A good mix of albums in this tranche.

The top pick from the albums new to me was Leonard Cohen's last album, which his terrific world-weary voice. This one got added to my Qobuz playlist, and may get more permanently added to my library.

A bit of a mixed bag of albums here. Of those I hadn't heard before, there were a few I ranked 5/5, which is good.

The first of these was Johnny Cash At San Quentin. This I loved despite my dislike of country music. It had everything a live album should have from great interactions with the audience to great interactions with the band members.

Another tranche of 20 albums from the 1001 Albums generator. It seems that the critics that assembled this list continue to be a bit anglo-centric. Also, I'm really not clear what gets an album onto this list - popularity, sales, 'musical quality', influential? 

Of this set of albums, the one that was most influential on my taste is Unknown Pleasures by Joy Division. I bought my first copy of this album on release, prompted by a room-mate will impeccable post-punk taste. I had to buy a second copy after my flat was burgled as I couldn't live without it or the second Joy Division album Closer for that matter. I later recovered most of the stolen LPs albeit minus most of the mainstream LPs in the collection.

Another tranche of albums recommended by the 1001 abums generator. Some really excellent albums here, bust also a few that I can't really understand why they made it onto the list.

On the whole, my album ratings have quite a strong concordance with the global reviews, the main exceptions being hip-hop albums.

Some great albums here, plus some real dogs (in my opinion, obviously). The highlight in this set of albums is London Calling by The Clash, but then that's been a favourite of mine for many years.

I hadn't listened to Orange Juice's Rip it Up much at all over the years, and I kind of appreciated this. So that's the album I'm flagging up here. Devendra Banhart's Rejoicing in the Hands was also interesting. Both these are in my Qobuz favourites for further listening.

The albums in this list of 1001 continue to be predominantly anglocentric, which is a bit of a disappointment. Anyway, here is another tranche of 20 records. I was pleased to see Suicide's first album show up. I have a vinyl copy of the UK release (which has a slightly different track listing than the original US release), but also a CD copy of the US release. I bought it because I was intrigued by a review in a HiF magazine which rather rudely announced that only a poseur could possibly claim to like the record ("poseur" was something of a standard insult in those days!). I loved the album from the off, and went on to buy many more Suicide albums, and albums by Alan Vega and Martin Rev.

I was pleasantly surprised by Green River by Creedence Clearwater Revival, but many of the selections seemed to me to be rather inconsequential records. 

So here I am, having passed 10% of the albums. It continues to be a rather anglocentric exercise, with most albums from the US, UK and Canada.

No discoveries of albums in this tranche that I subsequently added to my collection. But the exercise is exposing me to records I've not played before, which has to be a good thing even if it confirms my existing taste! 

Here are my thoughts on albums 61 to 80 from the 1001 Albums website.

It's still very English language on the whole. On the other hand, it keeps exposing me to new music which is always a good thing.

I've changed the format of these blog posts, and I'm just pasting my commentary from the 1001 Albums website. I've left the weblinks in - the album title links to Spotify (I haven't tested those since I don't use Spotify), and the artist name links to the Wikipedia page for the album. The Global reviews link is to the reviews logged on the 1001 albums website.

Frankly, the whole exercise seems to me to be a bit lacking in diversity - hopefully we'll see more non-English speaking albums later on. (Click title to read more)

Here are albums 21-40 that the 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die website presented me. See albums 1-20 here.

Having got through 40 albums over 40 weeks, I'm actually enjoyig the experience - I'm listening to stuff that in some cases I've not played before, and I usually play the album three times. There's one exception to that in this posting - the Aerosmith album.

At the end of December, I came across the 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die website, based upon the book of the same name. After signing up at the site, you receive a daily album suggestion. There's an app for Logitech Media Server which links to a copy in your local music library, or failing that to your streaming service of choice, making it easy to listen to the album.

So far, I've had 22 albums - several of which I own in some format or other, some were new to me, and some have been added to my collection. As far as I understand it, the albums from the list are presented in a random order. Here's what I've had in order of appearance. Here are the first 20 albums.

Detailed instructions for setting up a Raspberry Pi Zero W as a Bluetooth-enabled music player for the Logitech Media Server streaming system.

I'm a long term user of Logitech's Squeezebox music server system. Despite Logitech discontinuing their line of Squeezebox players several years ago, the system seems to carry on in rude health owing to the dedication of a number of software contributors, and the excellent community support forums. One significant factor in the system's survival has been the development of piCorePlayer, an operating system based on TinyCore Linux for the Raspberry Pi (more information here). Since its initial launch, piCorePlayer has become astonishingly refined, even allowing installation of LMS (Logitech Media Server). Indeed, my home music system uses a Raspberry Pi model 3 as its server.