anywhere in the case. Not even on the disc.
I've encountered dozens of the upside down spine labels. The designer needs to have the text orientated correctly in the page layout program for it to print the right way; it's easy to "mix up" but you would think a proof would be printed before 1,000s of copies are made. To fix it you can carefully cut the paper and re-attach with some tape on the inside. It seems to be more of an issue with double CD cases. I remember seeing a multi-page CD booklet where the story text was completely out of order in terms of page numbers. But my most unexpected music mix up came to me via a 33 rpm record....I've got an album from a fairly well known classic rock band that was pressed with a different band's music on the B side. The HDCD issue you found was interesting, but it might be player related. I know that there are a few different "kinds" of SACD (hybrid discs, etc) and not all play in all SACD player models.
I have a number of them that quickly come to mind: 1 - Funhouse - Hazardous to Your Health - Wrong spine orientation. 2 - Robotech Perfect Soundtrack Album - Wrong spine orientation - Mislabeled CDs (Disc 1 is labeled as Disc 2, and Disc 2 is labeled as Disc 1). 3 - Keiko Matsui - Dream Walk - US Release - Disc and artwork mark it as an Enhanced CD, but it isn't. There's nothing on the disc aside from the audio tracks. 4 - Armitage III Cybermatrix - Soundtrack - Wrong spine orientation. 5 - Jethro Tull - Thick As A Brick - 25th Anniversary Edition - While the slipcover has the correct spine orientation, the CD case does not.
That Keiko Matsui disc I remember buying new from Target in 1996 and it was indeed at the time an enhanced disc. It had a music video of "Bridge Over The Stars". The extra content played fine on my Windows 95 PC at the time, but the extra content of that disc could not be accessed on my Windows XP PC years later. I say look at the playing side of the disc - if you see a larger than normal gap in the content after the last song, then the disc should be an enhanced CD. Since my copy of the CD is currently in storage, I cannot test it on my Windows 10 PC at this time to figure how to access the content using a modern operating system. I found that video on youtube posted here - just add watch?v=HdQQdJsTOjc to the end of the youtube.com url to see it.
@@jerryporter3903 Thank you for letting me know what the extra content was supposed to be. (The disc packaging doesn't include that.) Unless my copy uses some obscure format to hide the extra content I don't believe it exists on mine. Unlike the other Enhanced CDs I have, this one is always shown to be a single-session audio CD. (Though playing David Bowie's "Ashes to Ashes" music video from the _Sound+Vision Plus_ CD-Video disc requires a laserdisc player.) [Later] I have an external optical drive which the Mac I have here recognized, but that also only sees this dis as a regular audio CD.
I used to be a member of the now-defunct Jazz Heritage Society CD club (itself being a division of the classical Musical Heritage Society) back in the early 2000s, and they, like most CD/record clubs, had their own pressings of jazz albums previously released on other labels that they would license and re-release for the club. The CD inserts of their re-releases, although printed well, were always a black & white copy of the original album cover artwork, with the track listings and liner notes in the insert, and on the face of the CD, being rather generically reproduced (albeit the same text) compared to the more typographically stylized insert notes and CD face on the original releases from the original labels. The discs themselves sounded good though with the proper tracks, indistinguishable from the original releases, from what I could tell.
The "Best" one I ever had was a box set of singles from the Cocteau Twins, where 1/2 of them were random violent rap tracks. They were labeled as expected, just different audio tracks.
Thank God you crossed out that HDCD logo off that one particular Lonestar CD for future generations who will haplessly listen and think they're hearing 20 bits, crisis averted!!!
When I was a kid, I used to rent this one CD compilation of Disney songs from the library, and it would always skip on the first few songs. Turns out, they messed up in the manufacturing process somewhere and the two layers of the disc were glued off center. It still technocly played, but the first few tracks skipped a lot.
