Absolutely Baching – A Voyage Around My Ears

Giocoso Bug-fix for Dual Screen Setups

Posted on 7th September 2021 by hjr

Another small bug-fix, this time to Giocoso.

It was occasioned by my switching away from using a 4K TV as my monitor and replacing it with two 1920×1200 monitors in a dual-screen setup. Since I had never used a dual screen display before, I had not realised that when Giocoso is asked to display album art as a new recording plays, it would break when confronted with the decision as to which monitor it would display the art on!

The fix is now in place. It brings Giocoso

ISO-handling Bug Fixes

Posted on 31st August 202131st August 2021 by hjr

If you rip SACDs to ISO files, which I’ve previously documented how to do, you will subsequently need to be able to split the ISOs out into separate FLAC files, in order to catalogue and tag them properly. If

Another Giocoso Update

Posted on 10th August 2021 by hjr

Just when I thought I’d got away with not having to do lots of updates to Giocoso, I found another bug in the Stats report. This time, it’s a really silly one, based on a flawed piece of selection logic in the program’s code.

The short version is: the Stats report was computing the number of things that have yet to be played by looking for composition names known to exist, but which haven’t yet been recorded as played. That *almost* works (because

Giocoso – First Update

Posted on 28th July 202128th July 2021 by hjr

Somewhat annoyingly, I just discovered an error in Giocoso’s ––stats reporting function. It’s not a particularly terrible one: more a question of labelling the various numbers.

The stats report shows how many recordings you’ve got that last for various ‘time bands’ (i.e., 0 to 5 minutes long, 5 to 10 minutes long and so on). One of the bands said ’10 to 30 minutes’… but the actual query submitted to the Giocoso database

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