Absolutely Baching – ♬♪ A Voyage Around My Ears ♬♪

Outage: Advanced Warning

Posted on 11th July 202511th July 2025 by hjr

I wanted to give advanced notice to readers: this website is likely to become unavailable around June 14th - 16th, ish.

The occasion is the upgrade to my broadband connection: it's being increased to 500Mbps from a measly 76Mbps. This should make the website load faster and be more responsive, which is a good thing. In theory, the switch over will be transparent and painless... and no-one will even know it's happening! Yeah, right: we all know how those sorts of ISP promises go in the end 🙁 [...]

Semplice Version 2.11 Released

Posted on 4th July 20254th July 2025 by hjr

Today, I released Semplice Version 2.11. It contains the fixes I mentioned were needed last time, namely that the SACD ISO-handling software I had been relying on had suddenly decided to disappear from the Internet and thus needed replacing in its entirety. The fix essentially consists of switching to using sacd as the ISO extractor instead, which is still downloadable -though it doesn't appear to be actively maintained. I've also cloned the sacd repository so that, should that ever suddenly disappear, I'll have my own copy to rely on.

The irony here is that around five years ago, when I first wrote the precursor software to Semplice, I used sacd as the ISO extractor and only switched to odio-sacd when I realised that sacd was a fork of odio-sacd: I wrote an explanatory piece as to why I was, back then, choosing the odio-sacd software over the forked sacd offering. Several years later, the tables have turned, the original has been withdrawn and I'm forced to revert back to using the fork! [...]

Semplice SACD Woes...

Posted on 2nd July 20252nd July 2025 by hjr

If you have already installed Semplice Version 2, then you can ignore this post, because something has 'come up' which only affects new installs but won't be an issue for any installation that has already been completed successfully.

Thanks to a kind reader from Goa (which sounds like the start of a limerick, but isn't!), I have been made aware of the fact that the developer of the odio-sacd program, which Semplice relies on to be able to convert from SACD rips to other audio formats, has destroyed his github software repository and, indeed, his entire website. This is unfortunate: when Semplice is first installed it pulled down the odio-sacd source code from the now-defunct repository and proceeded to compile and install it for you. That process no longer works, because the repository no longer exists. In fact, it now prompts you for non-existent github passwords a couple of times and then fails to pull down the software anyway. [...]

A Word of Thanks

Posted on 23rd June 202523rd June 2025 by hjr

A special word of thanks is due, I think, to Mark Whitnall, a reader who recently went slightly beserk and bought me an extraordinary amount of 'music scores' using the 'Buy Me A Coffee' donation mechanism. His donation was more than sufficient to allow me to make a long-wanted purchase of the full score of Parsifal, which I've been reading ever since whilst following along with the six different recordings of the work that I have. It is always amazing to me to discover how much more of the music you hear when your eyes tell you you're supposed to hear something specific!

It's been an immense pleasure and I am very grateful to Mark -and, indeed, to all my regular readers, whether they've donated or not. [...]

Audio Hardware Updated

Posted on 31st May 202531st May 2025 by hjr

My listening room audio hardware used to look like this:

Hopefully, the immediate response on seeing that is: where is it?! I was after a 'mostly invisible' vibe for this incarnation of my happy place! Rest assured, it's all there, in the centre console. In the right-hand drawer of said console sits this: [...]

Out of retirement!

Posted on 30th April 202527th April 2025 by hjr

I have been a member of the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society for just about ten years now: this will perhaps shock some regulars who, probably, expect me to blowing the Benjamin Britten trumpet, for they famously didn't get along, though RVW was always kinder about Britten than Britten was ever able to be about RVW. But there it is: I have been a member in good standing for a decade and on two continents. I've thus long enjoyed receiving a thrice-yearly copy of their Journal in the post, the extremely high-quality society magazine-newsletter.

