Progress Report & Merch!

Posted on by hjr

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: [...] 

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Pre-announcing Giocoso Pro

Posted on by hjr

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! [...] 

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Giocoso Version 3.20 Released

Posted on by hjr

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. [...] 

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News from Nowhere

Posted on by hjr

We bought our current house in April/May 2023. It's been a slow slog since then: solar panels, new roof on the conservatory, new flooring throughout. One room remains to be tackled downstairs (upstairs gets dealt with next March!): the music listening room, otherwise known as the Holy of Holies, my Utopia, and Sanctuary!!

This week the plasterer was due, and then cancelled, and is now due next week (typical Lincolnshire, really). Which meant the listening equipment was removed from the room, then moved back, though not necessarily to the same places from whence they had come 🙂 Hopefully, next week (sometime) will be the charm... [...] 

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Giocoso Changes Afoot...

Posted on by hjr

Note: I've updated this post since originally written. The next release of Giocoso was due to be 3.13. I've subsequently decided to make it 3.20. I've therefore mentioned that version number in the update.

Giocoso Version 3.20 promises to be a really big version bump (so big, in fact, that I was thinking of calling it Version 4.0, but ultimately decided against it). It is currently scheduled for release in mid-December (after I've dog-fooded it for another few weeks). For anyone interested, the list of changes that are in the pipeline for the next release of Giocoso is visible in the program's changelog. [...] 

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Happy Benjamin Britten Day ...in advance!

Posted on by hjr

It being the 22nd November tomorrow, I would usually spend all day listening to nothing but the music of Benjamin Britten, who was born on that day in 1913. It's something of an annual tradition in these parts, faithfully observed since at least 2007.

Unfortunately, family matters have intervened this year and instead of sitting down and enjoying the delights of Paul Bunyan, Peter Grimes or the Cello Symphony, I shall instead be driving towards the nearest airport and picking up a relative for a couple of days of home cooking and more alcohol than is probably good for you. Which isn't, of course, unfortunate in the least ...but does rather mean Britten has, for once, to go on the back-burner this year. No doubt I will squeeze in as much of his music as I can next week. And there is always December 4th, for example, which is the anniversary of his death. [...] 

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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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