Customer Rating: 
Summary: The Wonderful, Magical Unicorn Should Not Have its Horn Used
Comment: As a horse-shoe ringer-spike. I mean all of these musicians, are well-accomplished artists and have performed for many-many fans. Yes, I was leary about that 3-star rating and Windham Hill's compilations are mostly masterpieces. It's a Great Deal and a Super Listen both magical and thunderous, delicate and sweeping and highly thought-provoking. This music sounds nice with a portable; but will really make your home stereo come alive. This music is 10 stars. All pieces are flawless,(personally)I like playing disk #2 first---Ave Maria is one of my favs. So don't delay. Buy this masterpiece today! It's great!
Customer Rating: 
Summary: An OK-sounding album, but very little new or interesting
Comment: This is really more just a label sampler than a successful "chill" compilation. Windham Hill has put out many excellent collections in the past, most notably the underrated and genre-setting "Path" CD. That was a CD with many new tracks and new artists. It really opened my mind up to some great music. This new "chill" set does a very poor job of backing up the boast from the album's subtitle - "30 essential tracks from the original chill out label."Start with disc one, the "ambient" disc. So many of the cuts are from previous albums - even from previous W.H. collections! Often this is the 3rd or even 4th compilation appearance for some tunes! Windham Hill is getting like Higher Octave, endlessly re-packaging the same songs over and over. Some of these cuts are not even "ambient." The Ravi Shankar theme is nice enough, but isn't "chill" OR "ambient." It clashes with the other songs on disc one. The piece from Yanni is like watered-down Vangelis. Of course he is from the Tesh school of muzak and doesn't really belong on any compilation looking for credibility anyhow.
The 2nd disc, "acoustic," has some excellent themes from Nightnoise, Will Ackerman, and others. Again, though, many of the songs have been anthologized to death already. If you own just about ANY W.H. compilation, you've probably already got "Rickover's Dream" from Michael Hedges and "Wedding Rain" from Liz Story. Instead of putting out the same music again, it would be much better if Windham Hill would come up with something new for a change.