In a twist of fate that I certainly wasn't expecting, their long-time editor announced his pending retirement a few months ago and a call went out in the last issue of the Journal for a replacement editor... which no-one responded to. An email plea then went out to members for someone to volunteer to step up to the plate... and I therefore put up my hand, fully expecting 50 other far-more-qualified editors and RVW aficionados to do likewise and thus to never really hear from them again, except perhaps for a polite email of rejection. [...]

Shocking!

Posted on 22nd April 202522nd April 2025 by hjr

This website tries to be image-rich -and finding sufficient royalty-free imagery for it can be a bit of a challenge at times (I'm too cheap to pay actual royalties!). So, for fits and giggles, I thought I'd experiment with a bit of ChatGPT artificial image creation.

So here is a very famous and very genuine photograph of Ralph Vaughan Williams with his cat, Foxy: [...]

In Search of New Iconography...

Posted on 22nd April 202522nd April 2025 by hjr

After the recent bout of Giocoso, Semplice and Niente software updates, I had a few spare days to consider the poverty of my graphic design skills in allowing me to navigate my music collection via various means.

What I'm referring to is this: [...]

Semplice Version 2.10 is out...

Posted on 20th April 202520th April 2025 by hjr

I've just released Semplice Version 2.10, a few days earlier than initially planned -but there seemed little point delaying the release!

The Changelog has all the details, as usual. Many of the features of this release are minor bug fixes. There are a couple of enhancements to Semplice's SuperFLAC functionality, especially in (a) checking your per-track FLACs are tagged to this website's axiomatic standards before attempting to create a SuperFLAC from them; and (b) ensuring SuperFLACs preserve any per-track Custom Tags you may have set (they were previously discarded). [...]

Niente and Giocoso Updates

Posted on 10th April 2025 by hjr

As previously promised, a new version of Niente has just been released: Version 4.03. It contains some minor bug fixes and a couple of enhancements (mostly due to the suggestions of regular user Scott: thank you, Scott!!)

In particular, a new column is added to the database table that stores details of all your recordings: TRACKTITLE. Though upgrading to Niente Version 4.03 adds this new column, it doesn't populate it: you'll need to do a new full integrity check for that to happen. A new 'Advanced SQL Reports' option has also been added to the Reports menu, allowing you to construct full-blown SQL queries of your own devising, if you're up to it! The other big(ish) new feature is that Niente menus now work the same way as Giocoso's or Semplice's do: pressing [Enter] on any top-level menu automatically means you're invoking the first named option within that menu, without you having to literally tap the number '1' each time. The aggregate statistics report can now be produced by tapping 'R' and then pressing [Enter] twice, for example. [...]

Distro Updates, Giocoso and Other Stuff...

Posted on 5th April 20255th April 2025 by hjr

The thumbnail at the left is a screenshot of me testing Giocoso Version 3.30 on the still-in-Beta Fedora 42 (due for release in a couple of weeks): there were no surprises and, as you can see for yourself, everything works as expected.

The same thing happened on the still-in-Beta version of the next Ubuntu, I'm pleased to say, so this years crop of fresh distro updates do not appear to be posing a significant problem for existing versions of Giocoso, Semplice or Niente as far as I could tell: [...]

Semplice Version 2.09 Released

Posted on 2nd April 2025 by hjr

Somewhat delayed from the original plans, but I've just released Semplice Version 2.09 to production. You can upgrade to it in the usual manner: the Miscellaneous menu, Option 3 will walk you through the process. Fresh installations can also be performed in the standard way: wget doco.absolutelybaching.com/seminst and then bash seminst.

The new release contains a number of visual and work-flow enhancements, all very helpfully suggested by reader/user Scott, which were much appreciated. The changelog has the full details, as usual: perhaps the key one is that when converting between audio formats, Semplice now only shows you 'from' formats that physically exist within your current working folder, so you can't accidentally select to convert from a format that you don't possess. Another little enhancement makes the auto-tagging process clearer as to what it's doing at various points and what modified data gets saved or lost when you click 'Cancel' half-way through the process. [...]