SACD ISO: Knifing a Fork!
The world of opensource software can sometimes be confusing, because if someone likes your code, they can take it and ‘fork’ it -that is, essentially, copy it and declare it to be
Roller-coaster Ride
Today has been fun, in an up-and-down and terrifying sort of way!
First the good news: I finally managed to build a pure Arch-based virtual machine with no slip-ups, mistakes or catastrophes. Installing Arch is never for the faint-hearted and I’ve done it lots of times in the past… but never done it ‘quite right’, with always something missing or not-quite-working! I accordingly long ago gave up hope of ever achieving something that seemed stable and functional. But
Pi-faced!
A correspondent from the west coast of the USA recently got in touch to say that whilst he enjoyed using some of my music-related software, he regretted having to point out that the code didn’t run properly on his Raspberry Pi running the Raspbian Linux distro …but that he’d hacked a way to get it to work anyway.
A couple of thoughts came to mind when I read that. First, the grumpy-me thought
New! AMP Combo Deals!
Today, I’m releasing another new version of AMP (this one is version 1.12) with a slightly-tweaked ability to use override switches to control the randomness of what gets played.
Specifically, version 1.09 introduced the ability to specify a ––genre= OR a ––composer= switch to force AMP to randomly select a work that falls into a specific genre, or that was written by a specific composer.
The new version 1.12
A couple of changes…
You will perhaps have noticed a dramatic change to the ‘look and feel’ of the website: the result of getting bored with what had been the look-and-feel for nearly 2 years, I’m afraid! I’ve gone minimal and, I hope, more ‘punchy’ and easier to read in consequence.
There may be a few colour/font tweaks and twiddles in the days and weeks to come, but I think most of the disruption is done and dusted.
The second (quite big) change is that the site has now acquired
Duration-based Plays
Another week, another new version of the Absolutely Baching Music Player (AMP to its friends). We move from 1.10 to 1.11… and the new release contains two basic new features being introduced!
First, a new run-time parameter is provided called ––artsize=xxx. The ‘xxx’ values permitted are ‘small’, ‘medium’ and ‘large’, with ‘medium’ being the default if the parameter is not supplied at all, or if
Negation…
Another day, another new version of the AMP Player!
This one is a fairly minor release to version 1.10, bringing with it a new command line switch: ––negate and some miscellaneous and fairly minor bug-fixes.
Sounds exotic, perhaps, but it simply reverses the sense of the other four ‘override switches’ I added to AMP back in version 1.09.
In other words, if you’re happy saying ––genre=opera
Another new AMP version
A few days ago, I reported that I had finally re-balanced by ‘plays’: my top ten composers were no longer so dominant in my history of composition plays as they had once been.
I mentioned then that I had, by way of response, been able
AMP and CCDT Updates
Another couple of software updates to announce.
AMP is bumped to version 1.08. The code changes are mostly minor and cosmetic and to do with displaying a count-down timer indicating when play of the currently-playing music will end. Slightly unfortunately, a side-effect of this new
Finally!
Hurrah!
Finally, a nearly two-year effort to re-balance my classical music listening efforts came to a conclusion.
Since 2008, I’ve been ‘scrobbling’ my listening habits (i.e., auto-transmitting them upon the completion of each ‘play’) to Last.fm. In that time, I’ve racked up (at the time of writing) 161,958 ‘listens’ to something or other, comprising
AMP – Updates
I last wrote about changes and updates to AMP (the Absolutely Baching Music Player), way back on January 10th.
I thought the start of a new month would be a good idea to catch up on them, particularly as the pace of AMP development is slowing down and the thing appears to have just about reached a final form I can live with!
So Version 1.03 (January 11th) introduced a new command-line switch that allows you to view the cumulative stored PLAYS table.
AMP Doing Its Job
It’s been a little over a fortnight since I modified my AMP player to work with a database -and, when it does so, to record every ‘play’ it decides on in a database table of its own.
So now, 15 days later, I can analyze that ‘plays’ table to determine if AMP has been doing the job I designed it for: picking a wide variety of composers and music genres, at random, and thus not creating any ‘favourites’!
The first results look good. Click on the thumbnail