Absolutely Baching – –A Voyage Around My Ears

Moving on...

Posted on 25th January 2023 by hjr

After nearly six years living in Nottingham, we've decided it's time to move on. Our house has, in fact, already sold (but the English system of house purchase means that "sold" doesn't have a really good definition: either party can pull out, for any reason, right up until the time money hits your bank account!). We therefore find ourselves now doing frequent day-trips to Norfolk and Suffolk, our preferred new counties of potential habitation. Unfortunately, we haven't yet found a suitable replacement for the place we are shortly to be required to move out of, so further day-trips are required.

That, in turn, means little time is presently available for software development, so the new Niente is likely to be delayed a bit. Sorry about that. [...]

New Year Software Releases

Posted on 14th January 202314th January 2023 by hjr

A little late (but a birthday bash in Bruges will do that to a man!), but Happy New Year for 2023, and by way of making up for my tardiness, I give you two new software releases.

First is Semplice 1.01. The program has acquired the usual slew of bugfixes and minor tweaks and twiddles, but also a couple of nice enhancements and new features. The main new features are: the ability to extact and/or display embedded album art; the ability to create spectrum analysis graphs of the audio signal in a FLAC; and the ability to directly edit the contents of any cuesheet embedded within a FLAC. See the changelog for details. [...]

Adventures in Spectrum Analysis

Posted on 18th December 202218th December 2022 by hjr

I've been aware for years that it's possible to produce the sorts of images you see in the thumbnail at the left of this post: frequency analysis graphs of an audio file of one sort or another. Audiophiles have been swooning over them for years, but I never have. If my ears were satisfied with the sound of a recording, what additional good would it do me to do a spectrum analysis of that recording?

Well: for the most part, I still think that's true... but I had a very specific reason for dabbling in them lately, which then led me down the rabbit hole of finding them fascinating! I thought I'd share a little about it. [...]

Bye-bye, Last.fm

Posted on 10th December 202212th December 2022 by hjr

I've long been an advocate for registering the fact you just played concerto X or symphony Y with a web-accessible store of data, such as Last.fm. I've been doing precisely that with everything I've played since January 8th 2008, so Last.fm have a record of about 14 years of my listening history. The thumbnail at the left shows you that's quite considerable: 202,000+ "scrobbles" (i.e., a record of the completion of a 'play') have been received in that time,

My top 'plays' as recorded by Last.fm are (in descending order) Britten, JS Bach, Vaughan Williams, Handel and Sibelius -which isn't so hugely different from what has been recorded on this very website since June 2021. [...]

Semplice Version 1.0 - Now Available for Download

Posted on 26th November 202227th November 2022 by hjr

It's only three months late (!), but Semplice, the all-new, all-singing, all-dancing FLAC manager for Linux, Windows, macOS and Raspberry Pi, has just been released and is available for download, with instructions for doing that available from its web page.

In a nutshell, Semplice allows you to (1) tag FLACs; (2) apply volume boosts to FLACs; (3) concatenate per-track FLACs into single-file, whole-composition SuperFLACs; (4) split SuperFLACs back out into being per-track FLACs; and (5) convert audio files from and to about 7 or 8 different audio codecs (so, FLAC to MP3, for example; or SACD's DSF to super hi-res FLACs). [...]

Happy Benjamin Britten Day!

Posted on 22nd November 202222nd November 2022 by hjr

It seems numerically appropriate that 22/11/22 should be signifcant, but it would be significant anyway as the 109th anniversary of the birth of Benjamin Britten (and St. Cecilia's Day, patron saint of music). As is customary in these parts, Britten's will be the only music played today.

It is full of wit, orchestral brilliance, profound pain and darkness and unerring insight into the mind of Man. His is not the sweet, pastoral music that comforts without challenge, but it is extremely well-crafted and brings its own rewards in good time -and I commend it to anyone that wants to listen to some of the best music of the 20th Century.# [...]

Giocoso - Version 2.02 now available

Posted on 13th November 202213th November 2022 by hjr

A minor update to Giocoso has just been released, pushing it to version number 2.02.

It's minor because it only includes a single bug-fix and one enhancement, details of which are described at the top of the Giocoso changelog. On the other hand, the bug being fixed is quite a significant one, so I wouldn't dismiss it as an unimportant bug-fix! [...]

Giocoso - Version 2.01 now available

Posted on 15th October 202221st October 2022 by hjr

A new version of Giocoso, the randomising classical music FLAC player, is released today: the version number increments to 2.01.

The new version's main new features are most documented here, but the short version is: [...]

QEII

Posted on 12th September 202213th September 2022 by hjr

Like everyone else, I expect, I had been aware that Queen Elizabeth II was in declining health and was unlikely to last much longer (though I personally had my fingers crossed that she'd last until her centenary, at which point she would have beaten Louis XIV to the title of longest-ever reigning monarch: that's the competitive historian in me, I guess!) I was nevertheless taken aback when the news broke that the decline had been faster, and more terminal, than anticipated.

I am neither ardent monarchist nor fervent republican: I just think the Head of State mostly does ceremonial duties and therefore the person performing the ribbon-cutting doesn't really matter. On the other hand, if you elect Heads of States directly, they tend to become Presidential and centers of power in their own right -which doesn't suit the Westminster system very well at all. Plus, certain Presidents (mentioning no names, but the French and US ones spring to mind) tend to behave as quasi-monarchs anyway, so if you're going that route, what's the difference?! Appointing former political leaders to the ceremonial Head of State role also doesn't sit well, I think: they have a past, and past allegiances and loyalties to mates, and one of the nice things about a hereditary Head of State is that they owe no-one any favours. It's quite a nice check-and-balance to have, in other words, where the ultimate referee of the constitutional game is beholden to no-one for their position. [...]

Grim Reaper Plans...

Posted on 17th August 202217th August 2022 by hjr

With Giocoso version 2 finally out the door, I thought I would share with you some of my plans for my digital music-related software. As you can tell from the thumbnail to this post, the news is going to be quite drastic!

In a nutshell, nearly all of my existing software will be killed off. No more CCDT, no more CAO, no more MAXV or AUAC. Instead, they will all be replaced by a single piece of software which I'm naming Semplice (because one piece of software is simpler to deal with than four!). [...]

Giocoso Version 2 - Out Now!

Posted on 21st July 202221st July 2022 by hjr

At last, Giocoso version 2 is now available for download. And it's only taken me four months to write and test it 🙂 My apologies for the delay.

The program has undergone significant revision and bug-fixing and has acquired a bunch of new features. The really big ticket items are, probably: [...]

Tragedy! (Averted :)

Posted on 20th July 2022 by hjr

As expected, Monday and Tuesday turned into absolute scorchers and in a land almost entirely devoid of real air conditioning units in domestic settings, it was pretty nasty and definitely uncomfortable. The thermometer on the left is decently accurate and, although that shot was taken with it in the sun, when it was placed in the shade, it was still showing 37°C.

And that was outside! Inside the house, the temperatures just kept rising and the decision to shutdown all my servers in the loft for the duration turned out to have been wise, I think! [...]