[TJ Elite]

Well, here's my list. I tried to avoid naming the most popular albums on the planet and also attempted to keep the number of classical and jazz albums to a minimum to make the list more compact. All are extremely good albums with great or at least pretty good sound quality except for a few albums which might not meet strict audiophile standards. It might seem like a long list but that's just a fraction of the albums I could name.

 

Some of the albums might be difficult to acquire on CD but digital distributors like iTunes Store and AmazonMP3 might prove helpful in some cases. Two of these are actually only available as files lacking a physical release, so I've mentioned where they can be acquired legally below the list.
 
Arvo Pärt - Alina
Arvo Pärt - Tabula Rasa
Bear McCreary - Battlestar Galactica: Season 3 OST
Beck - Sea Change
Bill Evans Trio - Waltz for Debby
Björk - Homogenic
The Black Mages - The Black Mages III: Darkness and Starlight
Boris - Boris at Last -Feedbacker-
Brian Eno - Ambient 4: On Land
Burzum - Filosofem
Charles Mingus - Mingus Ah Um
Diana Krall - Live in Paris
Dire Straits - Love Over Gold
Ella Fitzgerald - Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Rodgers and Hart Song Book
Esbjörn Svensson Trio - Viaticum
Freezepop - Future Future Future Perfect
Hank Mobley - Soul Station
Hiromi - Another Mind
Husky Rescue - Ship of Light
Imogen Heap - Speak for Yourself
Isis - Oceanic
Jeff Beck - Performing This Week… Live at Ronnie Scott's
Jesper Kyd - Hitman 2: Silent Assassin OST
Jessica Curry - Dear Esther OST
Joanna Newsom - Ys
John Frusciante - The Empyrean
Kate Bush - 50 Words for Snow
Keith Jarrett - The Köln Concert
Kenji Kawai - Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence OST
Kow Otani - Shadow of the Colossus ~Roar of the Earth~
Kronos Quartet, Kimmo Pohjonen & Samuli Kosminen - Uniko
Madonna - Ray of Light
Max Richter - The Blue Notebooks
Mike Oldfield - Music of the Spheres
MONO - You Are There
Nat "King" Cole - The Very Thought of You
Neurosis - The Eye of Every Storm
Opeth - Ghost Reveries
Owen Pallett - Heartland
Patricia Barber - Modern Cool
Pekka Kuusisto & Iiro Rantala - Subterráneo
Petri Alanko - Alan Wake OST
Radiohead - The King of Limbs
Rodrigo y Gabriela - Live in Japan
Shpongle - Ineffable Mysteries from Shpongleland
Talk Talk - Laughing Stock
Tarja - My Winter Storm
Tenacious D - Tenacious D
Tom Kerstens - Utopia
Tori Amos - Under the Pink
uniMemo - A Dagger and a Venturer's Clothes
Various Artists - Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots OST
 
Dear Esther OST can be streamed for free and purchased from the composer's Bandcamp page.
The album A Dagger and a Venturer's Clothes is sold by both iTunes and Amazon MP3.

 

[manveru]

Quote:

The Black Mages - The Black Mages III: Darkness and Starlight

 
The fact that this is on your list is just too awesome. 

 
Lots of other amazing albums as well!

 

[Redcarmoose]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[bigshot]

99.9% of what I listen to works fine random shuffled by songs. The only exception is classical music where you want all four movements of a symphony together. In those cases, I join as I rip. but if there's a quiet band between songs, it shuffles fine.

I admit, I grew out of Pink Floyd long ago, and I like the early Beatles albums much better than the post Sgt Pepper ones.

 

[manveru]

Quote:

99.9% of what I listen to works fine random shuffled by songs. The only exception is classical music where you want all four movements of a symphony together. In those cases, I join as I rip. but if there's a quiet band between songs, it shuffles fine.
I admit, I grew out of Pink Floyd long ago, and I like the early Beatles albums much better than the post Sgt Pepper ones.

 
Yeah, some albums I like listening to all the way through, but a lot music is good in shuffle as well. Agree about The Beatles too.

 

[Tilpo]

99.9% of what I listen to works fine random shuffled by songs. The only exception is classical music where you want all four movements of a symphony together. In those cases, I join as I rip. but if there's a quiet band between songs, it shuffles fine.

I admit, I grew out of Pink Floyd long ago, and I like the early Beatles albums much better than the post Sgt Pepper ones.

It's always interesting to see how people's opinions differ on the subject. Some people shuffle songs, and hate listening to albums because they find it boring that the songs are always in the same order. Others (like me), can't stand to listen to individual songs and find the need to listen to whole albums instead.
Most people are somewhere in between.

 

[bigshot]

Most people probably listen to the radio or a streaming service and don't even think about the fact that the song came from an album.

 

[bigshot]

From roughly 1900 to 1952, there were two lengths to records... A ten inch record played for 3 1/2 minutes and a twelve inch record played for 4 1/2. In the early fifties, the LP record and the 45 single were introduced. The 45 was te same as before... 3-4 minutes a side. The LP had about 22 minutes on a side, broken up into five or six different songs. The reason the songs were broken up and weren't just one continuous 22 minute composition was because they continued to be played separately on the radio and broken off for sale as 45s.

The first concept albums were done by Sinatra at Capitol. But they were still broken up into single sized songs. It really wasn't until Sgt Pepper when albums were created that weren't intended to be broken up. The late sixties and seventies had album side long drum solos, and concept albums that were padded out with inferior material. By the 80s, punk and new wave got sick of these excesses and started making 3-4 minute songs again.

So we're really only talking about 70s album oriented rock here... Which is not much more than a drop in the bucket of recorded music. The vast majority of popular music was intended to be shuffled at home on changers that played singles, or shuffled on the radio.

