♬♪ A Voyage Around My Ears ♬♪
This website is now scheduled to undergo periodic maintenance for about 1 hour at 05:00 UTC (about 9PM in California) every 23rd of the month, starting in two days' time.
Apologies for any inconvenience caused by this, but the ability to take a disk image of the website is something I've long wanted to be able to do ...and now we're running in a Linux KVM guest, I can finally do it! [...]
This website will be offline for several hours, intermittently, over the next day or so. My apologies...
I believe the website is now back online for the most part. There may be one or two random outages in the next few hours, but we're nearly sorted! Thank you for your patience... [...]
For reasons all to do with my incompetence, I managed to release Giocoso Version 3.30 with an installer that did not download two of the release's key new features (global resume and global notes). If you upgraded using the one-off upgrade script, no problem; but if you did a fresh install, you'd be missing files needed for full functionality.
Noticing this, I fixed the issue ...and introduced a regression that meant the installer tried to pull down files from a completely non-existent folder on this website. Meaning nothing got installed at all 🙁 Some fix. [...]
My attention has recently been turning to Niente, which hasn't had a new release in something like 5 months. I'm planning a new release for it at the start of April, though there are a few new floors being fitted throughout the house in the meantime, so that schedule might slip!
Anyway: I couldn't but help notice the more than 3000 folders of music in my collection that Niente thought could do with a volume boost. Since I've only got about 17,000 recordings in total, that's quite a sizeable chunk that is, in some way, less than ideal. It arises from the fact that I was ripping CDs in 1999 and only got round to writing volume-boosting technology into Semplice in around 2019! Short of going to each sub-volume-boosted folder, one by one, and running Semplice there to apply a retroactive volume boost, this wasn't going to be fixed any time soon: thirty or forty would have been fine; three thousand or more, less so! [...]
After a bit of a delay, but slightly ahead of the previously-advised revised schedule, I've today released Giocoso Version 3.30. The changelog, as usual, details all the fixes and enhancements and changes that have gone into the new release.
The short version is, however: Giocoso Pro. This is Giocoso's new-found ability to communicate with a remote database and thereby share its play history with other devices. That also allows one device to make a note about a recording and an entirely different device to read that note later (a feature called 'Global Notes'). There's also 'Global Pause', which allows one device to pause playback and another device to resume it: a feature I find incredibly handy when I listen to music at night on the laptop then want to resume it in the main listening room the next morning. Less obvious, but equally as significant: the default music search algorithm underwent a significant re-write, making it more efficient, but potentially leading to new outcomes that would have been impossible in earlier releases. [...]
As promised, Version 2.08 of Semplice has just been released. It is a relatively minor release, containing a few bug fixes, some minor enhancements and the ability to work with AIFF audio files. The Changelog has the details, as usual.
These improvements were made possible by a huge amount of input and bug-hunting on the part of one of my readers: thank you, again, Scott! [...]
It's been almost two years since we moved into our Lincolnshire home. It was intended to be a 'move in and don't spend anything' kind of place, but before four months were out, we'd added solar panels to the main roof. Another three months and we'd fitted a new, insulated roof to the sunroom/conservatory. At the start of the second year, we replaced the floors in the kitchen, sunroom, laundry and boot room. After that came floor replacement in the second study and repainting of every room in the house. So, it ended up not being the 'move-in-ready' kind of place we'd hoped for!
My listening room was next, but it's been a long haul! There was a fireplace which had to be removed and total re-plastering of the wall where it had once been, together with embedding power and speaker cables in the brickwork. I wanted a panel of vertical wooden slats for no particular reason I can remember or think of: I'm told they are currently fashionable, but I wouldn't know and I asked for them two years ago! That panel went in just before Christmas, after which ...crickets! The English workman likes his New Year break and after that their diary was full, so they couldn't squeeze us in to replace the floors until this past week. The week thus began with me moving all my books out for the umpteenth time, all my glass, all my comfy seats... and my computers. Which means I've been offline since Tuesday, kicking my heels: it turns out that a laptop doesn't really replace a desktop PC you're comfortable with 🙂 [...]
I'm sad to report that the release of Giocoso 3.30 is on-hold for a few more days and the hoped-for release date of 27th February will be missed. It's mostly pointless to propose another date at this stage, since it depends on my floor getting done and walls re-painted, so it's in the hands of others, not me. But I'd guess I will be able to release no later than 10th March. We'll see, anyway.
The issues triggering the delay are not serious: it's really just a late round of testing that has revealed the need for a little more 'polish' and a decision by me to rebuild my virtual server farm onto new hardware in order to do that testing ...and rebuilding virtual machines for all the distros I need handy takes a lot of time. [...]
Anyone wanting a Giocoso-themed coffeee/tea cup is now welcome to get one. Every mug purchase made by clicking that link yields me a £1 commission, which helps pay this web server's electricity bills! It's just a bit of fun, really; but if enough people asked, I can get organised to do t-shirts, too. The mug is a typical size, fits in the hand nicely and has the new Giocoso logo all over it! It's been tested in the microwave and dishwasher, so it's pretty robust. Make of it what you will, anyway!
Perhaps more importantly, Giocoso 3.30 itself moves ever-closer to release. In particular: [...]
I'm going to be releasing a new version of Giocoso soon(ish): sometime in February 2025, I think. The new version will be yet another 'version number leap' ahead of its predecessor. From Version 3.20 we will be jumping straight to Version 3.30 ...and I don't do version number leaps without a good reason!
The good reason this time is the introduction of Giocoso Pro, which is not a separate product, nor something you have to pay for. It's simply the new ability of Giocoso to use a remote database to work out what to play next and to record details about what it has played. I've called it 'pro' only because doing remote database connections requires the installation, configuration and use of a 'proper' relational database: in this case, MySQL (or MariaDB: the two names essentially describe much the same product), and 'doing' proper relational database work can be ...er, tricky! [...]
It's getting close to that time of year again, where I query my Giocoso database and analyse what it is I've been listening to during 2024.
Sticking to a tried-and-true format, I can report that I listened to 3,022 unique recordings this year, which altogether played for a grand, cumulative total of 72.19 days. [...]
Today, a few days earlier than planned, I'm releasing Version 3.20 of Giocoso. It's a very significant release and the version number has therefore jumped from 3.1x to 3.2x (specifically, from 3.12 to 3.20), as previously explained.
The two (relatively!) huge changes that have occurred are: 1) Ability to control a play (pause, resume, terminate, repeat etc) from within the playing Giocoso session's main play screen; and 2) Accurate timing information is now displayed (i.e., 'played X minutes of a piece that lasts Y minutes, therefore ending at Z clock time'). These were canvassed in some detail in an earlier blog piece. [...]