Speaking of cds having misled tracks, some karaoke laserdiscs like the ubest compilation even have wrong track with wrong artist. Like example of a ubest top songs 23 disc have sweet love by The Commodore with Lionel Richie written on the back cover track listing coz he wrote the song but when you listen to it, it’s actually Anita Baker’s song.
When I go to record stores for used CDs, lot of the CDs are mislabeled and most of the jewel cases and discs are damaged. I have a portable CD player just to check if the discs are actually working.
I remember an incident in the mid 90s, at our local Hastings (R.I.P.). I walked in to talk with the guys at the music counter, who were already laughing together in amusement, because a customer had recently returned a copy of the Space Jam soundtrack, because instead of the movie soundtrack... it had the Back in Black album by AC/DC on it! Lol. Pretty funny! 🤘
Don't have a big collection or anything, but I own a My Bloody Valentine Loveless remaster that has the disc mislabeling issue. Disc 1 is actually disc 2. It was funny, since disc 1 was meant to be the original DAT tape master while 2 was the analog tape. People would comment on disc 2, which they thought was the analog tape master, sounding "warmer", and it was. The classic DAT version is less harsh than the analog master. In this same remaster, halfway through one song is an annoying digital glitch. Thankfully neither of my copies have this, but I've heard it in a download.
If you want to break a CD, strike it on a metal spindle roughly the size of a CD hole. At Pony, we used to take discs for shredding and we would have fun trying to either break it into 2 perfect halves or try to break it into as many pieces as possible. 🤣🤣 I have so many funny/stupid stories from those days.
I have an SACD set of Alexander Gavrylyuk playing Prokofiev's piano concertos, and on the second disc (I think) there's a track where there's cell phone interference. Apparently the sound engineer didn't switch their phone off when doing the mastering. Not sure if this should be called a CD-related screwup, but shelling out the cash for an SACD only to hear cell phone interference popping out of nowhere really made me mad. I'm not 100% sure if it was the second disc in the set, because I never went back to it after that first listen, I'm still that mad.
I would assume that the interference already got in during recording somewhere between microphone and ADC, not at mastering level - at least it would be odd for an SACD not to be using digital recordings. Pro audio equipment is not necessarily entirely immune to RFI. Microphone inputs and microphones are the most likely entry points.
You should do a video about studio albums recorded in analog that have tape wrinkles in them and were to find it. On the Devo album 'Freedom Of Choice' the track 'Snowball' there's a place where the tape got eaten around the 1 minute mark...and all of us probably are aware of the temporary loss of azimuth lock in the M.C. Hammer song 'U Can't Touch This' towards the end. In the early version of Tangerine Dream's 'Cyclone' album the tape that they digitized off of had one drop out in each of the first two songs. Yes, tape wrinkles exist.
The early CDs of the first few Police albums are bad, especially "Roxanne". There's very noticeable tape drag and the first few guitar "duns" are flat.
I don't have any good CD stories, but I recently bought a copy of "Back in the High Life" by Steve Winwood on cassette that was probably the worst bootleg I've run across. The j-card was a badly-copied version of the LP cover that was shrunk down, the songs were muffled and almost unlistenable on side A, while side B was, I kid you not, recorded onto the tape backwards.
That sounds absolutely amazing. Do you have it still? Maybe you could submit it to discogs, I am a collector of bootleg cassettes and I would love to see this and learn more about it.
@@hypnotised-clover unfortunately, I returned it to Retro Records (the local record store in my town), where I bought it. I like bootlegs too, but not if it is unlistenable. I exchanged it for a tape of the music of Charles Manson.
They probably recorded it on a 4-track PortaStudio or Tascam cassette mixing tape machine and instead of reversing the audio after rewinding to the beginning of Side A they just dumped it on verbatim.
Bless your heart that you have never heard about the biggest track list/CD recording blunder ever: the various failed pressings of the „Tol Cormpt Norz Norz Norz“ by Impaled Nazarene: Original pressing was indexed incorrectly. Re-release was supposed to correct it, but made it even worse, with songs all over the place, fused together etc. Only the third pressing got it correct. It was… a clusterfuck.
