Concerning "A Few Old Tunes"

Howdy folks,

This has bugged me for quite a while. Information on it is mysteriously absent from the BoC wiki (unless I'm just missing something). I have the following:

Not sure where I got it, but there it is. All the songs are of better quality than the other "old tunes" compilations I have. I have it listed as "A Few Old Tunes Volume Two", which as I understand does not exist. Can anyone shed any light on this origin of this one? Did someone just take the tapes and clean up random tracks?

  On 4/11/2010 at 6:41 AM, Bramsworth said:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Tunes_Vol._2_%28album%29

That's Old Tunes Vol. 2. This one is labelled as "A Few Old Tunes Volume 2" and has an entirely different track listing.

AFAIK just a collection of this and that, perhaps even cleaned up a bit with a sound editor.

That'd be my guess too, but some of them sound really good so I was just curious if there was anything else to them other than a simple cleanup.

I've always kinda felt bad listening to the old tunes saga.

At any rate, once in Mp3 there is no going back and making it sound better, that data is gone. Also those old tunes were released on cassette so even if someone rips it to wav (please Joyrex) then it still will be shitty quality. Cassette is like 360nW/m, and it's really hard to compare analogue tape to digital files but it more or less means that it doesn't sounds very good.

Any sort of "mp3 cleaning" to the files will only make them sound worse, plus that's like trying to get rid of the static on "Beware the Friendly Stranger" just doesn't make any sense.

... Maybe you did stumble across higher quality versions of BoCs old catalogue in that case, you my friend may have the most power here on the BoC subforum.

This was originally released within the MP3 scene as Boards_of_Canada-A_Few_Old_Tunes_Vol._2-2003-RFL. According to the nfo (click here) this was supposed to be released in 2003 before the new album came out. Obviously now we know thats a load of bull. Back then the group RFL was just looking to release another album within the scene and weren't huge BOC nerds like we are. RFL used to be known for putting together fake releases and taking things from soulseek claiming them to be their own rips. Also if you look at the audio data in a spectrogram you can tell its just a mix of several sources.

Nice. Thanks for the .nfo link! Clears things up a little bit.

Still wondering why some of the tracks sound as good as they do though (Iced Cooly Beatnik stands out in my mind, although I've never given this compilation a detailed listen to compare it to the other releases).

Edit: And now that you mention it, under comments in iTunes it does say "/RFL" for each track.

yeah im not too sure if RFL just downloaded it from someone who had already compiled it or if the RFL guys did the editing and compiling, but knowing their history from back then, theres no doubt in my mind that it wasnt from some cd that boc only made 10 of or anything like that. i agree some tracks sound quite good but i suppose if you chop off the entire highs and lows and do some other editing you can make a muffled tape source sound a lot clearer, but you lose a lot of the dynamics in the process.

wait im lost.. some of these tracks are on a few old tunes and old tunes vol 2