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25

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Stolen from the Hoffman forum. A nice way to display your favourite 25 albums (or whatever) in one picture. If you take part I just request 25 different artists and no explanations.

Instructions:

Go to Topsters 3 and select “Add Items” and then “Music”

https://topsters.org/

Search for your artist/album or both and drag and drop onto the table on the right

You’ll likely find duplicate covers, some with text reflecting a remaster or edition – for the sake of simplicity, ignore anything beyond artist/album in the text field to the right.

When finished, click “Download” in the upper right of the page and save the result to your computer.

Upload to an image host of your choice – I use Imgur and embed the image in your post! (you might need to right click and “open image in new tab” to get the raw file to embed after it’s done).

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Comments

    • That Cowboy Junkies album – it’s in the spread of albums between ‘At the End of Paths Taken’ and “All that Reckoning” that I have never heard. There are so many good albums by them (I would have picked ‘The Caution Horses’ if I had more than 25 to choose, as my introduction to them). Can you ‘sell’ it as being the best album? I love hearing people heap praise on my favourite artists.

      • Sing in my Meadow was one of four albums in the Nomad Series. I wouldnā€™t say itā€™s the CJā€™s best, but itā€™s certainly their grungiest and for that reason probably their least representative. Itā€™s one I keep going back to, and all of the Nomad albums are worth listening to.

      • Indeed. Here’s what they say …

        Why can’t I find any King Crimson albums?
        Not everything in the databases has cover art attached. Because charts require cover art, Topsters 3 filters out items that are missing it. For example, occasionally a band decides they don’t want their cover art to appear in databases anymore, so they file a copyright takedown. You may have seen this happen on other sites such as Rate Your Music. This is very rare but it can affect popular items–as of this writing, all of King Crimson’s releases are missing album art on Last.fm and as a result will not appear in search results.

        I’ve also ended up with a black square for one of my favourite (admittedly obscure) artists.

        • Just go to Discogs for your Crimson cover of choice and copy the image link from there: past the link in on Topsters in the ‘Custom’ section, click ‘Generate chart item’ and the website does the retrieve and lets you include it. Seeemples.

    • My second favourite Spacemen 3 album, favourite ABBA album, favourite Nick Drake album, probably my favourite non-greatest hits New Order album – tasty cuts indeed.

        • Perfect Prescription is awesome – I have both the album and Forged Prescriptions, the outtakes from the sessions. It is a beautiful bath of music. I would say it sways more towards the Jason Spaceman side than the Sonic Boom in its lushness. Playing With Fire has more variety, with Suicide representing the excellent guitar feedback assault of Sound of Confusion, while ‘How Does It Feel?’ is for me their acid-soaked pinnacle – peerless – all surrounded by lots of Perfect Prescription style loveliness.

          Playing With Fire was my introduction – my first year at uni. I was on a journey of discovery and every day was dressed in bright sunlight.

          It’s in the bottom row of my choices directly below this subthread, between SpaceMonkeyz and Systema Solar.

  15. I’ll play…..

    View post on imgur.com

    With the usual provisos – this is off the top of mu head at this point of time and will likely be different tomorrow and there will be two or three albums that I think of the moment I post, that most definitely should have been on the list.

    • and the three missing that immediately came to mind – Kirsty MacColl / Kite, REM / Automatic For The People & Tom Petty / Wildflowers.

      But I can’t decide which they would replace in the initial 25, so I guess it stands.

    • oooh yes, Chapter 3. Shoulda had that.
      I think we had that little gem on the turntable for about 3 weeks non-stop at one point, back in the time-stretches-out-infinitely-in-a-lovely-hazy-fashion-when-you-are-properly-zonked days.

    • You could do another 25. Nobody is stopping you. The idea, which just occurred to me, is tempting. 2nd rate sometimes is more interesting. Not every song is outstanding, like the first 25, but some of them are so great that they deserve their moment in a 5×5 square.

