Gloria Estefan Greatest Hits

The 2006 release of The Essential Gloria Estefan satisfied a long unmet need for a career-spanning English-language retrospective, one that includes the singer's popular hits with Miami Sound Machine in the mid-'80s as well as her subsequent solo recordings. For years, Estefan fans had few best-of choices to choose from – the Spanish-language Exitos de Gloria Estefan (1990), the two-volume Greatest Hits series (1992, 2001), and the latter-day Amor y Suerte: Exitos Romanticos collection (2004) – with no alternatives, not even budget-line knockoffs. The long-overdue release of The Essential Gloria Estefan thankfully resolved this gripe, for it includes the highlights from all aspects of Estefan's varied output, spread generously across two jam-packed discs.

Released just after Cuts Both Ways and a year before her Greatest Hits compilation, Exitos de Gloria Estefan rounds up the key highlights among the singer's Spanish-language recordings for Sony Discos. Expected inclusions like "Conga" and "Don't Wanna Lose You" are here, of course, albeit in Spanish (though "Here We Are" is oddly here in its Portuguese version). More notably, however, Exitos de Gloria Estefan also rounds up unexpected inclusions, some of which never had English-language hit counterparts. "Renacer" is a remake of the title track from Miami Sound Machine's debut album from way back in 1977, for instance, while "Dingui-Li Bangui" is a wonderful song that will be new to most English-language-inclined listeners. And too, the English-language "Dr. Beat" is a welcome inclusion, for it's a catchy and fun dance-pop song from 1984 that was unfortunately left off the Greatest Hits collection. Most of Miami Sound Machine's less commercially successful albums remained out of print for years, so Exitos de Gloria Estefan is one of the few relatively available albums featuring these songs.

The "Gold: The Eighties Greatest Hits" it's a collection in metal box which include 3 cds with 50 songs (original masters) of the most famous singers of 80's. Nena, King, Stray Cats, Toto, Men At Work, Cyndi Lauper, Europe, Kenny Loggins, Martika, Jennifer Rush, Thompson Twins, Bonnie Tyler, Hall & Oates, Rick Astley, Fiction Factory, Taylor Dayne and others, are the artists that sound in this collection, released in 2008 by the Sony BMG label.