Entire Beatles Catalogue Digitally Remastered For 9/9/09 Release

Mark 9/9/09 in your calendars as Beatles Day. First there's the release of "The Beatles: Rock Band," and then the culmination of four years of remastering the band's entire catalogue - 14 albums - at the Fab Four's trademark Abbey Road Studios in London. Talk about an awesome job - geeking out to Beatles recordings for 1460 days. (Sign me up!) September 9th, 2009 will see the release of each of the thirteen Beatles studio albums, plus the compilation album Past Masters, digitally remastered with some special add-ons.

But before we start doing cartwheels, this does NOT mean you'll be seeing the Beatles at an online shop anytime soon.

According to the Apple/ EMI peeps, "Discussions regarding the digital distribution of the catalogue will continue. There is no further information available at this time." So yes, the Beatles go on kickin' it old school on compact discs.

Now for the goodies: Each album reissue - Please Please Me, With The Beatles, A Hard Day's Night, Beatles For Sale, Help!, Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Magical Mystery Tour, The Beatles, Yellow Submarine, Abbey Road, Let It Be, Past Masters - comes with the usual reissue BS: original vinyl artwork, linear notes and some extra historical data. But why pick up one of these suckas if you already got 'em? Not only does it mark the first time the albums have been tweaked since 1987, there's the whole remastered with "state of the art recording technology alongside vintage studio equipment, carefully maintaining the authenticity and integrity of the original analogue recordings" bit, AND a QuickTime mini-documentary about each album (except Past Masters). Each documentary sports never-before-heard studio chat from The Beatles along with archival footage and photos. The embed-able docs will only be on the remastered albums for a limited time.

Then there's the two new box sets, making the one I got for my dad a few years back totally outdated. The first box set is all the albums mentioned above in stereo plus a DVD of all the aforementioned documentaries.

The other box set dubbed The Beatles in Mono contains 10 of the Fab Four's albums with the original mono mixes - Please Please Me, With The Beatles, A Hard Day's Night, Beatles For Sale, Help!, Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Magical Mystery Tour, The Beatles, Mono Masters. Both Help! and Rubber Soul will include a 1965 stereo mix too.

Mark you calendars. 9/9/09. Beatles Day!

All photos belong to "© Apple Corps Ltd, 2009"