Hey everyone, I'm still slowly working my way through the overwhelmingly large amount of unreleased Prince material, and for the sake of sorting out songs, I need some help. Out of everything that has been floating around over the years, which unreleased tracks from the 80's are available in perfect (or very near perfect) quality? Also, out of all of those high quality tracks, which are the most essential for a mix CD? Thanks in advance!

I think you need to do the work yourself here...

jaawwnn said:

I think you need to do the work yourself here...

The Work, Work It or iVault contain the bulk of it. Later leaks, including some songs from those collections with better sound quality have been scattered over a dozen releases over the years: Box Of Chocolate, Exodus 1 & 2, the Parade Demos, 30 Years of Unreleased Funk, Blast From The Past, Perfect Unreleased Prince, 10000 Wallpaper and so on.

Best is to go on a cetain P2P network where everything is widely available, but then it's a headache: I have up to 6 different versions of certain songs and I still have to sort the whole thing up on my drive to keep only the best sounding version of each track, which I do every once in a while but it's taking ages.

It's about time all that stuff get officially released so we don't have this problem anymore

Take the journey, don't cheat yourself out of the discovery by asking others to tell you what to listen to.

databank said:

jaawwnn said:

I think you need to do the work yourself here...

The Work, Work It or iVault contain the bulk of it. Later leaks, including some songs from those collections with better sound quality have been scattered over a dozen releases over the years: Box Of Chocolate, Exodus 1 & 2, the Parade Demos, 30 Years of Unreleased Funk, Blast From The Past, Perfect Unreleased Prince, 10000 Wallpaper and so on.

Best is to go on a cetain P2P network where everything is widely available, but then it's a headache: I have up to 6 different versions of certain songs and I still have to sort the whole thing up on my drive to keep only the best sounding version of each track, which I do every once in a while but it's taking ages.

It's about time all that stuff get officially released so we don't have this problem anymore

Yeah I wish they would release everything so that I can delete all my bootlegs. It's hard to keep all that stuff managed. I don't need everything Prince ever did but if they would release all of his best unreleased stuff I would be good with that. I'm sure eventually they will.

I will say probably the OP's best bet is to probably get his hands on "The Work".. I think that one has everything sorted by the year it was recorded which makes things a little easier.

My response was a bit glib,

the best thing to get is Work It 2.0 which is an improved version of the Work.
Then the releases Databank listed, then there's a few essential live shows like the 1984 birthday show, Small Club, 1983 First Avenue.... and rehearsals like the Sign o the times rehearsals and so on and so on depending on what era your tastes veer towards.

The Dawn 4.1 is a bootleg of mostly released music from 1993/1994 sequenced and altered slightly and turned into a triple album that is worth seeking out as a listening experience.

Even after all that there's a few bootlegged songs that have come out here and there since, not to mention some released songs like the "virtual" musicology b-sides that these days seem to be harder to come by than a lot of unreleased 80's stuff.

As for choosing favourites, there's no consensus, none. Choose your own, and tell everyone else they're wrong if they dislike your choices

The Blast from the Past series is good too. The sounds is miles better the original work series though I haven't heard the Work 2 series so I would trust these folks here about that.

djThunderfunk said:

Thanks for the advice everyone, I think I'm gonna look for Work It 2.0 and then check out some of the other smaller bootlegs that were recommended. That should be better than cherry-picking songs from youtube and ripping the audio like I have been doing

Kara said:

djThunderfunk said:

Take the journey, don't cheat yourself out of the discovery by asking others to tell you what to listen to.

It's a lot of work, but so worth it.

Have snacks ready and prepare to immerse yourself in the experience.

It's so much fun!