Developments...

A bunch of small developments to announce this time.

Firstly, the installer scripts for all my music management/playing programs have been updated so that they set the terminal's background colour to black (with yellow text) regardless of the configured colour scheme your terminal might be using: this helps the installer's text messages display correctly, no matter what your usual terminal colour choices might be. If you're not re-installing any of the programs, you won't see this change and it will have no significance for you, but it is worth mentioning as it was another good suggestion from Scott. An additional change to the installers is that they now all check for the pre-existence of ncurses. Most Linux distros have this installed by default anyway, but Niente now checks that it exists and if it doesn't, will warn you and quit. It won't install it for you, but merely tell you to install it yourself, using your distro's standard package management capabilities. [...] 

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Signing in? Don't...

I get multiple alerts every day about people trying to sign in to this website using names such as 'zaintaylor' or 'bpgenius'. I assume almost all such log-in attempts are bogus, bot-driven attempts to attack this site, but it occurs to me that there may be a handful of people trying legitimately to log in to this website using (for example) their wordpress.com user credentials. If so: please don't bother, since no-one can log into this website, except me. Attempting to do so will net you an instant 2-month long ban for your IP address.

If you are attempting to leave a comment, you don't need to log in to do so: just supply a name and an email address at the time of leaving a comment and, assuming you pass moderation, your comment will appear in due course. Once you've had one comment appear, subsequent ones should not need to go through the moderation process. [...] 

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Niente Version 4.0 Released

Today, at last, I'm finally releasing Version 4.0 of the Niente FLAC checking program. I've been using it daily for around 2 months now, so I reckon most of its quirks and foibles (and bugs!) have been ironed out by now!

Niente performs physical and logical integrity checks on your FLAC collection, without ever modifying the FLACs themselves. Physically, it makes sure that the music contents of your FLACs hasn't changed over time (due to silent corruption or 'bit rot'). Logically, it takes this website's axioms on how classical music ought to be tagged and checks whether your FLAC tags match the axiomatic requirements. For example, it will check that, if you've said 'Karajan' is the distinguishing artist on a recording, that the name 'Karajan' also appears in the COMMENT tag for the FLACs associated with that recording. It can also do checks to ensure you've embedded nicely-sized album art in each of your FLACs, or whether all your FLACs are at their maximum-possible non-distorting volume. [...] 

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A Problem of Dates in Giocoso - Fixed

As I discussed in the last post here, Giocoso can be affected by the problem of 'fake, duplicate play completions' being inserted into its PLAYS table one second later than the real completion of a play is recorded.

I promised a fix: today is therefore the release day for Giocoso Version 3.09. The new version adds a trigger to the PLAYS table that prevents such fake duplicate plays being created in the future. The fix does not go back and eliminate any existing fake duplicates, since that would involve automatically deleting data from PLAYS, and that sort of thing is very tricky to get 100% right and thus not endanger good data. [...] 

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Semplice Version 2.03 Released

It's only been a week since version 2.02 of Semplice was released, but today I've released yet-another-new version: 2.03.

The new version contains two small enhancements, which I describe in the Changelog, but which can be summarised as 'SuperFLACs get automatically cleaned when first created' and 'More information is provided when performing volume boosts on FLACs'. [...] 

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Semplice Version 2.02 Released

I wasn't particularly aware that this was a thing, but JPGs, PNGs and other image files are constructed using particular 'colourspaces'. A colourspace is simply a way of internally representing colours. There are basically two principal means of doing this with digital artwork: use an additive colour model (where red+green gives yellow), or a subtractive colour model, where red is what you get when taking the difference between magenta and yellow. The additive model we call the RGB model (because you add red, to green, to blue to get the full gamut of possible colours). The subtractive model is called the CMYK model, because you use cyan, magenta and yellow, plus black (the 'K'!) to construct the gamut.

Generally speaking, computers and their monitors should use the RGB model, because LCDs monitors are generally natively black or dark and have individual 'lights' (LEDs) projecting shades of red, green or blue to construct complex colours on top of a dark background -so adding colours to a dark background is right up their street. Printers, on the other hand, tend to use the CMYK model, because they work with inks which are manufactured in cyan, magenta, yellow and black hues and which are laid on top of a usually pure-white background (i.e., a sheet of paper!), so printers need to start bright white and remove colours from that to construct a colour image. [...] 

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Giocoso Version 3.08 Released

A tiny enhancement (or, possibly, a bug-fix... I can't quite decide which!) has been made to Giocoso and its version bumps to 3.08 as a result.

The fix is that during playback, Giocoso would display a tiny and mostly-inconspicuous cursor marker somewhere along the bottom-right of the program display. Now it doesn't. Details, such as they are, are in the changelog[...] 

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Semplice Version 2.01 Released

As previously promised, an upgrade release of Semplice Version 2 has now been made available. It fixes the issue whereby several distros now appear to be shipping Version 7 of ImageMagick (the image manipulation program) rather than the Version 6 that was being shipped on all distros when Semplice Version 2 first shipped. If you try issuing Version 6 commands when you have Version 7 of ImageMagick installed, you get ugly warnings about 'convert is deprecated in IM7'.

Since it's not entirely clear to me which distros have decided to run with ImageMagick 7 and which have chosen to stick with ImageMagick 6, I've had to add code to Semplice which works out what version is installed and then use the appropriate image editing commands accordingly. [...] 

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Semplice Version 2 Released!

Finally!

Today, I'm releasing Semplice Version 2, and simultaneously retiring Version 1 (it's still downloadable, installable and documented, but I wouldn't recommend anyone use it now and I'm certainly doing no further development work on it to fix bugs or add new features or offer support on it: it's dead, Jim, and Version 2 is where it's at now!!) [...] 

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