Sony Intentionally Left Off 2 Huge Hits !
358831
I searched for one ELO Greatest Hits CD to buy & I noticed that all 3 single disc hits collections are missing hits. But this one is the newest, and they could have corrected the problem with 20 tracks included here. But what did they do ? They purposely chose not to include 2 of the band's biggest smash hits - CAN'T GET IT OUT OF MY HEAD and DO YA. At full list price, and not a mid-line, they could have easily picked the 20 biggest hit singles that ELO has. Instead they put on some filler tracks. How can you leave off these 2 classic singles? It has to have been an intentional thing. Too bad, as being a full price CD, they really are gyping the buyer. As it is, I chose the " ESSENTIAL ELECTRIC LIGHT ORCHESTRA " CD to buy. At 15 tracks, it has most of their chart singles, though SHOWDOWN is conspicuously absent . The " ELO GREATEST HITS " CD is just the original album reissued , which captures them at mid-career, hence , does not include the hits after that point. Too bad that corporate Sony purposely screwed up the perfect chance to get all of ELO's hit singles on one CD with this ALL OVER THE WORLD : THE VERY BEST OF ELO. It is not the very best .
598234
I tried to buy this twice. Both times I got the Best of DeBussey and not Grieg. From 2 different sources. Sony screwed up!
266431
I own both the 400 and 300 CD jukes, having bought them in the late '90s and 2002, respectively.  From 2010 until now, the 400 was in storage while I completed a major remodel, and the 300 remained in its box, unopened.  Last week I plugged in the 400, and it slowly sputtered back to life.  Not wanting to overtax it, I manually scrolled thru all 400 discs one at a time in order to gently allow it to relubricate itself.  When I pushed play, it sputtered once or twice more, then kicked into gear, and has been shuffling along ever since.  The 300 fired up right away with no sputtering at all.  This weekend I'm going to link the two units and settle in for an extended-play megashuffle!

Does Sony make great products or what?
1315845
Dang it! This one started out soooo good - great audio quality, cool video art design and good camera angles, etc. and then... right over the top of the song, we get commentary by the artist himself. Couldn't we have waited until the song was over for that stuff?

The worst part of it is that it happened several more times throughout the disc. I was very disappointed as the playing was excellent by both Misters Guy and Smith. Some of the camera angles on Buddy's hands were great. You could really get a sense that his one-of-a-kind sound comes from those fingers and his playing, not all from his custom artist model Strat or the amp he was playing through.

It's a pleasureable view nonetheless... but it could have been so much more.
3364893
It's hard to believe the number of tracks duplicated on this and the competing compilation Ultra Weekend 2. The remix of Coldplay is on both, but longer here. The Oakenfold mix of "Sorry" by Madonna is longer on Ultra Weekend 2. Danielle Bollinger's "Kiss the Sky" is less than a minute longer on Ultra Weekend 2. Goldfrapp's "Ooh la la" is almost the same exact length on both discs...and closes both! On the bright side, while Kelly Clarkson's "Walk Away" is on both compilations, this disc has the Craig J mix and Ultra Weekend 2 has the Chris Cox mix, which is a plus for those trying to collect these hard-to-find mixes (although, it would have been nice to have more than 4 minutes of the Craig J mix).

Disc 1 is loaded with mainstream dance tracks, many of them not all that great. The new mix of INXS is horrible--basically taking the original track and just adding a house beat, making it sound like a really weak bootleg. "Crazy" by Alanis didn't make a dent in radio play, and the remixes didn't help make it any more interesting. "Seasons of Love" has a bunch of remixes, some of which are better than the Gomi mix. This mix of "Doctor Pressure" doesn't even have a club beat and breaks up the flow of the mix, as does the clunky Junkie XL mix of Britney. Peter Presta's "totally hooked" samples "more than a feeling" by Boston, with a new melody by a male vocalist, and is one of the best tracks on disc 1, which moves from electro to hardhouse to disco house without rhyme or reason.

Disc 2 begins promising with the thumpin alternative male vocal track "Hard to Beat", but segues into the atrocious "Love Generation", which sounds like a bad Bob Marley rip off. "Music in Me" is a remix of the Kiki Dee classic, and is a total party anthem. Things mellow out with the Kaskade track, but then we get into a handful of peak hour female vocal anthems that taper off with the melancholy rerecording of "Dreams" by Stevie Nicks. One of the biggest treasures here is one of the remixes of New Order's "Guilt is a Useless Emotion"--a single that was not released commercially.  "So Special" is an uplifting and light house track with female vocal, and "tracking treasure down" has a somewhat trippy mood. And we finish with the pounding rhythms of Goldfrapp.

