I'm back...

Posted on by hjr

Well, it took a couple of days longer than anticipated... and my new "server room" is currently (and temporarily!) the laundry, but if you're reading this, you'll have worked out that I am indeed back on line and things are working OK.

In ten or so days' time, electricians are supposed to be turning up to electrify the loft space. I have no idea how long that will take. Once it's done, the server will be taken offline for as brief a period as I can manage, allowing it to be hauled into its final, permanent location in the loft. That will be fun: the new loft lacks dedicated loft stairs, so it will be a matter of balancing precariously at the top of a stepladder whilst holding on with one hand and balancing a very heavy server in the other. Fun times ahead, then! [...] 

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A word about GMG

Posted on by hjr

I just wanted to put on record that I was sorry to have to cease my membership of the GMG Classical Music Forum a week or so ago. There were at least a half-dozen members there whose contributions I valued highly (Harry, Vandermolen, Karl Henning and others, for example). There were dozens more who were utterly decent people with a lot to contribute. There were also terribly pretentious Irish members, as well as at least one Australian member with zero sense of humour; but these were in a minority, whom it was easy to ignore.

Unfortuately, there were several members who thought that, presented with a CD album art image of a female artist, it was OK to comment on her cleavage. One in particular, was recorded to have posted, "Poor girl. She can't even find a dress to fit", because a bit of cleavage was visible in the black dress sported by the fine, professional and highly-skilled pianist in question. The poster was 74 and, I think, ought to have known better that women do sport cleavages but that one doesn't reduce a highly-skilled, professional woman to her cleavage. Some of us could hear the heavy breathing and dripping spittle accompanying such commentary. [...] 

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Software Updates

Posted on by hjr

Before this website goes offline for nearly a fortnight, I thought I'd better release a couple of software updates that have been in my 'pending' tray for quite a while now.

First, Giocoso is bumped from version 2.03 to 2.04. The updates are mostly minor and inconsequential -except for one 'bugfix'. All versions of Giocoso have long contacted this website to obtain a new version of the program's error/messages file, whenever it detects that the program version number doesn't match the error/messages file version number. That all works fine, when this website is up! If, however, this site is not contactable (because, say, its host managed to blow up its Hungarian webserver!) then the program sits there, apparently locked up, trying to contact the uncontactable. Eventually it gives up and resumes working as normal -but now without the ability to display any error or progress message text at all. The new version now adds in a 'ping test' before trying to fetch the new message file: if the site's not accessible for some reason, Giocoso shouldn't hang for minutes trying to reach it, and the old error messages file is retained, not wiped. [...] 

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Whoops...

Posted on by hjr

The icon at the left kind of describes what just happened to this website.

You'll recall I moved it to a rented 'cloud' server in Hungary a few weeks back? Well, the 'cloud server' turned out to be a bit of a 'mushroom cloud server'. I went to bed Monday night with everything working just fine; I woke up in the morning to discover the entire site was inaccessible. I couldn't even ssh into the server. I did the usual thing: turned it off and back on again, using the control panel web interface the company provides... still no joy once the server was back up running, however. Heart sinking, I contacted the help desk. I explained the problem carefully, including all the steps I'd taken so far to try to fix the issue. Their response was, "We just turned your server off and back on again. Try it now." Not what I would call a support desk's most considered response. [...] 

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Houston, we have a problem... Part 4...

Posted on by hjr

This is the last in my series about how the new Niente Version 3.0 has revealed past cataloguing 'issues' with my music collection. In previous episodes, I've dealt with:

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Houston, we have a problem... Part 3...

Posted on by hjr

Following on from my two earlier escapades in fixing up my music collection's tagging, it is time to turn my attention to my penultimate big issue:That 'Folders with multiple tracks' statistic (number 12 in the list) is something that is not officially a problem, but it annoys me nonetheless! It is counting the number of times a folder contains more than one FLAC. Now, if you rip a symphony off most classical music CDs, you probably expect to end up with four separate 'tracks', each track representing one movement of the symphony -so the presence of more than one FLAC in a folder might not seem to be surprising or particularly 'wrong'.

You would be entirely correct in thinking that, I hasten to add: there is absolutely nothing wrong in having parts of a composition represented by a separate 'track' and there is nothing in my Axioms of Classical Tagging article to say otherwise. In fact, it's entirely silent on the subject. [...] 

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Houston, we have a problem... Part 2...

Posted on by hjr

A brief reminder, if any were needed, that my music collection is, in some ways, in a bit of a pickle. Pickles which I hadn't realised it was in, that is, until some damn fool or other (that would be me!) released Niente Version 3! With that program's new-found ability to analyse for physical corruption and logical failings (or, if you prefer, failures to live up to the strictures and precepts of the Holy Text of the Axioms of Classical Tagging), it's now easier than ever to discover you've been merely mucking about with your music cataloguing all these years, even though you thought you were being rather good at it at the time!

A blog post or two ago, I pointed out that a lot of my album art was undersized, oversized or ok-sized-but-not-square. A bout of bulk-fixing via a fixart.sh script, plus a spot of intensive manual acquiring of good album art, plus a lot of manual re-tagging, means all those problems are now behind me. Sadly, however, that wasn't the only tagging issue Niente showed me I had! [...] 

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Houston, we have a problem... Part 1...

Posted on by hjr

It is certainly not in the same league as having your space craft blow up whilst half-way to the moon, but the unfortunate thing about writing a tool like Niente to keep an eye on how logically-consistent your tagging of your music collection has been over a span of about 23 years is that... it has a horrible tendency to show you've been making silly mistakes all these years!

Here's my current situation, which is indeed a bit of a problem: [...] 

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The Giocoso Hardware Player

Posted on by hjr

At the left, in the thumbnail, you see my brand new media player. It's totally silent. It's a complete mess of cables and chaos. And it's smaller than a coke can.

I am, of course, using Giocoso as my software to play music. I've been doing that for a long time, using assorted standard PCs, small form factor PCs, tiny PCs, laptops and Lord knows what else. The trouble with all of those modes of playback: every single computing device has involved a fan somewhere. If not on the CPU itself, at least in its power supply. Now, fans make noise... and the one thing you definitely do not want in your music room is a source of noise. So for absolutely ages, I've been after a way to run Giocoso that's completely silent: what you see in the thumbnail to the left (which you can click on to get a full-sized version) is the first tentative steps on that road. [...] 

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