Blackout All-Stars - I Like It

hello Mark,

I too always wondered why I had this song in mono. I have the club mix on a Canadian Various Artists CD (Hit Zone 3) running 4:19. Then one day I heard the song as backing to a Ritz cracker TV ad, and it was STEREO! So, I tracked down a CD called "Total Dance Explosion" on Columbia which has the D'Ambrosio Club Mix, but edited. Here, it starts out mono, but is stereo starting at the first "that" about 15 seconds in. Then it mixes into the next track. I took the mono end of the Hit Zone 3 version and replaced the ending. SO mine goes back to mono on the last "that" at about 4:00. Kinda neat, actually!

I've also heard the original version from the soundtrack LP and 1994 movie "I Like It Like That". Glad they remixed it!

The "Edit" of "I Like It," found on the stock CD single (38K 78455), has a strange mastering history, and I have an educated guess as to what happened.

In my library, I have a CD-R promo made by DB Plus Digital Services. This disc calls the song “I Like It Like That” and says "KTU Edit" and "from Global Basics." I believe NY station WKTU was one of the first to start spinning it, and they created their own edit from the Global Basics compilation CD. Whoever made the edit made two big mastering goofs, though. First, they had their production board set to mono when dubbing it from the CD, as Mark and others above have pointed out. Second, they used a piece of equipment that rolled off all frequencies above 17K. It's quite possible they used a primitive digital editing workstation in the production studio.

After the song was starting to become a hit, the decision was made to use the KTU Edit as the official single version. The exact same mastering and edit was then included on the stock CD single, although the channels are evenly balanced and volume increased on the stock CD. The promo CD-R has a lower overall volume and the left channel is not quite as loud as the right.

As Mark points out, the good news is that the Global Basics album does not have the 17K+ frequencies rolled off, and it’s in stereo, making it easy to create the single edit the way it should've been done in the first place.

No, but if you have a wav file of the club mix, would you mind sending it over? I may have the CD somewhere, but offhand, I don't know for sure. I'd be happy to send the edited version back to you.

No biggie. I'll dig around for the CD unless Mark comes to the rescue first :)

My only access to the stereo club version was through
Spotify, which of course is lossy.