Overall, disc 2 flows much better than disc one. Thrive Mix 2 could have been improved with better sequencing of the songs, plus some optional mixes of a couple of tracks.

Track times:

CD1

1. talk (5:59)

2. Need you tonight (4:26)

3. walk away (4:28)

4. don't cha (6:09)

5. And then we kiss (4:15)

6. Crazy (3:55)

7. In my mind (4:58)

8. I'll be your light (5:28)

9. Seasons of love (5:42)

10. Doctor pressure (5:17)

11. sorry (4;22)

12. totally hooked (6:28)

CD2

1. hard to beat (6:10)

2. love generation (5:29)

3. Music in me (7:18)

4. Everything (4:23)

5. Kiss the sky (3:54)

6. give me your love (5:21)

7. house is not a home (5:01)

8. dreams (4:31)

9. guilt is a useless emotion (5:35)

10. so special (6:55)

11. tracking treasure down (7:02)

12. ooh la la (6:17)
3541731
I was hearing about bad Sony service till I had a similarly bad experience. Thankfully the camera was a rental! Now Sony is even looking the wrong direction. They're trying to create a sony approved service for a premium - meaning that you must own 2-3 sony full frame bodies and 2-3 sony gmaster lenses, disregarding completely all the people owning just one of these expensive easily breakable toys. Up your game Sony, because you have great technology and ZERO support. Same with your TV bravia line - after a month of emails I managed to get through to your software team - they told me a bug would be fixed on the next update - and 1 year later, the update came but the bug is still there. Just close up shop already!!...
1464318
Sony has let me down once again.

I only bought these because I had newly pierced traguses and needed something of good quality to go over my ears. There was a better version of these headphone but as usually, they discontinued it, and we are left with these crappy ones. These are so bad that I decided to just remove my piercings early, suffer the bleeding and swollen ears to put in flat backed piercings so that I could wear NON-Sony earbuds again.

I have a bad history with Sony. I have had to buy $400 in headphones from them (before I realized it) because their phones and earbuds have a tendency to fail after a few weeks, no matter how well cared for, the left ear ALWAYS goes out. When I call and ask them to improve the product they never do. When I get a replacement pair (not a refund) when my earbuds quit working after a week, the replacement pair also breaks or I am charged for it. Between my poor history, my Sony Playstation Network account being hacked and my MP3 Walkman being on the fritz since I first bought it, I'm done with Sony for the most part.

DO NOT WASTER YOUR MONEY!!!!!!!!!!!! Take it from an expert at wasting money on Sony. If you choose to take the risk, prepare to be completely disregarded by the company!
2561728
Sony,why did mess this collection up? Essential 3.0 is fine.."Open Our Eyes" and "I Am" are heavily represented now and worthy albums like "That's The Way Of The World","Spirit" and "All N' All" don't count now. (Still no "Love's Holiday" guys?) I'm glad to see "On Your Face" finally get some respect but really Sony,some of that stuff of the second disc is not worthy of an "Essential" collection.

I would recommend The Essential Earth,Wind & Fire 3.0 OVER this one with ease.
4514682
Record companies need to stop "double-dipping" with all these deluxe, platinum editions etc.  It has become the norm to throw a couple new songs on a successful album and re-release it to make more money without having to actually pay for an entire new album to be recorded.  And I'm sure 15 years down the road there will be an "Ultimate Edition' released, containing even more songs that didn't make the final album.

This version of the album has 5 new songs and 1 remix, plus the DVD with 5 music videos & some behind the scenes stuff.  None of the 5 new songs are as good as the 13 on the original album, which is probably why none of them have been released as a single to support this "platinum edition" of the album.  I bought the album for the music videos and the 5 new songs, but after listening to the songs I was very disappointed.  They sound like 5 songs that weren't good enough to be on the original album, so they saved them for later to make a few bucks extra on this version.

