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. [...]