If you’re reading this, it means that my move to self-hosting my website has gone more-or-less according to plan!
I’ve been paying a reasonable amount to Linode for many years now to run a server in New York on which to host this site. It’s not a lot of money (US$12 a month, if you’re really interested), but since this site is now merely a hobby and nothing at all to do with earning an income, it didn’t seem to be a good idea
I have bought more complete sets of Bach Cantatas in my time than is probably good for a man! I started with the Leusink Cycle that was included in the Brilliant Classics ‘complete Bach’ set and is now available as a separate purchase: I would strongly
The Classical CD Ripper (CCDR) has been updated and a new version (Version 3.0, for anyone keeping count!) is now available for download. Upgrading consists of merely deleting your existing copy of the shell script, downloading the new one in its place, and remembering to make it executable (chmod +x ccdr.sh).
The changes from the previous version are extensive. Out goes all the coloured text and other attempts to prettify its output: it’s a text-based application, so deal with it!
Out,
This blog post’s title is a bit of a stretch! For starters, I almost exclusively use FLAC audio files for my primary music store, so my need to be able to handle other audio formats is not exactly great. Still less do I need to handle so many different audio formats that you could describe a tool that handles them all as truly ‘universal’!
But I do have need to create MP3 copies of my FLAC music files -because I upload them to OneDrive and am able to play them from
Never mess with old code and expect the results to be perfect!
The recent spate of software updating I posted about last time resulted in an “improvement” in the CCDT code that handles making file names “NTFS-safe”. The improvement turned out
As we are all now experiencing ‘lockdown woes’, I decided I had time enough on my hands for it to be worthwhile for me to look again at my various bits of music management software. The Classical CD Ripper and Tagger scripts accordingly got a work-over: little tweaks to make each program work slightly more in ways that suit me than not! I use the Tagger program on a daily basis, so it’s important to me that it works efficiently, which I think it now does 🙂
I then tackled the
The new catalogue of Mozart’s works is now finished.
All items have been categorised (though some will no doubt disagree with my categorisations for various pieces). Where the scores exist, incipits have been prepared from them and assigned to the appropriate catalogue items. Where recordings exist, 40-second audio extracts have similarly been prepared and assigned.
This means that the DZ numbers are now finalised and definitive: they will not be changing from this point on. Should Mozart
Today would have been Mozart’s 264th birthday… and, quite by chance, it happens also to be the day that I’ve finally finished the first draft of the new Dizwell catalogue of his works.
The last few vocal works have now been excerpted and incipits found for each of them, so that makes 674 incipits prepared, uploaded and applied to the database, along with 635 40-second audio excerpts for most items. (The difference between the two numbers is that there are a handful of works
Having begun the process of re-cataloguing my collection of Mozart music just before Christmas (see the previous blog post), I thought it about time I posted a bit of a progress report. Naturally, what began as merely an exercise in re-naming things (for example, ‘Requiem, K626’ would become ‘DZ 02082 Requiem’ using the new Dizwell numbering scheme), rapidly became a full-on musicological cataloguing
In the world of musicology, I doubt anyone is quite so famous as Ludwig Ritter von Köchel, pictured left. That’s because he catalogued Mozart’s music in the 1860s and thus bestowed on every Mozart composition then known the ‘K’ numbers that have adorned them ever since. Mozart, of course, being the veritable God of classical music, Herr Köchel therefore has acquired some of his glory by reflection!
So, whilst non-musicologists might talk about Mozart’s Symphony
Antonio Vivaldi’s one of those composers most people have heard something of, even if they don’t know who or what… though my betting is that it’s likely to be one of the Four Seasons violin concerti!
His ready popularity with those four concerti makes it temptingly easy to dismiss him as a lightweight -or, worse, a repetitive lightweight. Stravinsky famously did, for example, when he said that, “Vivaldi is greatly overrated—a dull fellow who could
I am old enough to remember that my first experiences of listening to serious music on serious equipment involved visits to my brother-in-law and borrowing his component hifi for the afternoon!
I “progressed” from that to, in the late eighties, listening on my very own ‘integrated’ hifi (which, given my income levels at the time, was pushing the term ‘hifi’ to its limits, I now realise!)
So what does the listening equipment look like in these days of digital