♬♪ A Voyage Around My Ears ♬♪
As 2023 draws to its close, I thought I'd trawl through my Giocoso music player's database and work out what I've spent the past twelve months doing, as far as listening to classical music goes.
The headline news is that I've played 3,007 unique recordings this year which, cumulatively, lasted for about 69 days (68.93 if you want to be accurate about it!). [...]
I uncovered a silly bug in Giocoso Version 3 on Boxing Day: I had switched off random-play mode and instead instructed the program to play a playlist constructed from anything containing the word 'Christmas' in its ALBUM tag. The music itself all played fine, and everyone was pleased with the festive mood thus created 🙂 Unfortunately, I noticed that by the time the eighth piece was being played, Giocoso was reporting its duration to be over 10 hours! Going back over the play history for that day (now fixed), I saw that Percy Grainger's Sussex Mummers' Christmas Carol was recorded as having played for over 11 hours -when it's actually a piece that lasts about 5 minutes, tops!
What I immediately spotted was that the recorded durations for each piece was in fact the cumulative duration for all pieces played up to that point, from the playlist. If the playlist had said to play pieces that were (say) 5, 20, 13, 12 and 15 minutes long, the first piece would have been recorded as lasting for 5 minutes; the next as lasting for 25 minutes; the third as being 38 minutes in length; the fourth as being 50 minutes long; and the last would be recorded as having played for 1 hour 5 minutes. And so on. Throw a couple of Christmas Oratorios into the mix and a piece that should have been recorded as lasting 15 minutes would instead have been recorded as lasting for 10+ hours! [...]