OK, this is a first for me. I've never had anything like this happen before when I bought a CD (having bought well over 700 or so, only 359 of which I still have). To finish my collection of Pink Floyd studio recordings, I just bought The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. It was sealed in normal-looking plastic, and had the factory adhesive seal at the top edge of the case.

After opening it up, lo and behold, the wrong disc is inside! It's Obscured by Clouds!!! The image printed on the CD is the same as the one on my "real" copy of Obscured by Clouds, except it's a different color scheme. It's blueish instead of tannish (for lack of a better description). So, I figured, "Hey, maybe I have the $10,000 rare printing of TPatGoD with the ObC label printed on the CD", you know, like the rare double-printed nickels worth thousands of dollars. So I brought it up in EAC, and it lists the tracks on ObC. In Quintessential Player, loading the disc and playing it indeed plays the title track, Obscured by Clouds. For reference, it's a digital re-master, released in 1994 (as printed on the insert)...the original album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn was released in 1967. The insert and case edges/back all indicate The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.

So, is this just some mistake by the disc manufacturing company (Capitol)? If the printed side of the CD was exactly identical to my other copy of ObC, then this would be just an obvious packaging mistake. But the fact that the printed graphic is a different color scheme seems really odd to me. Has this happened to anyone else, with this album or any other?





P.S...I was going to return it to Amazon, but decided to keep it since it's "unique". Just ordered a hopefully real copy of TPatGoD from Buy.com.

Not that you could have done anything about it, I guess...

Altough people at Amazon are very comprehensive and they want to keep their costumers happy. Once I bought stuff that had not arrived to my home in a month after it was shipped (I live in Mexico). I wrote to them asking what could have gone wrong (I already knew that most likely it was shitty Mexican postal service). The sales guy, said: "Hmm, I couldn't tell, maybe we screwed up. I'll resend your stuff using a private shipping company, at no extra cost". The stuff arrived in one day! A couple of weeks later, the original package arrived. I felt I owed it to them to maybe ship it back, since thay had been so nice. The sales guy said: "Well, we feel that sending it back would be TOO EXPENSIVE FOR YOU, so you should keep the stuff ".

I realized that they had been really concerned about costumer satisfaction. They'd rather lose 30 something bucks and have a happy client than to screw a nobody they would never meet in person because he lives in a God-forsaken town in Middle Mexico. Just for comparison, I could not name a Mexican company that I trust would do the same thing.

Right there I became a lifelong Amazon fan...

This has happened to me before. I went into the local Borders and purchased a copy of Penguin Cafe Orchestra's self titled cd, and when I got to the car and opened it up the disc was "Here Come The Warm Jets" by Brian Eno. Weirdest thing... I wouldn't have been that mad except I already had that album. I noticed a correlation between the catalog numbers; The Eno album is EGCD 11 and the Penguin Cafe disc is EEGCD 11. Fortunately Borders took it back and I ordered a new copy which thankfully was the right disc.

I have a friend who had an even odder music buying experience, though. He purchased a brand new copy of the remastered edition of "Coda" by Led Zeppelin that ended up being the completely wrong musical content, although the disc packaging and even the disc itself was labeled correctly. We couldn't figure out what it was exactly, but it sounded like a modern female pop singer of some kind, like Mariah Carey or something. This was in the days before things like CDDB existed so we never figured out what it actually was, as it was returned.

Oh yeah, I also have a copy of the Rykodisc version of "Ziggy Stardust" by David Bowie that has a screwed up disc label. It looks like they ran out of ink (or screener or whatever it is they use) and while the background graphics are visible the text is hardly readable at all.

I have a couple of mistakes from the 80s.

I have a vinyl copy of the self-titled album by Joe "King" Carrasco And The Crowns that has side 1 on both sides, even though the labels are correct.

I also bought Certain Things Are Likely by KTP, but the cd in the package was Rush 2112.

Rob

The most recent mis-labeled disc I've seen was a Ringo Starr album, screen printed as Ringo Starr, in a Ringo Starr case... that played Steve Winwood. (Arguably, you lose both ways.)

I see all sorts of other screw-ups, although I haven't kept that many in my collection. One that is still in my collection is the "double white" screen printing of the Beatles' Anthology 3. On disc one, the white "text & logo" layer was accidentally printed a second time, rotated about five degrees counter-clockwise from the original.

- M.

Thanks, everybody! It's nice to know I'm not the only one...I thought it was that darn RIAA again, playing a weird trick on me. I was all ready to get on my soap box and blame them for yet another "conspiracy". At least it was another PF album, rather than Mariah Carey or something. But why couldn't it have been something I don't have, like Works, or maybe one of Waters' solo gigs?

Anyway, alkabrecka, you hit the nail on the head...the cat number is the same on the inner ring of both discs: 077774638524RE1. They could have been one after the other on the pressing line, and one of them just ended up in the wrong case.

Oh well, it's worth the $14.99 as a conversation piece to show my fellow PF fans. So should I call it Obscured by Dawn or The Piper in the Clouds?

How about The Dawnpipe at the Gates of Obscurity?

- M.

I bought the Ice Earth CD collection (Dark Genesis) in which four of five CDs were labelled falsely. The mixed up which label with which CD. Then I read on their page that this mistake occured only in the first 4000 releases of Dark Genesis, so I decided to keep it that way in order to have some thing really rare.

When my parents got their first CD player (the 80s sometime), it came with a big box of classical CDs as part of the package. One of them was some pop CD (I wasn't able to figure out what exactly it was, but it sounded like Tiffany or something similar). Even the label printed on the CD was wrong (it was supposed to be some opera stuff, but I don't remember because most of the label was printed in Italian). The CD label matched the jewel case/jacket though (only the music was wrong).

I haven't had any mislabeled or incorrectly packaged discs, but twice I've bought factory sealed discs, opened them up to find the cases were empty. This happened with a CD of Future Sound Of London "Lifeforms" and a DVD of "The Replacement Killers"...

Okay, I've never had such an experience with CDs but I once had a strange experience with an audio tape (yeah! that was a loooong time ago.) I bought Roxette's 'Tourism' on tape. It was factory sealed and everything! I bought it all the way home, opened the casing and hell, there was no tape in the cassette!! There were two empty spools with no tape inside. I was too busy so I asked my brother to return to the store and claim a replacement. There again he found that the cassette had no tape. In fact the entire lot of tapes had no tape inside the cassettes!!! The store owner was pretty bemused. He offered my brother that tape and any other tape of his choice in order to compensate for the inconvenience. Life is funny sometimes!!

Found this thread from here
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....howtopic=14305&
so, sorry if the resurrection bothers anybody, but I'd like to add something...

Around the time that the KoRn album Issues was released, apparently the manufacturer accidentally put a large number of Issues CD's in the case for Celine Dion's new album, much to the surprise of Celine Dion fans.

I picked up the Smashing Pumpkins "Pisces Iscariot" a few years back, and it had the disc for "Siamese Dream" inside. Weird.