Giocoso - First Update

Somewhat annoyingly, I just discovered an error in Giocoso's --stats reporting function. It's not a particularly terrible one: more a question of labelling the various numbers.

The stats report shows how many recordings you've got that last for various 'time bands' (i.e., 0 to 5 minutes long, 5 to 10 minutes long and so on). One of the bands said '10 to 30 minutes'... but the actual query  submitted to the Giocoso database was querying for durations between 600 seconds and 1200 seconds. [...] 

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Giocoso - A New Randomising FLAC Player

Today, I'm announcing the initial release of Giocoso, the randomising FLAC player for Linux, which is a replacement for my old AMP program. Giocoso is built on much the same code-base as AMP, but with quite a few changes. The most significant differences between Giocoso and AMP are, probably:

  • AMP scrobbled by default and had to be told not to; Giocoso does not scrobble by default, and has to be told to do so if it's required.
  • AMP scrobbling required the installation and running of a separate 'amp-scrobbler' script. Giocoso uses no external functionality to scrobble: it's all built-in to the main program.
  • AMP had acquired a bunch of 'statistical overrides' (such as --levelup, --xlevelup and --xxlevelup); those are now gone from Giocoso.
  • AMP could only apply --minduration and --maxduration filters after selecting something to play. This could result in a significant pause before stumbling across something randomly selected that happened to have the correct duration. Giocoso now knows the durations of pieces from the get-go, so duration-based selections are done successfully within fractions of a second.
  • AMP only displayed album art; when Giocoso displays album art, it adds a 'caption' to it, with its text derived from the ALBUM tag of the music being played: the album art can therefore now visually provide you with all information about what, precisely, is being played.

There are lots of other differences, detailed in Appendix A of Giocoso's User Manual, which is available for download on Giocoso's new product page[...] 

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Niente - A New FLAC Integrity Checker

I recently signed up to a Personal Backblaze cloud backup subscription. The product has some severe limitations: it only runs on Windows, for example; and it takes no notice of -and refuses to back up- anything a Windows PC is connected to via the network. It's one huge saving grace, however, is that for US$55 per year, you get unlimited backup capacity. If, for example, you plug in a 12TB external hard disk via USB to your Windows PC... that counts as local storage and therefore gets backed up to Blackblaze within the personal backup allowance. Add two more 12TB USB drives to the PC and you've just got 36TB of cloud storage for peanuts!

Yes, not working on Linux is a bit of a drawback for someone who stopped using Windows at all in about 2016 (and had spent the 20 years before that trying to!)... but it's not exactly hard to find an old PC and throw Windows 10 on it and then script something on Linux to push my music collection across to it. Once the music collection has been copied to the Windows PC, it heads off to the cloud, courtesy of Backblaze. I already have six copies of my music collection on various NAS devices and external USB drives. I even have an offline copy, on a pair of disks which only get plugged into a PC once a month for a refresh. But thanks to Backblaze, I now have an offsite backup. You know, for those times when the house catches fire or falls into a sinkhole. [...] 

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