I bought the 3cd set which arrived on saturday so id thought id offer you my opinion on it for those thinking about buying.

PHYSICALLY
The 3 cds arrived in plastic sleeve on plain silver cdr. There is a proper foldout cover ( nicely printed ) which contains the track listing, and a nice history of bootlegs on the back.

CONTENT
Can i just say with the death of Audiogalaxy there is no way that i would have been able to get hold of some of these tunes, hence the reason i bought it although it was probably morally wrong.

The 1st 2cds have a reasonable selection of tunes with the 1st containing some nice breezeblock sessions from lemmon jelly / avalanches etc. The 2nd cd contains most of the classic boots with a lot of home made boots from the smaller chaps, some nice casetteboy tracks and some random stuff ( i guess to fill space ) like daniel beningfield. The 3rd cd is a collection of mostly utter crap padded up with a lot of frenchbloke stuff, little thought gonna into this cd and you can tell its just filler to probably bump the price up.

Finally the most concerning part of this colleciton is the mp3 quality, maybee i was expecting to much but some of the mp3s are unlistenable, 64kbps, dodgy radio rips, poor levels etc. id say 60 % of mp3's sound like bad tape quality or less. Personally i wouldnt include mp3's of such crap quality but i guess if theres only 1 rip of a rare tune and that rip is bad theres not much you can do ...

anyhow theres my review hope it helps

Thats put me off even more, along with the price. Personally I think £15 for MP3 cds is very steep, considering that its on CDRs, and the MP3s are bootlegs anyway.
This whole set could probably be made for £1 by the sound of it, at 20p a CD (thats for HQ CDRs) and then a couple of paper sleeves. I admit theres been a lot of chasing around the net and places to get the mp3s but from what you've said theres a lot of crap on there!

When they lower the price I'll check it out.

I was disapointed by the content too. As a representation of what's been on Boom Selection it's probably quite fair but as a show case for bootlegs it seems to lack a certain something.

I sent them a nicely packaged CD with a couple of my boots on and got a favourable response. I was told I could expect to see one of the tracks on the site and was excited and pleased at the prospect. It's never been up there and wasn't on the CD.

Now, no-one else gives a monkeys chuff about this but I was of course a little peeved and I wonder how many other people wasted time sending them stuff. I also appreciate that they do this for love and it's a time consuming business but they do seem little hung up on the same dozen 'names' who always get stuff on there. They're always banging on about havinga huge backlog of booties to post up and then stick up a handful each month by the same people.

I know this is all a bitterness and it's their site and they can do what they want with it but as spokes-site for the scene it just seems like a wasted chance to represent more choice, to me.

Still love the site and have total respect for what they do, like. Just wanted to get that off my chest.

a lot of things to address here, so i'll start at the top.

-morally wrong
yes, it probably is. no bootleggers are receiving monies for this. if i did, how many different contributors would i have to pay out to, considering there are 432 tracks? the argument goes that the bootleggers are ripping off the artists they have bootlegged (but not making money from it), but they are doing something creative with it. i, on the other hand, am stealing these pieces of music for my own financial gain. some of those who feature on the cds have given me extremely good feedback and those who have bought it have bestowed praise upon it. boom selection is best placed to do a thing like this and although it's not perfect, it's better than any previous bootleg compilation i know of (best bootlegs in the world anyone?). it has taken time to put this together (despite what some people may think) and it has taken a lot of hard work on the site the past 7 months to get to where we've got.

-cd3
listening to it now, i agree that it's pretty shit. there was no 'padding out' - far from it. i could do another 3cd set with the sheer amount of bootlegs and mixes of that ilk in my collection. the tracks for all the cds were selected in quite a haphazzard way - there was no real logic to it and lot of stuff on it i'm not too pleased with. saying that, theres lots of excellent stuff i had to chop off to fit the 80mins and theres loads of good stuff on the cds too (cd2, par example). its supposed to be a representation of the stuff we feature on the site, the bootleg scene (hence a large proportion of it being shite) and some random stuff i included to piss people off. i made it clear exactly what was contained on the cds via the full tracklist on the website. also, please remember that it was compiled about 3 months ago - hence there being quite a lot of stuff missing.

-price
it's up to you whether you pay £14 or not. a lot of people have. it's about how much you are willing to pay for the 'product'. personally, i think £14 for 432 tracks is seriously good value, considering 2 track "7's are costing £6.99 and single audio cds of bootlegs are over 10 quid. would you have been happier paying £12 for a double audio cd from boom selection? oh btw - they are cdrs for a reason - pressing companies aren't too happy to do copies of this stuff.

-mp3 quality
these quality of the mp3s are as they are in my collection. the amount of radio rips and low quality files is low, but those are the only versions that i have (and probably the only versions that exist on the net). for quite a lot of the mp3s, i was the only person to have a copy apart from the bootlegger who emailed it to me themselves.

-bunny rabbit
i don't remember you sending me a cd (was bunny rabbit the name you sent it under?) and did you send it to me or someone else? i do get sent an awful lot of bootlegs by email and sometimes post. the reason we get hung up on the same names (usually the ones who get stuff released) is because these are probably the most interesting people around on the scene, and doing things more creative than placing a timestretched acapella over an instrumental. it's only really me featuring bootleggers on the site (and uploading the corresponding mp3s) and my time is stretched to breaking point as it is (especially with these cds kicking of bigstyle).

i'm really reluctant to just link to bootleggers home pages - they would go down with just one link on the top of the blog. let me tell you something, boom.phink.net (before it went down for several weeks) was going through 50gigs A DAY in bandwidth. thats the extent of what we're dealing with. we've had numerous problems with servers, address changes etc. - so when i want to upload something good i've been sent, i cant! the site isn't going the way i want at the moment - i've not felt comfortable enough to change it's direction and the influx of new bootleggers has lead to severe complaiancy, lowering quality and a total dissolution in the whole purpose of this bastardisation.

boom selection and bootlegs will have to change or die.

you're quite a cheerful fellow,aren't you ?

Let it die and then again resurrect with the people who were there right from the beginning.Then,let's start all over again and live a new life.Till they die again.And so on and so on.I don't think anyone believed the hype could stay without the consequences there are now...

You DID want to make money out of it,right before the change or death of bootlegs...

Cheers for responding DR.

Just for the record I sent the CD (under my Bunny Rabbit title) to mky and got a very positive response -
"production was pretty damn professional i
must say. liked both tracks much & we shall blog about
it soon".

I do appreciate the problems you have running the site and I'm in no position to criticise.

I'll shut the fuck up now.

I think the boom selections MP3 CD rocks. If it helps to finance the ongoing costs of the Boomselection Website, then that has to be a good thing, and they make a bit of dough thats cool too.

Afterall, Boomselection is pretty much responsible for the scale of the current hype.

dsico

it's good to hear someone say something nice about it... don't you think some of you are pretty rough to people who just helped bringing up and connecting the whole bootleg stuff? do they / this cd-set have to be perfect? e.g. i wouldn't expect the bootlegs to suddenly be in hifi sound when it said in the info that it's a collection of the mp3s - with some booties it's the idea that counts and works and you don't have to have the perfect sound. and it's really not expensive for so much music. and i like the bootie history piece it has according to the website info (although i miss culturcide). and i'd fcuking LOVE to buy one of these sets but don't have any idea how to get it around here. i hope some german mailorders will contact boomselection.