DimSkip's Universe: My evolving definitive Steely Dan collection

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Thank you for stopping by my blog. There is no particular theme or topic and no posting schedule either. This is just something I do for my own occasional enjoyment/interest as well as for friends and family, but others are welcome (although I don't go out of my way to self-promote—almost the opposite, in fact).

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Monday, May 14, 2007

My evolving definitive Steely Dan collection

Either late last year or early this year (I forget which exactly) there was an official release of Steely Dan: The Definitive Collection. It contains 16 songs, including one from each of their most recent albums even though most folks only know the old '70s stuff.

My reaction to the release was... How can this be a definitive collection when it doesn't include "Josie", "Any Major Dude Will Tell You", "Time Out Of Mind", or others such as "Doctor Wu" or "Haitian Divorce"!?

So I attempted to make my own such "definitive" collection and intended to hold it to a 2-CD set. At the time, though, I was under a misunderstanding as to just how much I could stuff onto one CD. I ended up with a collection which I thought would not quite fit on 2 CDs and thus I added some other good songs and made it a 3-CD set (disc 1, disc 2, disc 3).

However, I recently realized that my music CDs, though they list limits of 700 MB of data and 80 minutes of music, can actually hold more than 700 MBs worth of songs. The 80 minute limit is the more hard and fast one and you can actually approach 800 MB of tunes. Once I realized this, I decided to revisit my custom definitive collection and pared it back down so that now it does fits on only two CDs. I also changed a few tunes from the last two albums (which didn't really have "hits"), but if I were to redo the collection every few months I'd probably make changes every time because to me they're all great. To squeeze all the songs on the second CD I had to shorten "Cousin Dupree" by about 25 seconds, but it has a long repetitive outro so I don't think it suffers at all (even though I thoroughly enjoy the full length version).

The original goal was to compile what I consider to be a truly definitive set of Steely Dan's hits through the years and a few other "essential" tunes besides. I also wanted to showcase their albums of the new millennium since to me, they're every bit as good as the more well known older albums. I'm quite satisfied with the result.