Project Smile is a
CD-Rom of, shall we say, dubious legality, that attempts thoroughly to document the
Beach Boys' unfinished
Smile album.
Put together by fans, the CD contains:
The most complete mixes of all the songs recorded for the album,
Essays and opinions on the album, including musicological and historical essays.
A complete timeline of every session involved, along with all bootlegged session recordings
Every song broken up into its individual parts (all music on the CD is in MP3 format so you can mix and match your own edits - this is the most important feature of the CD and its main attraction.
The two surviving pieces of film footage from the era (Brian Wilson doing Surf's Up and the band's Fire video)
Live versions of Wonderful, Heroes & Villains, Surf's Up and Vegetables
A remix of the entire album, including additional overdubs by the fan who put the project together, to present his idea of what the album would sound like.
Various interesting fan remixes, including one, Sgt Smile, which combines elements of Smile tracks with Beatles outtakes.
The CD-Rom works best in Windows, but it has a HTML version for users of other OSes.
In all there's over ten hours of music on this CD, which makes it the best available resource on the album.
While this CD is not a legitimate release, it is available from http://groups.yahoo.com/group/projectsmilecd under two conditions. The conditions are that you do not sell the CD, and that if you own a burner you make two copies for other people waiting for theirs. It exists purely in order to aid true scholars, and no-one's making a penny from it (in fact most people involved are losing money).
For more on the Smile album, see that node, although the w/u there is a little brief at the moment.