The bottom line is if you already own the first version of Fearless then this is probably not worth the money for you.  But if you didn't buy the original version yet then this is a good deal because you get a few extra songs plus the music videos for a couple bucks more than the original CD cost.
2371840
Buyer/Music Lover BEWARE! Collectables Records Inc. has put out Andy Williams albums that are good material. The problem is that these recordings were owned by Columbia, and when pulled from the catalog, were AWFULLY remastered by Collectables.  The recordings, which I have on vinyl, are beautiful, breathing, living recordings with even some "dynamics".  These remastered "Collectables" items are so bad as to be almost un-listenable.  The dynamics are flat, no loud or soft...all the same volume.  The excitement in the original recordings has been lost completely.  Helen Keller could have done a better job remastering.  When I got these three Collectables albums, I played them in my car first, and thought my CD player had developed some bizarre sonic problems!!! Brought the albums home, and the home system sounded just as bad!  I pulled out the vinyl copy I had put away, and it sounded great.  I ran the vinyl record through MAGIX cleaning program, and was able to create a beautiful CD complete with all the elements that were missing from the "new CD from Collectables".  Needless to say, from now on, rather than waste time and money on such a shabby..well, let's just say, I will be re-mastering my own Lp's before I ever go back to Collectables.  It is sad. They are licensed from Sony, who owns Columbia, and have put copy guard on the CD, which I understand, but they are protecting "garbage"..not the performance, but the transfer to CD.  If the recording is worth putting in the car or on your Itunes, perhaps you should look into a cleaning program for vinyl before you waste time and money on this disservice to a great artist and the great engineers who made him sound so good.
2646734
As many people may know by now, Sony was recently caught with egg on their face when a security specialist found out that a recently purchased CD (Van Zant: Get Right With The Man) from Sony music not only installed DRM software (digital rights management, to limit and outright prevent copying music to certain devices), but it did so in such a sneaky way that it hid itself entirely from Windows, and opened the system up to security issues such as viruses.

This CD has the same copyright protection, called XCP. When installed, Sony hijacks your computer and installs custom software which:

1) Hides itself entirely from Windows by installing as a rootkit

2) Hides itself in such a manner that any files begining with $sys$ are also hidden. For example, if you install the XCP copy protection software on your machine, and rename "document.doc" to "$sys$document.doc" it then becomes invivisble to you forever.

3) Installs its own custom CD-Rom drivers to hijack your system. It also sneakily names these drivers "Plug and Play Device Manager" to seem as if it's a part of Windows. Trying to delete these drivers manually will disable your CD-Rom drive entirely.

4) Offers no uninstall option until you manually contact Sony

As of my writing this review, Sony has "apologized" for this incident, and claims they will "re-evaluate" this copyright protection software on their CDs in the future.

In the meantime, a virus is currently running wild, which names itself begining with $sys$ in an attempt to hide from the user and virus scanners.

Several class action lawsuits are also pending against Sony right now.

In summary, as you can tell from above, Sony's actions here are absolutely horrible. This is your music. You purchased it, and they should not have any right to dictate how you can use it, let alone install software which compromises your system security.

This is one of the CDs with Sony's XCP copyright protection software on it, and as a result, you should not buy it to send a message to Sony that this will NOT be tolerated in the future.
3174413
This HHD upgrade  works great  once you Sony ' s websites sucks. (No fault  to World computing  company ) This software  update  was the worst !! 2.03 is the latest this was released  couple  of  weeks  ago. Sony didn't  fully  release  this software, I formatted  2 usb thumb drive to Fat 32,upper  case letters  for the  file,change letters font, checked operating  system  of my laptops. I'm not a newbie  to this and this software  kicked  my tail for 3 sleepless  days ! ! ( Yea..hate to  say  it !!) Tried all the different  sizes  files, pulled  drop,into one file, but doing the time of the release  of this 2.03 software  that didn't  work  for me. I had all errors messages, looked them on Sony 's websites. Reinstall  over again- same results. (Like I said before  - not  new to  this).  I decided  to just to purchase  this 2.03software  on usb thumb.  From this seller on eBay  (World of video games and electronics )This seller  is TOP SHELF - Fast & smooth  transaction !! Once  I received  this usb thumb  drive  with 2.03software. (Damm ..Sony) That's  was the ONLY!!  issue  the software  updates . This upgrade  kit is THE BOMB ! ! after  all of that. Now I have my space after the license  of Sony  out of 2tb,  there's  1.77tb of FREE STORAGE .After downloading  the(15) games,apps, and saved game data. I have now 1.28 tb FREE STORAGE . . So now with my old  500 gb hard drive with  the enclosed  housing - will be for my Xboxone. That's  also 500gb, but xboxone  supports External  hard drives. So don't  let  me scare you off from this upgrade . Maybe  Sony  fully  released this 2.03 software. But this  kit is worth  the  time and  patience  for me. It's now been  2 weeks  now with this new upgrade - NO ISSUE !! I purchased  this  from the company  themselves just  cause  Amazon  was sold out, and I  couldn't  wait needed  my space  to play  The Crew & COD.. So I hope my sleepless nights helped you out .. (Lol), but there's light at the end of the tunnel...And you would  see 1.77tb of FREE SPACE  !!
9510
The first disc is just like a greatest hits of his previous albums with remix. The second disc is new album of new songs. I listened to the first disc on my system in my car with two P2 Rockford with a Power T500-1bd Amp, and with the song Competition Hertz. Damn I got out of my car and walked about 100 feet away and I can hear my trunk lid like someone with a jackhammer trying to get in it. LMAO! I was like HOLY ****! All I can say is all songs are for serious BASS listeners. If you want to test your subwoofer's for serious systems, this is a dual disc to get for sure.

