Coil vs Nine Inch Nails: Uncoiled/Recoiled

[Erneuert]

tbh I don’t even remember what the original Recoiled sounds like, lol. Cool to know that there are these extras to add onto it. @piggy , are these extra tracks listed on ninwiki?

Speaking of ninwiki, I still think it should have the subtitle “Everything Gets Written Down,” @Malechite .

[piggy]

@piggy , are these extra tracks listed on ninwiki?

Yes. I added them last year.

[stlkr]

I think there are some insufferable Coil fans out there.

As far as I am aware, Cold Spring did get permission from Trent Reznor. I know that I sent the contents of the CD to Trent before anyone else heard them, and I know that he spoke to The Quietus about the release, and had nothing negative to say about it. I believe Danny said as much in a post in the Coil Facebook group, but even without that, I have to think that if Cold Spring went so far as to request formal permission from you and I to basically do a variation on the packaging I designed with your photography, surely, surely they would ask Trent Reznor if it was okay to use his music.

I feel as though the arguments amongst the friends and acquaintances of the deceased members of Coil over who has control over what has left the fans out in the cold. I think the material was very well served as a download we assembled, but was beyond pleased to see our work evolve into something tangible.

I appreciate that, for as dramatic as NIN fans get, they do not come anywhere close to the drama Coil fans drum up.

as a former admin of COIL group on Facebook (bloody years) I can confirm that
COIL fans are the cuntiest

[trollmanen]

as a former admin of COIL group on Facebook (bloody years) I can confirm that
COIL fans are the cuntiest

That Facebook group is a trip! There's always some crazy person ranting about something, or the weekly thread about who has the rights to do reissues and how certain ones can't be legitimate. I'm basically just a member for the comedy of it all, I haven't actually listened to Coil is a long time but I can't bring myself to sell my CD collection because I don't think they'll ever go down in value at this point.

[trollmanen]

I recently revisited this whole release after listening to some Coil albums recently. Gave Up (Open My Eyes) sounded a bit strange to me with the vocals lower in pitch. Then, while reading the NIN Wiki page on it, I saw it mentions the following:

The original, wide distribution download of Uncoiled had a mistakenly sped-up version of "Gave Up (Open My Eyes)", which was corrected for Uncoiled Extended and Recoiled.

I went and listened to the original download files I got at the time, and the “original” version sounds better to me. The vocals sound correct and the elements that are also present in the remix on Fixed sound the same, whereas the version that ended up on Recoiled sounds odd and slowed down.

I’ve gone through this entire thread, and while I see this change mentioned at the time when the Extended version was released, no one really questioned or discussed this change. I see Danny's explanation about how it was the incorrect sample rate or something, but honestly, the version on the original download sounds correct. Am I alone on this? Given that we’ve come to find that these remixes weren’t just found and released as is, but partial recreations based on notes, it’s not hard to believe that this was an overlooked error on Danny’s part. Thoughts?

Also, I'm confused by the fact that Discogs shows the duration for this track to be 5:28 (the original download version) but it's clearly 6:01 on the CD and streaming, which is the "corrected" slowed down/low pitched version. This appears to be taken from the back cover of the digipak. So many questions...

[TheBang]

Also, I'm confused by the fact that Discogs shows the duration for this track to be 5:28 (the original download version) but it's clearly 6:01 on the CD and streaming, which is the "corrected" slowed down/low pitched version. This appears to be taken from the back cover of the digipak. So many questions...

Yeah, the timings are definitely taken from the back of the digipak. I'll update them to the actual timings on the disc.

[TheBang]

I went and listened to the original download files I got at the time, and the “original” version sounds better to me. The vocals sound correct and the elements that are also present in the remix on Fixed sound the same, whereas the version that ended up on Recoiled sounds odd and slowed down.

So, I listened to the versions with what you said in mind, and I'd have to agree. If you compare the Film Mix to the Fixed version (ostensibly the two "definitive" versions of Coil's efforts), although the tempos are different, they didn't change the pitch at all (easiest to hear in elements like the vocals or guitar). So, I don't see any reason why this remix should be pitched any differently either. And the 5:28 version matches the pitches of the Film Mix and Fixed mix perfectly.

I didn't go through the posts or explanation given, but I just assume that the "incorrect sampling rate" was a matter of 44.1 KHz vs. 48 KHz (both of which DAT supports). I asked ChatGPT to do the calculations (because I was lazy) and a 6:01 runtime, 44.1 KHz track resampled to 48 KHz would come out to a 5:31 runtime. So, my thoughts are that there were either some bad notes or labels on the DAT tape that led Danny to believe that 44.1 KHz was the correct sampling rate. Based on the pitch though, and the other existing mixes, I think 48 KHz was, in fact, the correct sampling rate, and thus the 5:28 version of the track on the original Uncoiled is the correct version.

[Leviathant]

I win, Danny Hyde!

[TheBang]

I didn't go through the posts or explanation given, but I just assume that the "incorrect sampling rate" was a matter of 44.1 KHz vs. 48 KHz (both of which DAT supports). I asked ChatGPT to do the calculations (because I was lazy) and a 6:01 runtime, 44.1 KHz track resampled to 48 KHz would come out to a 5:31 runtime. So, my thoughts are that there were either some bad notes or labels on the DAT tape that led Danny to believe that 44.1 KHz was the correct sampling rate. Based on the pitch though, and the other existing mixes, I think 48 KHz was, in fact, the correct sampling rate, and thus the 5:28 version of the track on the original Uncoiled is the correct version.

I looked at "Gave Up, Given Up (Intense Mix)" from the Recoiled Extra disc and realized that it suffered from the same issue. At first, I used a tempo/pitch plugin to speed it up by 8.84% (the difference between 44.1 KHz and 48 KHz), and that did fix the issue. But then I realized that the correct way to fix it was to simply change the sample rate on the file from 44.1 KHz to 48 KHz (WITHOUT resampling), and that would fix it without altering or discarding any sampling data; it would just be played faster. I then did the same thing to "Gave Up (Open My Eyes)" from Uncoiled Extended, since that presumably came directly from Danny Hyde and has all the original data from the DAT, just at a 44.1 KHz sample rate instead of 48 KHz. On Uncoiled, although the correct duration, the track would have been resampled (losing some data) to 44.1 KHz to conform to CD-DA. So, here are the two tracks at the correct 16/48 sample rate, resulting in the correct pitch/tempo. If you need to burn them to CD for some reason, you'll need to resample them to 44.1 KHz. (I was going to append "fixed" to the filenames, but realized that could potentially be confusing given the context, so chose "corrected" instead.)

https://www.mediafire.com/file/5zoji...cted.flac/file
https://www.mediafire.com/file/5mcx0...cted.flac/file

The fact that both of these tracks, when changed from one DAT-supported sample rate to another, sound exactly the correct pitch, to me just reinforces the hypothesis that this is the simplest explanation for what happened here. It would be too coincidental for any other explanation.