Ask MetaFilter posts tagged with album

Can't remember this album cover

Meatbomb — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 11:13:28 -0800

Poorly remembered album cover art - 70s? R. Crumb? Help? I had the memory triggered looking at my new profile picture (link). I thought it was art from R. Crumb's "Cheap Thrills", but it dosen't seem to be a part of that album cover.

But the art style seems right, I swear there was an album in my dad's old record collection, the front cover was an extreme close up cartoon face, looking sort of up the guy's nostrils, and something like R. Crumb's style. So think my profile pic linked there, framed like that, in R. Crumb cartoon style, on the cover of an album from the 60s or 70s...

Please help? Is this ringing any bells?

Albums arranged by song length

Wolfdog — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 03:38:06 -0800

The songs on Wintersun's self-titled album appear in order of increasing length. Can you turn up other albums that are organized this way?

Where can I find this guestbook design?

irishkitten — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 10:11:41 -0800

Help me find a specific guest book and accessories for our wedding! My googling is failing me. I'm trying to find this guestbook and the matching photo album/frame. All I've been able to find out is the manufacturer, which is apparently Splash, but after digging through pages and pages of guestbooks, I'm running out of keyword ideas(and time!)

Another shot of the rest of the set here. Thanks, MeFi. :)

Two two two songs in one: What's this album name?

mcbeth — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 14:50:38 -0800

Name that tune Know any album for which lyrics of one song are laid over the melody of another?

My Australian ex made a cassette of *that* album, whatever it is, and we listened to it several times when I was overseas and visiting 6+ years ago. I'll be jiggered if I can locate either the name or the album. Not sure if it was an oz-specific compilation; I checked with ex -- she doesn't remember anymore. Both the lyrics and tunes were from popular 70-80s rock tunes. I don't remember the specifics of those either but at the time I recall thinking 'hey cool, I know that/those songs.

Bonus gold star stickers awarded if someone can tell me where to go to buy it.

Remember a photo of Pink Floyd in Kew Gardens?

electric_counterpoint — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 06:19:55 -0800

What Pink Floyd album cover (or liner) does this image come from? My dad just visited me in London, and recalled a certain image from a Pink Floyd album when he toured Kew Gardens. We eventually hunted down the photo I linked, but he doesn't think it's the shot he remembers. The one he's looking for was also posed in front of the Victorian greenhouse, but from a wider angle, showing the band from a distance.

He thought it might have come from the montage on A Nice Pair, but I can't find a scan of the gatefold (or liner notes; I'm not sure how it was originally packaged). I'd be happy to have the album confirmed, but even happier if anyone can point me to a scan online.

How to DIY distribute an album on the internet?

Mali — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 17:00:24 -0800

Is there any sort of code available / software / how would I design a digital download distribution model for an independant band? My band is releasing our first full length this month, and we're keeping everything as DIY as possible (we recorded / mastered the thing, we did the art, and we're going to be doing the promotion / pressing of it for the most part). We are going to have physical copies available for purchase at shows, but we want to have people be able to buy and download the FLACs and JPGs of the album art from our website. We don't want to use iTunes or any other established solution, because we're going to sell the thing for cheap (3 bucks) and any sort of profit we'd make from it would probably go right back into paying for iTunes and such. We'd just set up a Paypal donation thing and then send people to a download link, but we're afraid that people will just send the download link to their friends (we're aware that all music on the internets gets shared, and we're fine with that, but we don't want to make it THAT) easy.

Is there any solution that we can use where people can Paypal us 3 bucks and then somehow be directed to a unique download link or site, without us having to manually send it every time someone buys the thing? Or any better solution / existing infrastructure we haven't thought of?

How would you show off 400+ photos?

oreonax — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 16:59:34 -0800

Seeking large capacity photo albums in Portland, Oregon! I just got about 400 photos from my wedding that happened in 2004. I'd like to put them into a photo album, but where on earth (in Portland, OR, specifically) do I find an attractive photo album that can handle roughly 400 pictures?

I'll be going through it and culling the less-than-preferred ones which will go in a box but I'd like the rest to have some kind of display...

Songs about America

DoorFrame — Thu, 15 May 2008 12:08:30 -0800

I'm driving cross country and am looking to make a mix CD for the road using songs about America. Ask Metafilter has previously tackled similar questions dealing with songs about Los Angeles, California, New York, New Jersey and even Europe, but what are some of the best songs about America?

It's the hunting stories with noise album, of course

scruss — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 03:05:03 -0800

My friend had an album - mainly spoken word pieces with electronic noise. It was a story about a man who went out hunting with his friends, who laughed at him. Help my friend find it, please. In one of the later variations, the hunter killed and ate his friends. The album was Canadian perhaps, late 60s.