I remember buying a new Michael Jackson CD in the early nineties, pretty sure it was the Dangerous album and it had an entirely wrong album on it, some other rap album I'd never heard. I took it back, and apparently they'd gotten a bunch like this. It was purchased at one of those huge music stores you'd find in malls.
Bought a 3 CD set of 80's music from TimeLife years ago. On one of the disks is Kim Wilde's "You Keep Me Hangin' On". At about 25 seconds into the track, there is what I think is an overlay of music from a different section of the song which lasts for about a half a second. Drives me nuts every time I forget and accidentally listen to that track.
I’ve never seen this as a subject of a video before but I found that fascinating, and as an ex graphic designer of CDs who always felt that my typefacing was a little under par, I felt like a god of it compared to some of those CD covers. That set that had no spine consistency across the collection hurt me.
One of my teachers at the audio engineering school once showed me a disc where they managed to print the label on the wrong side of the disc (!!!). However it turned out to be great for testing error correction of different players, as they would react differently to the disc.
I'm not completely certain, but I think that the original US pressings of Basement Jaxx's _Remedy_ may have been from a glitchy master. There's a noticeable clicking noise at about 50 seconds into "Rendez-Vu" in my copy, and I swear I even remember noticing this same glitch in the iTunes Store preview years ago (though the version that's currently on iTunes sounds correct).
In 1991, RCA Victor released a collection of Isao Tomita's albums encoded in Dolby Surround based on the quadraphonic mixes. Each spine had a letter so that together they'd spell out TOMITA. The only problem was that they only released five of the albums, so the entire collection only spells out TOMIT. A cheap release of classic recordings of Christmas songs that came with some magazine had one of the channels polarity inverted. Once I ripped it and fixed the polarity issue, I found that there was extreme pumping on some of the tracks, probably due to some lazy attempt at noise reduction.
Those Tomita's CD. I own three of those CDs and yes, I wondered which album could be the last "A". I'm absolutely obsessed with these CDs. They are great.
i once ripped a cd that for some reason had a pre-emphasis mark only for the last track on the album but not the others. wasn't even a compilation, it was a straight album, so it's a weird decision. I also have a copy of The Downward Spiral by Nine Inch Nails that has a weird quirk with the table of contents. Track 12 is supposed to be the song Reptile, followed by track 13: The Downward Spiral. For some reason on my copy track 12 ends in the middle of Reptile, but track 13 continues on, playing the second half of the song and the next track. So i can listen to it straight through, but if i want to listen to Reptile on it's own i'd have to dig up the mp3s i bought from Google Play. so much for upgrading!
I have a copy of Rated R by Queens of The Stone Age that has the 30 second reprise of Feel Good Hit of The Summer as a separate track but that's in no way indicated on the back of the CD case, meaning that there's 11 tracks listed on the back of the CD case but in reality there's 12 tracks on the disc itself therefore messing up the tracklist by one song. That's always bugged me, lol
Absolutely incredible, informative and funny video. 4:07 everytime this songs comes on the 80's radio that my parents listen to all the time, I remember your video and have a little chuckle
I actually have a fully misprinted CD. I ordered an album by the group The Anti Nowhere League, which is a Punk Rock band. Packaging was all correct, CD was printed correctly. When I put it in the CD player, instead of a blast of early 80's Punk music, I got The Beatles - Sgt Peppers album. I still have that copy as an amusing artifact.
Some CD's by the audiophile label DCC Compact Classics had errors with track sequencing, one that I can name off the top of my head is from one of the CCR albums, the entire guitar intro for 'Bad Moon Rising' was left on the end of the track before it. You'd think someone who's hailed as an audio God like Steve Hoffman (Who mastered the discs for DCC) Would've caught such an error. Although it seems that Kevin Gray has retroactively been given much of the credit for how good many of their releases sounded.
