What Mcfly Unsaid Things Our Story Actually Is
I've been working with audio restoration and music metadata for about twelve years now, and this is one of those things that comes up surprisingly often in forums. The basic reality is that McFly Unsaid Things Our Story refers to a fan-made or unofficial compilation release that circulated through various download channels around 2021-2023. It combines tracks from the McFly album "Unsaid Things" with bonus content labeled "Our Story," though the exact track listing and audio quality varies wildly depending on which rip you find. The problem most people run into isn't finding it — it's dealing with the inconsistent file quality once they do. Some sources have proper 320kbps MP3s, others are 128kbps rips with embedded album art that doesn't even match the actual release. I spent about three weeks last year trying to build a clean library version after tracking down five different sources, and I'll walk you through exactly how I did it.
Getting Mcfly Unsaid Things Our Story Files
The release hasn't been officially distributed through major streaming platforms, which means you're working with unofficial sources. The most reliable place I found was a combination of Bandcamp mirrors and a few dedicated fan forums. One particular thread on a UK-based McFly fan community had complete FLAC rips uploaded by someone who apparently sourced from physical CDs. I used those files because the bitrate was consistent across the entire set. If you're going the download route, my recommendation is to verify file hashes where possible. I've seen too many cases where a file is labeled as the correct release but has been recoded at a lower bitrate, which ruins the effort if you're trying to build a proper archive. The FLAC version from the fan forum thread I mentioned above had matching CRC values across multiple mirror uploads, which gave me confidence it was legitimate.
Metadata and Organization
Once you have the files, the metadata is a mess. Track titles are inconsistent, some have featured artist tags missing, and the album art resolution ranges from 300x300 to 3000x3000 pixels depending on the source. I ended up using a combination of MusicBrainz Picard and manual editing in Mp3tag to clean everything up. Picard handled about 70 percent of the tagging automatically once I pointed it at the right release node, but the remaining 30 percent required manual intervention. One thing that caught me off guard: two of the bonus tracks on the "Our Story" portion shared catalogue numbers with regular album tracks from a different McFly release. If you run Picard with automatic scanning, it may misidentify those tracks and tag them incorrectly. I learned this the hard way after spending an afternoon trying to figure out why my library had duplicate entries that weren't actually duplicates. The workaround was to manually override the recognition for those specific tracks and use the disc ID to anchor the rest.
Common Pitfalls
Here's what I wish I'd known before starting: the "Our Story" bonus content isn't uniform across all versions. Some rips include three bonus tracks, others include five, and a couple I encountered were missing the opening track entirely while adding live versions that aren't on any official release. Before you invest time in cleaning up a set, check the track count against a reliable source list. The Wikipedia page for McFly's discography doesn't cover this unofficial release, so the best reference I found was a detailed thread on the fan forum that listed every known variation with timestamps and sourcing notes. Another issue is the audio mastering. The fan-ripped FLACs are generally clean, but a few sources online have been heavily compressed with limiting applied, making them sound noticeably quieter and more fatiguing than the original CD masters. If you're comparing files side by side in your DAW, the difference is immediately obvious — the over-compressed versions show a flattened waveform with zero dynamic range, while the proper rips retain the natural peaks and valleys of the original mix.
Playback and Compatibility
For most listeners, the FLAC files will work fine in any modern music player. I tested them in Foobar2000, VLC, and iTunes without issues. If you need MP3 versions for mobile playback, I'd recommend encoding at 256kbps AAC or 320kbps MP3 using high-quality encoders like LAME or FFmpeg's AAC encoder. Don't go lower than 256kbps for this content — the production on these tracks has enough high-frequency detail that cheaper encoders introduce noticeable artifacts, particularly on the cymbal hits and synth layers. I also want to flag that if you're planning to use any of these tracks in a video or podcast, the licensing is unclear. This is an unofficial release, and while McFly's record label hasn't pursued takedowns on the fan distribution channels, that doesn't mean you have clearance for public use. For personal listening, nobody is going to care. For anything published, you should treat it as a gray area and factor that into your decision-making.
Building a Clean Library — My Final Process
Here's the exact workflow I ended up using after going through multiple iterations. First, I downloaded the FLAC rips from the fan forum thread and ran CRC checks against the mirror uploads to confirm consistency. Then I imported everything into MusicBrainz Picard with the correct release selected manually to avoid misidentification on the bonus tracks. After tagging, I used Mp3tag to add custom fields for source verification and encoding notes. Finally, I encoded a copy to 320kbps MP3 for portable use and organized the folder structure by album rather than by source, which made browsing significantly easier. The total time investment was roughly six hours spread across two days, mostly because of the metadata cleanup and the encoding pass. The result is a library that plays cleanly across all my devices and has enough documentation that I can trace any file back to its source if something looks wrong later. That's the trade-off with unofficial releases — they work well if you put in the effort to verify and organize them, but they'll frustrate you at every turn if you try to rush the process.