My iPod Touch wants to be a Shuffle.

prinado — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 15:16:14 -0800

My new iPod Touch will not sequence an album in the proper order. I cue an album, push play, and it shuffles randomly from song to song. Any ideas to get me back on track? Yes, I'm sure it's not in shuffle mode. Yes, I double and triple checked. Yes, I use standard file naming that has worked flawlessly for my iPod Classic and Nano (i.e. 01_songname) and have populated the Track field, too (i.e. 1 of 10). And yup, I've cleared the drive and re-uploaded the files, updated the iTunes and Touch firmware, googled, yahooed, asked other Touch owners and so on to no avail.

I tried living with it for a week, but, you know, Dark Side of the Moon just isn't the same all discombobulated.

Anyone else experienced/fixed this issue?

MP3 CD Woes

snap_dragon — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 07:25:51 -0800

How to burn Mp3 random mixes (not entire albums) into several folders on Macintosh for easy navigation in my car cd player...I used to be able to make mp3 discs of whatever songs i wanted and then place them into folders on my desktop, then burn them to disc. It seems that Itunes only allows some form of folder separation (if any at all) by sorting things only by each group's album. This is not helpful if you want several folders with random songs in each folder...for example...I want one folder with songs by rock groups..another that is jazz...whatever. On the new imac, it does not seem to let me take the drag and dropped mp3s in folders on my desktop to a burn disc icon as it did in my older G4. Any suggestions on software or a simpler way around this? I appreciate your input. When it did work, it worked great and saved me from using a crummy fm transmitter on my ipod. The mp3 cds for me sound much better and are easily disposable if left in car.

How to obtain license to perform on NYC streets / promote album?

Mali — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 00:04:52 -0800

How does one go about acquiring the permit for a band (not solo performer) to perform/busk on the streets of New York City? My band just finished recording a seven track demo, and we're very interested in promoting it. In my brief experience in NYC, I've occasionally seen bands (mainly R+B and hip-hop, but occasionally rocK) set up on relatively wide streets performing and selling albums / playing music. Would this be possible for a relatively unknown pop-punk band to do? Are there any particularly good locations for it? What exactly would we have to go about doing to ensure we don't get shut down while doing it? Is it even legal?

Anyone else who has any input on how to promote a record in the tri-state area, I'd gladly except it.

Help me find the band "Album"

Baby_Balrog — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 12:39:20 -0800

I received a mix-tape a while ago with a really great band on it that I can't find. I'm pretty sure they're called "Album," and I think the song was called "hormigas." The song was quite bleak and beautiful and I think it was sung in Spanish. It sounded a little post-rockish. I can't find the band because searching Itunes or Google or anything else for a band called "Album" is pretty damn fruitless.

Help with iPhoto

triolus — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 11:44:32 -0800

How can I use iPhoto to put my photos online? I want to make a web album of all my pictures. I have everything sorted out the way I want it to be, but iPhoto only lets me export to a .mac account I don't have and don't want.

Since everything is already laid by and sorted into album, I pretty much want something that will create the HTML, dump it and the pictures into a folder, and scale the images back for me a bit. Being able to mess with the templates would be nice, as well. I don't want to have to sort everything out again (by using something like JAlbum).

How can I get more exposure for my music?

SampleSize — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 15:12:27 -0800

Help me expose myself! How can I get my music heard? About 6 months ago, I released my second album, which has received some excellent feedback from press and listeners (including Sean O'Hagan of Stereolab and High Llamas). I have it available on CD Baby, iTunes, Amie Street, last.fm and whole bunch of other music download services. Some of my tracks are on Podsafe Music Network and have been used in 10 or so podcasts. I have had several tracks do pretty well on Garageband (one track has been in the top 20 of the indie-rock genre for 5 months and is currently in round 3 out of, I think, 4 rounds). I have sent it to terrestrial and Internet radio stations. The result so far has been, well, minimal. I get no comments on my website and, if I have any fans, I don't know about them. I have made less than $20 on digital downloads and have sold 10 copies of the album through CD Baby -- 6 of which were to my mom.

Thanks, Mom.

Despite this, I still feel very good about the music and think it is deserving of fans. It's not for everyone, but I believe that a certain (small?) percentage of people will really love the stuff. The challenge has been getting it in enough ears that that small percentage becomes meaningful. I'm not looking to sell a zillion copies of this, my second album; If I sold 100 and made some fans out there, I would feel pretty thrilled that I had taken a significant step forward in my music career. Actually, at this stage, the fans are more important than the sales. Between selling 100 copies to people who disappear and selling zero but getting some kind of buzz going, I'll take the latter for sure.

