A Voyage Around My Ears
Today, I’m releasing yet another new version of AMP (version 1.28 if you’re keeping count).
It’s main reason for existence is that it contains a new feature: you have been able to get AMP to do multiple ‘cycles’ of play since the very earliest versions, by setting the ––selections=x run-time parameter. Replace ‘x’ with 2, for example, and AMP will randomly select one piece of music to play,
Just a day or two after the last one, there’s a new AMP release (version 1.27). I am heroically trying to reduce the rate of version releases, I hasten to add! But if I come across a bug that needs fixing, my hands are rather tied to making the fixes available as soon as possible!
Sure enough, whilst this releases introduces a useful new feature, it also fixes a quite significant bug I just encountered.
First, the new feature: if you ever specify ––maxduration=x
Just a quick note to report that I’ve just released a couple of software fixes related to the problem of sub-optimal loudness levels in music files ripped from CDs or other sources.
Firstly, MAXV has been bumped to version 1.08, because of the addition of a tiny bux-fix that stops the grep utility sometimes thinking that what it’s being asked for is a binary file rather than a text file.
Just a quick note to mention that I’ve today released a new version of AMP: version 1.26.
The new version contains a couple of new features, rather than any bug-fixes (for once!). Firstly, I’ve increased the maximum time-bar for a composer to 999 hours (up from the previous maximum of just 9 hours). That’s approximately 42 days, so by running amp ––timebar=999, you are effectively saying ‘don’t randomly select a composer for
I bought a digital download of the Naxos CD you see at the left the other week.
As with most downloads I purchase these days, the music files I bought came pre-tagged with all sorts of pieces of metadata. Which is kind of the record companies, I guess -in this case, Naxos.
But it turns out that the record companies make just as bad a job tagging their music as all those music ignoramuses that flooded the CDDB database with inaccurate and plain stupid data back in the day. But whereas the ignoramuses
May has been a month of progress on something I made a New Year’s resolution to do (but then put off for four months!): catalogue the enormous pile of ripped CD files I’ve built up over the past year or so. Click on the graph at the left and you’ll see how I’ve done: I started the month with 485.1GB of music files sitting in the ‘temporary’ area of my hard disk (which has been pretty permanent for at least
Fresh from my war with a new mini PC (which I lost, you’ll recall), I remained determined to do something to upgrade my old workstation-class desktop PC. I bought it second-hand a few years ago: it’s a Dell Precision T3610, which is a bit of a monster, and was originally
Yesterday was not a happy day!
At the end of April (the 23rd, to be precise), I took delivery of the small form factor PC you see at the left. It’s a “Minisforum UM250” and comes with 16GB RAM, a 512GB M2-SSD hard drive and an AMD Ryzen 8-core processor. It is my first brush with an AMD Ryzen processor, which I’ve been keen to get my hands on for quite some time… so I was pretty excited. I was concerned at how noisy a small form factor PC might be: the thermals
Yeah, I know I promised last time no more tinkering with AMP and the next release would be called version 2.
But version 1.22 is out anyway, representing a tiny, tiny, puny little bug-fix!
Basically, I was doing the computation for ––levelup incorrectly: I was comparing a composer’s average play-length to the global average play-length, which turns out to be a mathematically stupid thing to do. Say every Beethoven composition lasts 40 minutes. You play him 60 times
I am aware that as new AMP feature follows new AMP feature, it can feel like a never-ending ride to who-knows-where, prompting the ‘Oh God, not another one!’ reaction, as well as the ‘Will it never end?’ one -as well as the one alluded to in the thumbnail at the right!
For the record, I think we are closing in on a feature-complete AMP that needs no major bug-fixes nor has use for substantial new pieces of functionality.
But we’re not there quite yet!
Thus AMP Version
A quick mention that CAO (“Composition-At-Once”) has been updated to fix a mildly serious bug.
CAO turns standalone FLACs into single-file ‘superFLACs’ with an embedded cuesheet, so you still know within the one big file where all the separate tracks are meant to start and finish. CAO can also use that same information to split a superFLAC apart back into its constituent single-file FLACs.
Let’s start with a warning: this is quite a long post and covers quite a lot of ground! I don’t normally ‘section up’ my posts, but I will on this occasion, to try to make things clearer. So, this time we have:
Taking each of those in turn, therefore…
I’ve added a further two new override switches to AMP, bumping its version to 1.20 in the process.