 

[OJNeg]

Awesome list TJ. I'll make sure to check some of those out.
 
As for my music listening habits, I always listen to full albums all the way through. Whether I'm pulling out an LP or CD, or clicking play in Foobar2K, I always take the time to relax and listen to the whole album. I'm unyielding when it comes to this; no shuffle, no skipping tracks, I'll sit my butt down and make myself enjoy it if I have to 

 

[bigshot]

I use the playlisting feature in iTunes to make my own albums. I think it's a lot of fun to mix things up and find interesting combinations of different music. I have a bunch of different iTunes libraries, but one of them is exclusively for random shuffling. I have a lot of fun preening that library... adding interesting music, removing things that don't work.... It contains everything from Cuban mambo to country/western to jazz to jump blues, ethnic and rock n roll. It's interesting how a huge diversity of time periods, stye and culture can work together to create a unified context.

Not all shuffle is really random.

 

[Camjon]

Just got the new Foo Fighters cd. Best cd of any artist in a long time!

 

[TJ Elite]

Quote:

 
The fact that this is on your list is just too awesome. 

Nobuo Uematsu's music is what made me realize there is actually good music in this world. I find the album extremely satisfying to listen to and it's pretty well mastered too. It's not too dynamically compressed, at least when compared to most modern rock records. The previous album on the other hand sounds pretty horrible; the electric guitars are clipping in a lot of places which is really annoying and distracts me from the actual music.
 
Quote:

It's always interesting to see how people's opinions differ on the subject. Some people shuffle songs, and hate listening to albums because they find it boring that the songs are always in the same order. Others (like me), can't stand to listen to individual songs and find the need to listen to whole albums instead.
Most people are somewhere in between.

I LOVE albums (but hate compilations with a passion) and find the order the songs were placed in very integral to the listening experience as a whole. On the other hand I also like listening to songs on shuffle because sometimes I really want the next song to complement the previous one by contrasting it, if that makes any sense. On some albums the songs differ a lot from one another, but on others the mood stays pretty much the same throughout the entire album which sometimes bores me even if the album is excellent. I've always been an album person, so in the past I never had any appreciation for singles or even EPs but during the past two months I've been getting familiar with Vocaloid music and most of those releases are either EPs or singles which has taught me to appreciate the art of writing an individual song without any plans of ever including it on an album. A lot of Vocaloid users actually explore a variety of musical styles with their music and some seem to switch between genres almost effortlessly, which appeals to me a lot because western artists almost never do that (at least successfully) and also because I simply can't stand being tied to one type of music for more than a day or two. I crave variety and if a single artist can provide me with that then I'm down with that.
 
My car has a CD player that can play MP3 CDs and and for several years I've been creating about one MP3 CD per year filling it with songs from different years, artists, genres and so on. Trying to arrange completely unrelated songs in an order that has a nice flow to it can be really challenging but also really satisfying when you get it right. It's been over a year since I made a new disc, so this summer I'll probably try to put a new track list together.
 
Edit
A couple of words about how I listen to music.
 
When I'm using my computer I usually select an album and listen to it from the beginning, but if at some point I feel like I want to listen to something else then I select another album and start than from the beginning. I hardly ever use shuffle when I'm using iTunes these days. When I'm on the road and using my iPhone as a portable player I pretty much 100% of the time have it on shuffle. I sync the songs to it from my Mac which has only a small percentage of my music library. When I add music to it, I do it an album at a time and I go through all of the tracks several times deleting the tracks that I don't think are good enough or don't seem like they would work very well when they would come up in shuffle mode.
 
I personally don't think that music should be listened to as background music. If you want background music use music that was specifically composed for that purpose. But that's just my opinion. When I'm using a portable source it's not always possible to pay full attention to the music, so when I notice that I'm not actually listening to the music I turn it off and return to it later when I specifically want to listen to music.
 
When I want to give music my full attention I listen to my main speaker setup. I always have all the light turned off and my eyes closed unless the album sound better with my eyes open which seems to be the case with some albums for some reason. Might be related to how the soundstage is laid out or something. When I listen to CDs I almost never skip any tracks and I definitely listen to the album in its entirety, unless it's not the right album for my mood at that moment, in which case I change discs until I find the album that clicks with me that day. I've found it impossible to predict which album is perfect for each day; the album that brought me close to eargasm recently might make me yawn, and an album that I think is musically mediocre at best might be just the thing.

 

[manveru]

Quote:

Nobuo Uematsu's music is what made me realize there is actually good music in this world. I find the album extremely satisfying to listen to and it's pretty well mastered too. It's not too dynamically compressed, at least when compared to most modern rock records. The previous album on the other hand sounds pretty horrible; the electric guitars are clipping in a lot of places which is really annoying and distracts me from the actual music.

 
I know what you mean about the sound quality of the previous album, haha. It's always unfortunate when that sort of thing happens. Nobuo's works are a big inspiration for me and my friends in making our own music. Actually I have to kind of fight with them not to want to compress the crap out of everything and make it as crushed and loud as possible. Thankfully I'm the one who's actually handling the mixing.

 

[bigshot]

I personally don't think that music should be listened to as background music.

Parties at your house must be pretty quiet!

 

[TJ Elite]

Quote:

Parties at your house must be pretty quiet!

I don't go to parties and I definitely don't host parties at my house. If I have friends over and we listen to music, we actually listen to the music and discuss it afterwards. If the friends who are visiting don't really care that much about music we do something else; it's as simple as that.
 
But yeah if I ever held a party at my house there probably wouldn't be music playing in the background so I guess it WOULD be a quiet party if you don't take chatter into account.