So, the question is, where are my resources best spent? I know I could do more cold mailings, but the effort to return ratio on that has been pretty abysmal. What if I was going to spend a little money on -- I don't know -- a radio promoter? A publicist? A something else?

What's "a little money," you ask? Well, I'm really not sure. Depends a lot on the potential for return, the risk, etc. $1,000? $5,000? Honestly, I don't even know what's a reasonable ballpark.

Please share things that have worked for you, guerilla marketing techniques, crazy ideas that pop into your head, etc. I won't self-link here, but my website is in my profile if you want to hear what the music.

Is there a website where you can put in features of artwork from a CD/album, and it'll find what the album is?

trampesque — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 06:12:12 -0800

Is there a website where you can put in features of artwork from a CD/album, and it'll find what the album is? I might have dreamt this, but seem to remember a website where you could put into the search box, for example, 'Tiger' and it would return all the albums with the picture of a tiger in the artwork.

I'm trying to track down what some CDs are and literally only have small thumbnails of the covers - the title is too small to decipher - and a website like this would help immensely!

Help me ifgure out if I'll score brownie points by giving LP albums as art or not.

n'muakolo — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 01:48:59 -0800

Grateful Dead/Dylan/Phish/Johnny Cash/Hank Williams lovers. How do you feel about LP albums as art? I'm thinking it might be cool to get my bf - who is pretty intense about the Dead, Phish, Dylan, Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, bluegrass and jazz (sorry I can't specify more) - some LP albums that I would frame and hang on the wall as art for his music lair. He has a lot of concert-related memorabilia. I'm just wondering, though - LP album art - hot or not hot? I'd rather not ask him too many questions or I'll tip him off.

If hot, any tips on Dead, Dylan, Johnny Cash, Hank, Phish, albums that would make his little heart sing? (I do know some favorite shows/albums of his, but I'm wondering if there are albums out there that almost anyone would recognize as awesome to have on their wall. If they liked this stuff on their wall.)

Programmer-Photographer WLTM API for printing, binding...

Ogre Lawless — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 16:13:11 -0800

Hardbound photo books interfaced with an API? I have the photos and the descriptions on my own scratchbuilt gallery thing and want to use an API to generate one of them hardbound photo books -- maybe you know of a route? (a few withing) The best bet I've come up with at this point would be either:

a) Run the mess into a Flickr pro account (which I don't now have) in order to have Qoop do the layout for me -- the later integrates nicely with the former which has a very nice API. Downside: Qoop only does softbound books and the privledge of using Flickr's API would run me $25/yr.

b) Run the mess into, like, RTF and shlep it thence into PDF and off to someone like Lulu for the printing and binding happiness. Lulu will more than do the magic for me, but oy -- the conversion headaches.

A few previous asks give some pointers to Other Software, but since I've already got the images with captions and organized, it would be a major pain in the ass to reduplicate that work...

Record of my life (well, just one year)

arcticwoman — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 15:46:00 -0800

Help putting together an online record of my year as an exchange student. Specifically, my questions inside deal with: what media (blog, wiki, lj, flickr, website?) how to deal with different materials (diary, emails, photos, memories) and a legal question regarding the association that sent me. In 2000/2001 I was a long-term youth exchange student to Malaysia with a particular service organization. I was thinking about my year abroad and realized that if I don't do something now to preserve and organize my memories they will be lost. My diary has already suffered some water damage and parts of it are unreadable, and years of shuffling around has meant that my photos are all out of order and some have disappeared. So I want to get everything together in a virtual format that will withstand physical damage and will make it easy for me to search particular events/photos. Also important is that it is in a form that I can share with my family and friends.

I have: a damaged diary
a few old livejournal posts
emails that I sent to my mother and her replies
photos
pamphlets
postcards
cookbooks/loose recipes
other scraps (from conferences, movie tickets, song lyrics/)

What can I do with all this? How can I organize it all online in a coherent order?

Finally, my legal-ish question: I didn't actually have a good year abroad and I have a lot of negative feelings and opinions about the organization that sent me. Do I need to hide the name of this organization under a pseudonym, or can I be candid? Not all of my opinions on this group are bad, and it is possible that in a few years I may even try to join. Is writing about how they let me down going to be problematic?

How do I cheaply promote a compilation CD?

cortex — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 07:05:26 -0800

How can I promote a small CD release on the extremely cheap? For those playing along at home, yes, I'm talking about meficomp.

Initial disclaimer: I know nothing, nothing, about promotion. It is not my forte. It is possibly my antiforte, even.

This CD isn't a for-profit release, which puts me in a different boat than if I were trying to, say, self-release my own album. Profits from the project are going to charity, so I'm disinclined to cut deeply into that by spending any significant money on promotion. At the same time, selling all 1000 units, less a bit of promotional spending, will raise more money for the charity than selling 200 units and sitting on the rest.

