Announcement: Prince and the Christmas present

Oddly enough, when I did a google search for Prince, vinyl and test pressing, I got a picture of an Alpaca. Alrighty then!

So here's what's up, the Christmas present is approaching completion and I want to let everyone know what the deal is with that. I'm going to be sending off e-mails to everyone who offered to help with seeding later today but now for the announcement.

On December 10th, I will be posting the Ridiculously Deluxe Edition of Sign O' The Times. It will be a seven disc box set available in FLAC and V0 MP3 and completely suitable for burning to CD and keeping in your collection. Here are the contents:

Disc 1 - Sign O' The Times:
This is a fresh rip from my own collection of an original US vinyl pressing of the album. I haven't shared this version with anyone prior to this. It has been manually declicked where necessary and sounds like a dream. It also fits entirely on one CD so you can now play it all the way through without swapping discs.

Disc 2 - B-Sides and Non-Album Tracks:
A collection of B-Sides, Remixes and Non-Album Tracks from Sign O' The Times and it's surrounding era. The majority of these tracks have been sourced from T's 12" Collection V2.0 and sound beautiful.

Disc 3 - Dream Factory:
The final version of the Dream Factory album from 86/87 that eventually became Crystal Ball/Sign O' The Times.

Disc 4 - Camille:
The unreleased Camille album. This is technically a fan assembly of the album by myself but it sounds great in my opinion. I've used the best sources for all the tracks and everything was from a lossless source, or in the case of Rebirth Of The Flesh, the best source I could find.

Disc 5 - The Black Album:
This is a fresh vinyl rip of The Black Album from a 1994 German pressing of the album. It is the same version that was posted here earlier.

Disc 6 - Outtakes:
A collection of outtakes with a focus on the Dream Factory era. Many of the tracks are taken from the Work It collection although they've been tweaked and edited for maximum quality.

Disc 7 - Additional Outtakes:
More outtakes with a focus on the Crystal Ball/Sign O' The Times era.


I also have 24 Bit, 96khz versions of the SOTT and Black Album vinyl rips which I'm considering posting, although I'm really interested in trying to make DVD-Audio discs from them. I would assume that would make it easier for most people to enjoy them.

Squirrelgrease, the fellow who did the amazing art for Fun With Vinyl's collections, is doing the art and packaging for this collection so you know it'll be excellent! Big thanks to him! I'd still love to see any art anyone wants to contribute to this project or their own personal visions, kind of like the NIN community has done for their fan releases, but we can discuss that later. Regardless, SG is gonna kick a ton of ass!

As this won't be the last homemade deluxe edition of a Prince album I make, it's worth stating that I'm starting a new blog that will run alongside The Unheard Music, although it won't be updated nearly as frequently. That site will be named There Are No Kings and it will focus on those deluxe editions as well as Prince side-project deluxe editions. At the moment, the first two releases planned for that site are the lossless version of the Lovesexy deluxe edition I posted here earlier, although I'm going to tweak it a bit before posting it, and a two disc version of Purple Rain with the main album sourced from the 2008 Kevin Gray mastered vinyl reissue of the album that Rhino released. I'm planning for the first thing to be posted to T.A.N.K. in January, though it might be a little earlier.

I'm going to cut a little early on the lossless side-project releases here and share the last one next week, though I might continue sharing them at T.A.N.K. before January. All T.A.N.K. updated will also be shared here.

Finally, the deluxe edition projects, as I'm planning them, will feature fresh vinyl rips of the albums in question. I've got a number of Prince albums on vinyl but I don't have them all, so if you have some and can do good vinyl rips please let me know, I'd love to use your rips for those releases and I'll make certain you get credit for your work. Apart from that, more info will be given as we get closer to 12/10/10. Now if only I could get Prince to pay me to do this! That'll be the day!