Absolutely Baching – A Voyage Around My Ears

Giocoso – A New Randomising FLAC Player

Posted on 15th July 202126th July 2021 by hjr

Today, I’m announcing the initial release of Giocoso, the randomising FLAC player for Linux, which is a replacement for my old AMP program. Giocoso is built on much the same code-base as AMP, but with quite a few changes. The most significant differences between Giocoso and AMP are, probably:

AMP scrobbled by default and had to be told not to; Giocoso does not scrobble by default, and has to be told to do so if it’s required.
AMP scrobbling required the installation and running of a separate ‘amp-scrobbler’ script. Giocoso uses no external functionality to scrobble: it’s all built-in to the main program.
AMP had acquired a bunch of ‘statistical overrides’ (such as ––levelup, ––xlevelup and ––xxlevelup); those are now gone from Giocoso.
AMP could only apply ––minduration and ––maxduration filters after selecting something to play. This could result in a significant pause before stumbling across something randomly selected that happened to have the correct duration. Giocoso now knows the durations of pieces from the get-go, so duration-based selections are done successfully within fractions of a second.
AMP only displayed album art; when Giocoso displays album art, it adds a ‘caption’ to it, with its text derived from the ALBUM tag of the music being played: the album art can therefore now visually provide you with all information about what, precisely, is being played.

There are lots of other differences, detailed in Appendix A of Giocoso’s User Manual, which

Niente – A New FLAC Integrity Checker

Posted on 1st July 20211st July 2021 by hjr

I recently signed up to a Personal Backblaze cloud backup subscription. The product has some severe limitations: it only runs on Windows, for example; and it takes no notice of -and refuses to back up- anything a Windows PC is connected to via the network. It’s one huge saving grace, however, is that

AMP Per-Cycle Pause

Posted on 8th June 20218th June 2021 by hjr

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,

Another AMP Release

Posted on 5th June 20215th June 2021 by hjr

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

The Loudness Wars…

Posted on 4th June 20215th June 2021 by hjr

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.

AMP Version 1.26 Released

Posted on 3rd June 20213rd June 2021 by hjr

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

Record Companies need to lift their game

Posted on 26th May 202127th May 2021 by hjr

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

Progress…

Posted on 20th May 202120th May 2021 by hjr

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

CPU Shenannigans

Posted on 13th May 2021 by hjr

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

Mishaps and Minisforum Mayhem

Posted on 6th May 20216th May 2021 by hjr

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

tiny…

Posted on 15th April 2021 by hjr

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

AMP: Are we there yet?

Posted on 14th April 202115th April 2021 by hjr

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