♬♪ A Voyage Around My Ears ♬♪
I suppose it had to come sooner or later: since all my media manipulation is done by scripts I've written myself (and which are freely available to download for anyone capable of installing ffmpeg and one or two other packages), it seemed appropriate to consider creating a scripted, minimally-functional media player.
The Absolutely Baching Media Player (AMP, to its friends) is the result. [...]
In the post-pudding Christmas after-glow, I have come to the conclusion that if I am going to put the recording year into the ALBUM tag (because only by including it there do we properly and completely use recorded classical music's primary key), we might as well not fear duplicating data in another important matter: namely, the business of declaring who is the "distinguishing artist" for a recording.
It should already be common practice to have this data already present in the ALBUM tag (it's why I own Symphony No. 5 (Karajan - 1970) for example). [...]
A Happy Christmas to all my readers.
It's been a pretty rough year, but hopefully there are happier (and healthier!) times ahead. [...]
Once you've been collecting music for a while, you will suffer from an abundance of riches: those 15 different versions of the Beethoven symphonies; those 5 complete sets of Bach cantatas; at some point, they will all become difficult to navigate and make playing any particular recording increasingly difficult.
It is for such times that an 'overflow' library is a good idea: a separate physical storage area on disk where you move your lesser-played recordings to as you come to realise that they aren't your favourite performances any more. They're still there on disk, though: so they can be restored from the overflow folder back into the main library if you change your mind later on! Or (more pertinently), they can be played at will whether they are considered 'overflow' or not. [...]
In my last post, I pointed out the shenanigans that ensue when you use Easytag to update the metadata associated with your FLAC music files. Specifically, I demonstrated how Easytag will silently, and without the opportunity to configure the behaviour, change the name of a tag from COMMENT to DESCRIPTION.
When you then go on to use software which expects a tag to be called COMMENT, this causes problems! [...]
I had been subsconsciously aware of a problem for quite a while, but had paid it no real attention: whenever I looked, a lot of my music files seemed to lack proper performer details! The tracks played fine and everything else about them seemed OK, but just no 'conducted by, orchestra playing is, soprano singing is...' stuff. I'd noticed it, in a casual sort of way, from time to time... but because you can live without knowing that particular information at your fingertips, I mostly just did.
I had also vaguely registered (erroneously, as it turns out!) that the problem was with a lot of music I remember buying in the 1990s and ripping in the early 2000s, so I put it down to sloppy tagging habits, waaay back before I knew any better. But it wasn't and isn't. It is a tale of software shenanigans and garbage programming that really kind of ticks me off, to be frank. So, first: let me show you the problem... [...]
In order to get media around the house, to various rooms and devices, on an as-needed basis, I've deployed various mechanisms in my time -including such things as DLNA servers and other various forms of home-brew wonderment.
A couple of years back, I lighted on Plex Media Server, which is a really very capable music- and video-streaming programme with a reasonable media management library attached. It is open-source and thus entirely free of charge, but there are some "value-add" options available which are only available if you shell out for a 'Plex Pass'. That's quite expensive: it's listed on the page I've just linked to at £4 per month or £95 for a "lifetime" pass (I put the quotes around 'lifetime' only because I don't honestly know how long these open source projects will last before egos and desire for profit make the thing pass like ships in the night!). [...]
Before I accidentally wiped the web server that runs this site, I had been blogging about the problem of SACDs and the fact that they are often mastered with absolute peak volumes set to about 6dB quieter than they really should be (for technical reasons). I thus modified by AUAC audio converter program to automatically boost SACD rips by whatever it took to get the loudest track on a CD to be as loud as it could reasonably go without becoming distorted.
Which is fine for SACDs... but there are times you think to yourself (especially with some recordings on really old CDs) that the volume levels on even ordinary CDs aren't entirely what they should be. Whilst incorporating a volume boost into an SACD extraction tool is a good idea, a standalone volume boosting utility sounded like it might be quite useful, too! [...]
Visitors to the website over the past ~12 hours or so will have noticed... errors. Lots of errors!
My apologies. [...]
If you've been reading the last few posts hereabouts, you'll know that I've recently updated most of my audio-processing scripts. The AbsolutelyBaching Universal Audio Converter (AUAC) in particular received a significant new piece of functionality: when extracting high-res audio from an SACD ISO, it will now boost the resulting FLAC files' audio volume by 6dB (6 decibels).
This was done because I had noticed that SACD extractions usually had much quieter audio than the same music mastered onto ordinary CD -and, asking around, I discovered that for assorted, obscure technical reasons, the music industry records SACDs at -6dB, to prevent distortion. So the quietness is built in. The recent AUAC update therefore built it back out again, by increasing the volume by the same amount the industry reduces it to prevent audio artefacts getting encoded into the signal. This is a safe thing to do, since we're no longer mastering and recording the audio, and thus at risk of creating artefacts. We're just, essentially, turning up the volume knob after all the processing and mastering has long since been completed. [...]