♬♪ A Voyage Around My Ears ♬♪
This website tries to be image-rich -and finding sufficient royalty-free imagery for it can be a bit of a challenge at times (I'm too cheap to pay actual royalties!). So, for fits and giggles, I thought I'd experiment with a bit of ChatGPT artificial image creation.
So here is a very famous and very genuine photograph of Ralph Vaughan Williams with his cat, Foxy: [...]
After the recent bout of Giocoso, Semplice and Niente software updates, I had a few spare days to consider the poverty of my graphic design skills in allowing me to navigate my music collection via various means.
What I'm referring to is this: [...]
I've just released Semplice Version 2.10, a few days earlier than initially planned -but there seemed little point delaying the release!
The Changelog has all the details, as usual. Many of the features of this release are minor bug fixes. There are a couple of enhancements to Semplice's SuperFLAC functionality, especially in (a) checking your per-track FLACs are tagged to this website's axiomatic standards before attempting to create a SuperFLAC from them; and (b) ensuring SuperFLACs preserve any per-track Custom Tags you may have set (they were previously discarded). [...]
As previously promised, a new version of Niente has just been released: Version 4.03. It contains some minor bug fixes and a couple of enhancements (mostly due to the suggestions of regular user Scott: thank you, Scott!!)
In particular, a new column is added to the database table that stores details of all your recordings: TRACKTITLE. Though upgrading to Niente Version 4.03 adds this new column, it doesn't populate it: you'll need to do a new full integrity check for that to happen. A new 'Advanced SQL Reports' option has also been added to the Reports menu, allowing you to construct full-blown SQL queries of your own devising, if you're up to it! The other big(ish) new feature is that Niente menus now work the same way as Giocoso's or Semplice's do: pressing [Enter] on any top-level menu automatically means you're invoking the first named option within that menu, without you having to literally tap the number '1' each time. The aggregate statistics report can now be produced by tapping 'R' and then pressing [Enter] twice, for example. [...]
The thumbnail at the left is a screenshot of me testing Giocoso Version 3.30 on the still-in-Beta Fedora 42 (due for release in a couple of weeks): there were no surprises and, as you can see for yourself, everything works as expected.
The same thing happened on the still-in-Beta version of the next Ubuntu, I'm pleased to say, so this years crop of fresh distro updates do not appear to be posing a significant problem for existing versions of Giocoso, Semplice or Niente as far as I could tell: [...]
Somewhat delayed from the original plans, but I've just released Semplice Version 2.09 to production. You can upgrade to it in the usual manner: the Miscellaneous menu, Option 3 will walk you through the process. Fresh installations can also be performed in the standard way: wget doco.absolutelybaching.com/seminst and then bash seminst.
The new release contains a number of visual and work-flow enhancements, all very helpfully suggested by reader/user Scott, which were much appreciated. The changelog has the full details, as usual: perhaps the key one is that when converting between audio formats, Semplice now only shows you 'from' formats that physically exist within your current working folder, so you can't accidentally select to convert from a format that you don't possess. Another little enhancement makes the auto-tagging process clearer as to what it's doing at various points and what modified data gets saved or lost when you click 'Cancel' half-way through the process. [...]
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! [...]