      It’s lovely seeing all the album covers lined up next to each other. I know you can’t judge a book by its convert, but a record, well… I think the spirit that infuses the recording, at its best, flows out in a synaesthetic way onto the frontispiece.

      • Almost as soon as I posted my immediate thoughts were dash it I forgot to include this or that. I bet everyone has thought much the same. I will show restraint though. To do otherwise kinda blows the concept.

  25. That was far more fun than I expected

    View post on imgur.com

    Here are 25 albums I like. Yesterday it would have been 25 different albums. Tomorrow 25 more.

    You could do all sorts of fun things with this tool Great find! Thanks Dai!

    25 favourite soundtrack albums
    25 party albums. ‘
    25 instrumental albums
    25 unjustly neglected albums
    25 Albanian jazz albums
    etc

      • Obscure? Moi?? What a thought!

        My choices have all sold in very large numbers so they are pretty mainstream

        But for this list, I confess, I did deliberately avoid any artists who sang in English. Just to redress the balance.

        I’ve seen 19 of my 25 faves live in concert.

  34. That was the delightful gradual revelation as I posted the pics for Tig. I have great admiration for the recognition of great album art. Until Tig’s post, it was ‘Happy Trails’ and ‘It’s a Beautiful Day’ covers that stand out as the most beautiful. Though I am liking the blues in the albums chosen by @Graculus.

  36. Too another look and now The Juice are there. Ten minutes of fun making my box. Then, 90 minutes of agony trying to make it work on my phone. Now, it looks like I might make it work on my computer…?
    *Edith* Yes! Yes, it will..

    • Thanks a lot @fitterstoke!

      As the snow fell and covered the streets of Bagarmossen, I’ve just been enjoying a Fitterstoke Classical Breakfast.

      Here’s the playlist I made from your Classical 25:

      I know it is a bit ridiculous to make a sampler of this kind for classical music but it will pique my curiosity and encourage me to explore further.

      It’s a challenge to find classical albums on Spotify. I tried by looking for conductors, then composers and musicians and in the end found all but one: Neville Marriner and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields playing Delius.

      So many new names!

      New discoveries! That’s what I come here for.

      • Iā€™m glad you enjoyed it, @Kaisfatdad – but, although I enjoy most of the composers on my grid, I confess that some of my choices were motivated by the colour and appearance of the cover – and whether I could find what I was looking for!

        For example, I would have rather chosen a Vaughan Williams symphony than a choral work – but I wouldnā€™t have got the nice orange/yellow cover!

        • Now I look at it, I see what you mean, @fitterstoke. Visually it works very well.

          And there I was, trying to find exactly those recordings! How could do that to me??

          Seriously, I am very pleased with the result. I like some tracks more than others but the compilation as a whole has really dragged me out of my musical comfort zone.

          • My fondness for Scandinavian and British music seems to have come through, in any event! Iā€™ll be interested to hear what you think of Tubin and Rautavaara – two names which I feel should be better known: also, on the British side, Alwyn and Lloyd, both fine symphonists – but not represented as such on my grid!

          • Gosh! How wonderful! My own personalised classical sampler!

            That was very thoughtful of you @fitterstoke. I am very grateful.

            Today is hectic so I won’t really get a chance to listen properly until Monday. But I promise to let you know which tracks I enjoy most, after I’ve given it a few listens.

            This is turning into a real voyage of musical discovery.

  41. Iā€™ve given the @Fitterstoke Classical sampler one complete listen. Itā€™s three and a half hours long and I found myself getting really get lost in the music.

    Most of these composers are new to me. I feel like Columbus setting in the Americas!

    • I hope you enjoy it, @Kaisfatdad. I based it on the 25 covers (as per your own playlist), but rather than sticking with the actual recording, I kept the composer (mostly) and chose a piece that I would prefer myself. One or two composers were swapped out, where the picture had been chosen more for colour or shape than musical content. And nothing was chosen which I donā€™t listen to myself.

      Edit: didnā€™t notice until later that Iā€™d picked two pieces by Shostakovich – but theyā€™re so different from each other that I decided not to fix it!

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