♬♪ A Voyage Around My Ears ♬♪
I bought a digital download of the Naxos CD you see at the left the other week.
As with most downloads I purchase these days, the music files I bought came pre-tagged with all sorts of pieces of metadata. Which is kind of the record companies, I guess -in this case, Naxos. [...]
May has been a month of progress on something I made a New Year's resolution to do (but then put off for four months!): catalogue the enormous pile of ripped CD files I've built up over the past year or so. Click on the graph at the left and you'll see how I've done: I started the month with 485.1GB of music files sitting in the 'temporary' area of my hard disk (which has been pretty permanent for at least 2 years now!), in the form of 10,007 individual FLAC files. As of this afternoon, I'm down to 13.6GB and just 625 files. Most of that is a 'collected works of Messiaen' box set, which will take ages to catalogue and tag-up properly, because French is slow to type, what with all its accents (but maybe not as slow as German. And definitely way faster than Czech!)
Undertaking all this cataloguing has meant using my own CCDT tagging program, of course. As a result, I decided to make a couple of little changes to CCDT. The important one is a new run-time switch, called --namereplace. Run CCDT with that in the launching command and CCDT changes the way it handles music files that already have a track title tag. [...]
Fresh from my war with a new mini PC (which I lost, you'll recall), I remained determined to do something to upgrade my old workstation-class desktop PC. I bought it second-hand a few years ago: it's a Dell Precision T3610, which is a bit of a monster, and was originally constructed (I think) in around 2012 or 2013: its warranty says it started in February 2014 and expired in February 2017, so it's somewhere in that ball-park.
It shipped with a Xeon E5-1620 v2 CPU CPU, which was launched in the third quarter of 2013, so that also helps date the machine. That CPU has (inevitably, as far as Intel was concerned back then!) 4 cores and thus 8 threads when hyperthreading was enabled. Nothing too remarkable, but not exactly shabby, either. I think when I bought it, it came with 16GB of RAM: I soon bumped that up to 96GB. So, it's not memory constrained either! It also shipped with an Nvidia Quadro K4000, which was cutting edge at the time, but has long since been eclipsed by newer graphics cards: since I don't play games beyond Solitaire, however, I don't particularly care how out-of-date my graphics capabilities are! [...]
Yesterday was not a happy day!
At the end of April (the 23rd, to be precise), I took delivery of the small form factor PC you see at the left. It's a "Minisforum UM250" and comes with 16GB RAM, a 512GB M2-SSD hard drive and an AMD Ryzen 8-core processor. It is my first brush with an AMD Ryzen processor, which I've been keen to get my hands on for quite some time... so I was pretty excited. I was concerned at how noisy a small form factor PC might be: the thermals in such a small space are not great, and my intention was to use this as my main music-playing PC, so quietness is quite important. A review I read on Ars Technica suggested the sound levels were acceptable, so I bit, paid up, and took delivery the very next day. [...]