Downloaded Wings Albums are Different Recordings

Posted by: PeterJ on 08 February 2016

On Friday I downloaded Band on the Run and Venus and Mars by Paul McCartney and Wings as 96KHZ FLACs from High Res Audio.

Both albums were deluxe versions with extra tracks. However, the 'original' album tracks are different versions from the ones on the 'classic' albums/CDs. These tracks are a different performance/recording to the classic versions and nowhere near as good with a lot a piano/vocal solos from McCartney.

I expect that a 'deluxe' version will have additional tracks and that there will be some re-mastering but I have never had anything like this where the main tracks are completely different recordings/performances. It is really worrying to be unsure if a downloaded album is the original version.

Has anybody else experienced this?

Posted on: 09 February 2016 by PeterJ

The mystery has been solved. There were both alternative and original versions of the tracks but they had the same filenames. So, when they were downloaded (to my Melco N1A) the alternative versions overwrote the originals. Melco will be putting in a fix for this.

Posted on: 11 February 2016 by Harry

Band On The Run is one of the best adverts I've heard to date for HiRes. Not a favourite album of mine but back in the days of very little material available in 24bit I took anything I could get. If anything it sounded more dated than ever to me. But what a superb rendering. I got it from HD Tracks and there were two versions of the album in the package.I have plenty of material with different mixes and alternative versions in 16 and 24 bits. It is not uncommon.