In 1986 my therapist at the time told me about an album I might like, in fact, lent me the LP. I have always loved this album, The Gospel at Colonus. It is not readily available in its original studio recording. I had the live version available on streaming services, and a cassette tape I made in 1986 of the studio version when she lent it to me.
There's a Wikipedia article about this, which was actually a musical that was eventually on Broadway. I've also watched a production of it that can be found on YouTube, and saw a live production locally about 6-8 years ago. Wikipedia article on The Gospel at Colonus
So in 2021 (time flies!) I decided to see what I could do to improve the situation. I found the LP on eBay, and I don't even have a turntable anymore. So I found a guy who runs a little business digitizing media, and he turned it into a set of .wav files for me. I imported this into Apple Music and enjoyed the result.
Today I decided to make a public version of this, so I figured I should get them into mp3 files. This involved a little tinkering and googling (God bless Stack Overflow, among others) how to deal with spaces in the filenames, encode with lame from the .wav files, etc. Then I realized I should look into making an .m3u file that would play (and hopefully allow import!) the whole batch like an album.
The following is the result of these efforts. I hope someone enjoys this music like I do. First, the .m3u file: Gospel/GospelAtColonus.m3u
On My Mac, that plays in Safari via http streaming, which is pretty satisfactory. If you save it, then open it, Apple Music, opening that creates a playlist called "Internet Songs" which has all the songs. It is streaming them though.
To actually add these songs to your library as an album, download the zip file, it will create a folder called Gospel in Finder. In Apple Music, go to File->Import, navigate into the Gospel folder, and select all (Cmd-A) and open. This will create an album called The Gospel At Colonus(1986) with the songs in the correct order.
I don't know what other players will do with it.
On Windows, clicking on the m3u file also streams it. If you download the zip and extract the files, you can follow a similiar process in Media Player of Adding the folder to your Media Library. The ID3 tags will have it as an album with track order and song names.
The .mp3 files:
01 Live Where You Can.mp3
02 Stop Do Not Go On.mp3
03 How Shall I See You Through My Tears.mp3
04 A Voice Foretold (Prayer).mp3
05 Never Drive You Away (Jubilee).mp3
06 Numberless Are The World's Wonders.mp3
07 Lift Me Up (Like A Dove).mp3
08 Sunlight of No Light.mp3
09 Eternal Sleep.mp3
10 Lift Him Up.mp3
11 Now Let The Weeping Cease (Hymn).mp3
Here they all (the mp3) are in a zip file: GospelAtColonusMp3s.zip