It’s about this "Pseudo-Release"¹, currently in the RG of Sultans of Swing: The Very Best of Dire Straits.
The track list is quite different from any other release found there. And worse, its recordings do not match the recordings used on this compilation.² In fact, they don’t match any other known recordings of the respective songs at all. Although the lengths of the tracks also vary on other releases, they are similar enough to be the same recordings. On this release, all track lengths are problematic. They are off by a few or many seconds or just between the lengths of known versions. But these lengths are supported by a disc ID…
¹) I asked the editor “Why Pseudo-Release?” and got no answer, but now I think it was an attempt to separate this release from the others.
(16-track versions have the same tracklist with 2 live recordings appended, special editions have more live tracks on bonus CDs or additional DVDs, but all with reasonable track lengths)
Now, what should be done?
My preferred choice would be to remove the release completely. Or at least make it a bootleg and move it to a separate RG.
And the recordings? It would probably be best to make them all separate recordings with disambiguation (unknown version). I’m not convinced that these are actually the titles listed. The disc ID doesn’t tell us that.
There are no edit notes in history (add release, add medium add disc id).
You could simply remove the release, IMO, if you didn’t find any matching releases outside MB for such a famous band.
Like @Comrade_Mike I’d suggest bootleg. Seen it quite often where someone sees part of a title and merges the RG but does not check the content. I’ve split a few up before like this - just carve it off into a new release group.
It looks very similar to another one I saw a few weeks back which also had tagged the first track into part of the title.
Also happens a lot with “Greatest Hits” collections… often getting heaped in together, but not really the same collection of tracks.
An example of a Russian “greatest hits” bootleg with track times chopped and diced to fit more onto the release.
These kinds of cheap compilations will usually just lift common tracks from other compilations or the albums. In this example I tried to match as many of the tracks up as possible and mostly merged them into the real things. They are just the same recordings.
I did get a copy of this from a torrent “for research purposes”. Not as if I could “steal” a product that had already been stolen… and I already had all these tracks anyway. Which is why I could place each of them. And wrote that pointlessly over the top description of how each track had been butchered to fit so many on one CD.