The Lost Prophets album StartSomething has this but IIRC it was a deliberate attempt to stop people ripping the tracks and distributing them individually. The DCC Compact Classics release was in 1993 so clearly they weren't worried abotu Napster at that time.
Thanks for another awesome and interesting video! I have a large collection of CDs and will be looking for errors from now on out of curiosity. My copy of Journey's Red 13 has the spine printed the wrong way. I'm sure I have others like that too.
Please do more videos like this; I find this shit fascinating. I know it's completely innocuous nowadays with the world of streaming but I just love this weird esoteric looks at old outdated music formats. Also can I just say that I HATE the look of those low budget CD's that are just black writing printed on top of a CD with no background. They used them so much for those compilation CD's marketed towards elderly people and I don't find them charming in the slightest.
When an interlude is counted as a separate track on the back of the cd but is not a separate track on the cd. The whole cd listing is out of whack. The CB4 soundtrack (UK Print) is one, track 6 on the listing is track 5 on the cd, and the recently incarcerated R. Kelly's 12 Play (UK Print) is out of whack after an intermission. I have a few Hip-Hop albums with clean/radio edit tracks put in by mistake. Plenty of cds with a upside spines. If I was the artist I would be livid!
The original pressing of Rush's Moving Pictures album had a major error. About the first quarter to half a second of Tom Sawyer is missing which chops off the beginning of the opening chord of the song. This was one of the first CDs that I purchased when they first came out. I returned it to the store and the replacement had the same issue.
I have 3 or 4 CDs where the track indexing/timecode wasn't mastered correctly. Some where the next track starts early before indicating the next track number and some late.
I have an Animals CD that has the wrong label printed on it. The disc looks like a Righteous Brothers CD, but it still plays the Animals. Both of the CDs are on ABKCO and have similar catalogue numbers. And yes, I added it to Discogs.
I have a Kraftwerk CD (The Man Machine, Capitol Records CDP 7 46039 2) where there's an obvious dropout in the beginning of the second track (Spacelab). The audio drops left and right as if someone accidentally hit record in the middle of an audio tape. It's not present in the German version (Die Mensch-Maschine) or on Spotify, so it must really be a fault made in mastering to CD.
Audio dropouts are far from uncommon on CDs that used analogue masters, especially older albums where they often didn't go back to the original masters and used whatever they could find (possibly masters for LPs or other previous releases). A few also have more digital sounding clicks, like the original CD issue of The Human League's Dare
@@AaronSmart.online the label says ADD, which means it was an analogue recording but the mixing and mastering was digital. So either the label was misleading (though in 1978 digital equipment was available and Kraftwerk were forerunner of technology) or someone REALLY messed up in mastering, as a digital mix was already available. What strikes me more though, is that a band who really goes for perfection, was let down so much by poor quality control. This wasn't some sort of greatest hits compilation, it was a landmark in electronic music.
@@volvo480 you're talking about a CD mastered in the '80s - if there was a dropout in the analogue source tape then they didn't have the ability to correct that back then.
If you listen to some of the remasters of eagles music from 2018, especially in the city, you can hear some nasty tape dropouts that were not present on earlier remasters. The original Masters and even the earlier remasters sounded fine to me. This is one problem I've been noticing lately is that the more people trying to go back and remaster older music, the original tapes sound worse because they've degraded and the equipment isn't kept up the best.
Here (in Australia at least), Black Sabbath got pretty bad treatment. Blackest Sabbath (a best of compilation) listed Wheels of Confusion as Snowblind. And then for the actual albums themselves (Paranoid, Master of Reality etc) there was a company who mastered the CD releases called Premium Masters with absolutely second rate results. Each song had bad distortion in it that wasn't in the original tracks. There was nothing "premium" about it and the people behind it were "masters" of nothing. Speaking of Black Sabbath, the album Master of Reality was supposed to be Masters of Reality, but the original record company stuffed it up and had a typo in the artwork. The band just went along with it and renamed the album rather than getting all the album presses redone.