I recommend this for mediocre systems and up. If you have cheap system, beware of Blowing your stuff quick. Not for beginners of car audio.
3007924
This is the second time Maroon 5 has released a new single, in this case "This Summer", on an already released CD causing the consumer to purchase the album again if they want the track.  They did the same thing with Moves Like Jagger on the Hands all over CD.  I like you guys, but I'm not spending my hard earned money on buying something new for 1 track when I already purchased the deluxe edition that didn't include yet another single so that you can get richer by squeezing more money from my pocket.
4976523
I am not a fan of Michael Jackson. I am a Prince fan. I am a fan of musicians, not just singers. So I should be a fan of Justin Timberlake and Usher right? Wrong. Getting back to Jacko. Usually BEST OF, GREATEST HITS or ESSENTIAL albums/box sets are filled with their complete hit catalogue. But there is always a song or two that should be on there and one song that is one there that shouldn't be. Who (or whom)ever arranged this hit fulfilled 3.0 package is just a few songs of perfect. Agree or disagree.

First of all, The 3rd disc starts with "Can't Get Outta The Rain". Now before I continue, here's Amazon's start of their product description of the Essential Limited series. 'Each Essential Limited Edition 3.0 expanded 3-CD set features the biggest hits and best-loved songs from superstar artists'. "Can't Get Outta The Rain" Best-loved? This song is awful. It's mocking disco with silly chants and noises. Quincy Jones should hide under a tree if ever asked about producing this one. They should have omitted that one. Secondly, where's songs like "You Can Win" from his Scarecrow role in the motion picture THE WIZ? Where's "Scream"? The only song that he's ever done a duet on record with his sister, Janet Jackson. Of even The Jacksons "State Of Shock" with Mick Jagger? Surely you don't mean to say that there was not enough room on the 3rd disc for those two tracks while disc 1 has 21 and disc 2 has 17 tracks on them, pushing disc 3 to 10 selections from 7, my goodness, would be-pushing it?

Nevertheless, this is an awesome set. Remember, I AM NOT A MICHAEL JACKSON FAN. But aside from my complaint, it gets no better than this. Starting with a few Jackson 5/Motown tracks to Michael's Motown solo hits, to shifting to The Jacksons and Epic to Michael doing it alone and never turning back. Questionable 2nd verse lyrics in "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'" (lyrics slightly different from the THRILLER album). There's nothin' BAD you can say about this box set, really.
4164721
It's at least insulting to release the theatrcal version and anounce the release of the extended for sometime in the following years...
Any decent studio would have the courtesy not to rip of its public like that.

You can very easily release them both together, or make an edition in which the viewer can select which version he/she wants each time he views it!

After this kind of treatment do you think its a wonder that many people resort to illegaly obtaining a large part of their music or movies collection???
Respect your clients and they will respect you back!!
4841454
My wife and I both love the show, The Sing Off.  And when she got me the albums that both of the first two season winners (NOTA and Committed) released, I was very pleased.  Unfortunately, Sony has ruined both a capella groups by adding background music to these CDs.  And then they have the gall to advertise the group as follows, "Formed in Huntsville, Alabama in 2003, the group, comprised of Dennis "DJ" Baptiste, Tommy Gervais, Geston Pierre, Robert Pressley, Maurice Staple and Theron "Therry" Thomas, arrange all of their own music using only their vocals as instruments to emulate a full band sound."

I'm sorry Committed.  I loved your sound and was really looking forward to hearing more of it.  But I'm returning your CD.  Please produce the next one yourself and post it on your website.  I'll buy it.