Absolutely Baching – –A Voyage Around My Ears

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

Posted on 28th March 202329th March 2023 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. [...]

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

Posted on 17th March 202321st March 2023 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! [...]

If you can read this...

Posted on 16th March 202316th March 2023 by hjr

Welcome to Hungary!

That is to say, I've moved the website from my loft in drizzly Nottingham to a server located somewhere in (presumably!) sunny Hungary. If you're reading this: the web server move has been a success! [...]

One down...

Posted on 10th March 202310th March 2023 by hjr

Last time, I reported how the new Niente program had helped reveal a lot of cataloguing mistakes I'd made with my music collection, over the years.

In particular, there was this not-so-little statistic: [...]

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

Posted on 4th March 202321st March 2023 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: [...]

The Giocoso Hardware Player

Posted on 28th February 20232nd March 2023 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. [...]

Niente Version 3.0 - Now Released

Posted on 26th February 202326th February 2023 by hjr

As promised (rather longer ago than I'd like to admit!), Niente Version 3.0 has finally been released. It's my 'FLAC checker' tool, just as Giocoso is my FLAC player and Semplice is my FLAC tagger.

It's a very substantial re-working of the Version 2 code, so upgrading is non-trivial and you'd basically better commit to completely re-working your crontabs to schedule it, and so on. The principle new feature is that it now runs on MacOS and Windows. [...]

Offer accepted...

Posted on 17th February 2023 by hjr

Well, that turned out quicker than expected!

A house was viewed about a week ago in south Lincolnshire (about due east from the current home, close to The Wash and thus within striking distance of all things East Anglian). An offer was made ...and accepted within the time it took to drive half-way back home! [...]

Moving on...

Posted on 25th January 2023 by hjr

After nearly six years living in Nottingham, we've decided it's time to move on. Our house has, in fact, already sold (but the English system of house purchase means that "sold" doesn't have a really good definition: either party can pull out, for any reason, right up until the time money hits your bank account!). We therefore find ourselves now doing frequent day-trips to Norfolk and Suffolk, our preferred new counties of potential habitation. Unfortunately, we haven't yet found a suitable replacement for the place we are shortly to be required to move out of, so further day-trips are required.

That, in turn, means little time is presently available for software development, so the new Niente is likely to be delayed a bit. Sorry about that. [...]

New Year Software Releases

Posted on 14th January 202314th January 2023 by hjr

A little late (but a birthday bash in Bruges will do that to a man!), but Happy New Year for 2023, and by way of making up for my tardiness, I give you two new software releases.

First is Semplice 1.01. The program has acquired the usual slew of bugfixes and minor tweaks and twiddles, but also a couple of nice enhancements and new features. The main new features are: the ability to extact and/or display embedded album art; the ability to create spectrum analysis graphs of the audio signal in a FLAC; and the ability to directly edit the contents of any cuesheet embedded within a FLAC. See the changelog for details. [...]

Adventures in Spectrum Analysis

Posted on 18th December 202218th December 2022 by hjr

I've been aware for years that it's possible to produce the sorts of images you see in the thumbnail at the left of this post: frequency analysis graphs of an audio file of one sort or another. Audiophiles have been swooning over them for years, but I never have. If my ears were satisfied with the sound of a recording, what additional good would it do me to do a spectrum analysis of that recording?

Well: for the most part, I still think that's true... but I had a very specific reason for dabbling in them lately, which then led me down the rabbit hole of finding them fascinating! I thought I'd share a little about it. [...]

Bye-bye, Last.fm

Posted on 10th December 202212th December 2022 by hjr

I've long been an advocate for registering the fact you just played concerto X or symphony Y with a web-accessible store of data, such as Last.fm. I've been doing precisely that with everything I've played since January 8th 2008, so Last.fm have a record of about 14 years of my listening history. The thumbnail at the left shows you that's quite considerable: 202,000+ "scrobbles" (i.e., a record of the completion of a 'play') have been received in that time,

My top 'plays' as recorded by Last.fm are (in descending order) Britten, JS Bach, Vaughan Williams, Handel and Sibelius -which isn't so hugely different from what has been recorded on this very website since June 2021. [...]