Selling all the units would also be much more exciting for the two dozen musicians/bands involved.

And it's a compilation album—the notable feature is not a specific genre or or sound, but the excellent variety of sounds and artists and the specific compilation hook (in this case, the Metafilterness).

So: what sort of things can I do to promote this release on the cheap? To whom? How? When? Educate me.

Help me rock the crib again...

Helga-woo — Sun, 05 Nov 2006 09:02:25 -0800

Help me track down the track listing for an album from my childhood: Hits for Kids, Vol. 1 and 2. In order to bring joy to my sister's otherwise reasonably grown up music collection, I'm recreating some of the cassette albums from our childhood on CD for her for Christmas.

This album was bought for us on an epic family shopping trip to John Lewis in Milton Keynes, sometime in the early - mid-eighties. At some point we lost volume 2, and in more recent years volume 1 has gone walkabout. The cover was yellow, and there was a slightly scary picture of a crying(?) girl in clown make up on the cover. Some tracks I remember being on it are Hello Sam, Goodbye Samantha by Cliff Richard, Happy Birthday by Stevie Wonder, Hang on Snoopy by the McCoys. There might also have been an above average number of Rolf Harris tracks on there as well (Two little boys, Jake the peg, etc)

But now I think about it, there are so many Rolf Harris songs kicking around my subconscious we might have had a whole album of his.

Sorry, but childhood me didn't think to remember useful information like record label....

Where to find more info on writing music in the studio.

occidental — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 22:22:05 -0800

Where can I find more information about bands and the writing of albums in the studio. While randomly linking across the internet I found and article on the album "Euthanasia" by Megadeth and how they made a film about the album which was the first "studio written" album. I have introduced a similar concept to my band for our current endeavor which will be our second album. Our first album was written and then taken to the studio. Now we have the equipment available to us that we can essentially have unlimited studio time and would like to use the studio as part of the writing process. I have read about the production of Radiohead's "OK Computer" being a studio endeavor in addition to a number of other great albums. My question is related to locating more items like the making of "Euthanasia" film. I would like to find more resources about bands using the studio which focus on the process more than the band. So rather than being like "LOOK! at Radiohead do a brilliant album" it would be along the lines of "let's examine the process of Radiohead creating a brilliant album." The focus here would be on methodology and the ideas that formed the process without delving into the shallow (mtv-esque) or the overly technical (some production how-to video) but a balance between the forces in the creation of the album. Also any input on why you think this is a good/bad idea is more than welcome.

What additional information do people include in the album MP3 tag?

mr_silver — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 06:31:59 -0800

I need to understand the most popular ways that people "corrupt" the album tag within their MP3's with additional information (such as disc number). I'm working on something which will take the name of an album from the metadata in an MP3 and pass it to a server to do some funky stuff involving searching of catalogues of albums available to purchase.

The problem that I've found is that some people (myself included) "corrupt" the album tag with additional information that would cause a straight album search to fail.

For example, a common one appears to be putting the disk number someone in the album name. For example, I have an album called "Cream Classics (disc 1)" but my friend might have it labelled as "Cream Classics [D1]".

As such, doing a straight search on these examples will fail because that is not the correct album name. So therefore I need to include some logic that strips out that additional information prior to searching.

Unfortunately I don't know what the common ways that people use the album field to hold additional information. Will just handling the two presented above solve 80% of the issues or are there other things that I need to consider?

So in short:

1. If you put additional information into the album title field, what do you put and how do you format it?
2. Is there any way I can use the web or a website to look through how people mangle the title field to put additional information?

The Beatles "White Album" Just Means They Were Too Busy To Do It

unixrat — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 11:32:05 -0800

So I'd like to start a site where people can submit/dl alternative album art for music. More inside? Yes, please. I've always hated the album art on Trip Shakespeare's Lulu and now that iTunes had that snazzy album-art viewer thing it began to drive me nuts. So, I created a different cover, one that I thought better represented the album. (All my own work - no copyright infringment, natch. But it had the band name and album name on it.)

That got me to thinking: "Wouldn't it be great if there was a site where people could share homemade album covers?" My very next thought was "Man, the RIAA would sue them into the ground." But would they?

So here's the question: "Would a homemade album art ul/dl site be legal?"

Sticky problem

arse_hat — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 19:46:27 -0800

Please help with a sticky photo album problem. I have been scanning thousands of old family pictures and have a problem coming up. I have about 40 pictures in an old album from the early 70's. It is the old kind with sticky pages with plastic covering the page. Many pictures came out quickly but this last group is stuck tight. Any suggestions as to how to get the pictures off the pages without tearing them?