Behold! I tell you a mystery... Adventures with ffmpeg

Posted on by hjr

The tool which my Giocoso classical music player uses to actually produce audio output is called ffmpeg, a command line audio and video de-coder and player. It is something of a truism to say that it is an absolute nightmare to use! It's command structure is truly ghastly, with a typical example looking like this:

ffmpeg -i example.mp4 -i LM_logo.png -filter_complex "[1:v] scale=150:-1 [ol], [0:v] [ol] overlay=W-w-10:H-h-10" -codec:a copy example_marked.mp4 [...] 

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New PC, New Semplice Bug, New Semplice Version!

Posted on by hjr

Three days ago, I treated myself to a new PC (a Beelink SER 5, using an AMD Ryzen CPU that's a lot more modern than the 2017-vintage i7 I was using before). I took the opportunity to install a fresh copy of EndeavourOS, an Arch derivative that I've used before and which tends to ship with a lot more up-to-date software than my previous distro, Debian 12. It's all working extremely well and is pretty much silent, which is essential given its location within my music listening room (though I do need to get a quieter keyboard: a previous choice for a mechanical keyboard with Cherry Blue switches means mine currently sounds like a thousand typists are at work!)

Anyway, the point is that everything I need to work worked well ...until I tried to tag up a new CD rip using my own Semplice program. The tagging bit itself was fine, but trying to embed album art within the FLACs produced this weird error: [...] 

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A note on Dave Hurwitz and ClassicsToday.Com

Posted on by hjr

Dave Hurwitz is, as he repeatedly tells us, the "Executive Editor of ClassicsToday.com". Classicstoday is an excellent classical music resource (and I'll refer to it hereafter as ct.com) and is worth your time to investigate their reviews and critiques. Unfortunately, a lot of their content is behind a paywall: meaning, sign up with credit card details and the like, to reveal all. I have no problem with the 'pay to view' proposition ...but it behoves a site that takes your money and your credit card details to demonstrate that they care about security and preservation of personally identifiable information -and ct.com does none of those things.

You can assess a website's security standards in a number of ways. Me: I check the Mozilla Observatory and SecurityHeaders. [...] 

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Semplice Version 2.06 Released

Posted on by hjr

I've just released Semplice Version 2.06 into the wild, a few days earlier than planned, due to social commitments at the beginning of November. I've been using it in earnest for about 10 days, however, and therefore think it's ready for a production release! It is a relatively significant release.

The details are available in the Changelog, but the short version is that Semplice can (a) now guess far more tags for you, if it's launched within a folder that is named according to this site's "axioms of classical tagging". In fact, the only things that can't now be guessed are the composer's name and the distinguishing artist's first name; and (2) obliterate all track-specific tags in one hit, which is useful when they're all full of garbage and the one-track-at-a-time Ctrl+U trick isn't looking terribly efficient. [...] 

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Using Giocoso Remotely

Posted on by hjr

A short note to mention that I just recently published an article about how I run Giocoso non-locally. That is, if I'm sat on my desktop PC in one corner of my listening room, how do I get Giocoso running on a completely different PC in another corner of that room?

To networking old-timers, the answer isn't terribly surprising (over SSH!), but even to them, the business of creating nice shortcuts on your desktop to initiate remote execution of Giocoso may be of interest; especially when doing that last bit involves completely different techniques, depending on your choice of desktop environment! [...] 

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Giocoso Version 3.11 Released

Posted on by hjr

As promised last time, a new version of Giocoso has just been released, bringing its version number up to 3.11.

It's a relatively significant update, especially as it introduces a new configuration parameter which may not be set to the value you'd prefer. Specifically, a parameter called 'Automatically launch Mgiocoso Control Panel' has been added and it defaults to a 'yes' value. It means that by launching Giocoso, you'll also trigger the automatic launch of the standalone mgiocoso controller window. If you'd prefer that not to happen, you need to use the Administration menu, Option 3 to edit your configuration file. Find the page for 'Parameters requiring yes/no answers' and look to the bottom of the page: [...] 

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Developments...

Posted on by hjr

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...

Posted on by hjr

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

Posted on by hjr

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

Posted on by hjr

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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