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Double album

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A double album is an audio album of sufficient length that two units of the medium in which it is sold (especially records and compact discs) are necessary to contain the entirety of it.

Recording artists often think of double albums as a single piece artistically; however, there are exceptions such as Pink Floyd's Ummagumma, one live album and one studio record packaged together, and OutKast's Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, consisting of one practical solo album by each member of the hip-hop duo. Particularly in the compact disc era, artists sometimes will release albums with bonus discs, featuring studio out-takes, alternate mixes, or other material that would not typically be suitable album material but which would be of interest to fans (e.g., the Beatles' Let It Be... Naked, which featured a bonus disc of studio chatter and jamming entitled Fly on the Wall).

The first ever double album was Dave Brubeck's At Carnegie Hall. The first rock double album, and first studio double album, ever released was Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde in 1966, although at the same time Dylan was recording the album, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention were at work on the double album Freak Out!, released two months after Blonde On Blonde.

Since then, the double album format has been more often used for live albums for which material is often plentiful.

In the late 1980s, the compact disc, which can carry more music than a typical vinyl record, became the most common format on which to sell music. Albums which were originally packaged as double records are often sold on a single compact disc, such as The Who's Tommy and The Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street (though not in all cases, such as the Beatles' White Album). Also, albums of the compact disc era are often longer than ones of previous decades and are sometimes packaged on two records if vinyl copies are produced. In general, an album is usually referred to as a double album when it sprawls across two units of the prominent format of its time period.

Sometimes there are also triple albums, or more.

The following is a list of albums, each of which is double in the vinyl and/or the CD format.

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