♬♪ A Voyage Around My Ears ♬♪
Since all my other software scripts have recently gotten a bit of a re-work, I thought I should probably re-visit the program I use most often myself: the AbsolutelyBaching Universal Audio Converter, or AUAC for short.
For the uninitiated, AUAC is a shell script which provides the convenient ability to convert almost any audio file format into practically any other. Thus auac -i=ape -o=flac will convert a bunch of Monkeys Audio files into FLAC ones. [...]
To accompany the updates to all my other audio-related scripts which have been published of late, the Classical CD Ripper has also now been updated. As with all the other software updates of late, the changes are in three basic categories: cosmetic, distro-awareness and year-in-album functionality.
The cosmetic changes are just to add a little colour to the various prompts and warning messages, so that you can tell the difference more easily between questions the software asks (white text) and the answers you type (yellow). Errors or other unusual conditions will now display in red. Not all terminals will display the colours, but they won't garble their displays if they can't handle the colours either. [...]
Another short note to let you know that the Absolutelybaching Flac Checker (AFC to its friends) has been updated to version 2.02.
As with the recent update to CCDT, the changes are cosmetic for the most part, but also contain a significant piece of new functionality. [...]
Today would have been Benjamin Britten's 107th birthday.
His music was the first 'serious' music I ever encountered, thanks to Mr. Harold Vafeas and the Senior School Choir he directed that sang "proper" music like Vivaldi, Orff ...and Britten. I hated the music Harold made us sing of Britten's. Absolutely hated it! It was difficult, complex and... "modern", at least to my ears. But if you practice a single piece for a term or more at a time, as we did, it gets under your skin, and by the time we came to give a public performance of Rejoice in the Lamb, I adored the piece. [...]
Just a short note to say that the Classical CD Tagger has been updated to version 2.12.
There were a few code tidy-ups. For example, the utility now puts up proper 'you need to install...' error messages if it detects that certain software prerequisites are not already installed: [...]
That screenshot left of this text contains the answer to an obscure-looking Linux command's query: when did the file system on my /dev/sdc1 disk partition get created?
The answer is November 23rd, 2019. [...]
This is the last in my series of three posts explaining what I've done to fix up a silly cataloguing error in my extensive music library. The problem was first described back here. But to recap: whilst I have always "allowed" the inclusion of a recording year in the ALBUM tag where it was necessary (to distinguish, for example, between Boult's 1959 and 1968 recordings of Vaughan Williams' 9th symphony), I only added the recording date rarely, and as an exception to the norm. Rethinking the logic of what counts as recorded music's primary key, however, I realised that the recording date should always and without exception be included in a recording's ALBUM tag.
So, the past few posts have been about the scripts I wrote to (a) check every recording had a recording year stored in its YEAR tag; (b) to check that those recordings that had a date included in their ALBUM tag matched there what their YEAR tag said should apply as the recording date. [...]
So, this is the next in a mini-series of posts, explaining how I went about fixing up the discovery that I'd tagged my music files incorrectly after all these years, despite knowing better!
The short version is that I always knew the recording date was an important factor in distinguishing between recordings of the same work by the same artist, but since I didn't often have duplicates, I assumed I'd get away without including it in the ALBUM tag for a composition. And then I realised that though I might well get away with it today, a new acquisition here or there could well mean that I wouldn't get away with it for ever: if the information is theoretically necessary to distinguish recordings, then it ought to be present, always. [...]
My last post explained that my music collection needed to be re-catalogued to some extent. In particular, I needed to make sure that every track I've ever ripped has an entry in its YEAR tag, identifying when a particular recording was made (because that little piece of information turns out to be a crucial component in classical music recordings' "primary key")
I wasn't going to check all 64,000+ ripped audio tracks by hand to achieve this! Instead, I needed to script something that could batch-check my entire collection in one go. [...]
I was in discussion with some people on a Classical music forum recently. Topic of discussion: yet again, the issue of how you go about tagging your music collection so that it works efficiently and in a scalable manner to achieve good music discovery and access. Of course, I long ago decided I had the correct approach to that!
Anyway, the discussion did what it usually does: when push comes to shove, two of the people declaring my proposals unworkable turn out not to bother with tagging music at all (too much hard work!). So they simply rely on their operating system's search engine (which in Windows' case, keeps changing as new OS versions are released, but let's not worry about that just for now!), or in a physical storage hierarchy that they can traverse easily in Windows' file manager. For the record, if you've structured your music appropriately physically, it's trivially easy to use that physical structure to back-port into metadata tags in your music files, and thus most of the hard work of structuring it logically has already been done. But let's not worry about that just for now, either! [...]