Month: September 2024

Signing in? Don't...

Posted on by hjr

I get multiple alerts every day about people trying to sign in to this website using names such as 'zaintaylor' or 'bpgenius'. I assume almost all such log-in attempts are bogus, bot-driven attempts to attack this site, but it occurs to me that there may be a handful of people trying legitimately to log in to this website using (for example) their wordpress.com user credentials. If so: please don't bother, since no-one can log into this website, except me. Attempting to do so will net you an instant 2-month long ban for your IP address.

If you are attempting to leave a comment, you don't need to log in to do so: just supply a name and an email address at the time of leaving a comment and, assuming you pass moderation, your comment will appear in due course. Once you've had one comment appear, subsequent ones should not need to go through the moderation process. [...] 

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Niente Version 4.0 Released

Posted on by hjr

Today, at last, I'm finally releasing Version 4.0 of the Niente FLAC checking program. I've been using it daily for around 2 months now, so I reckon most of its quirks and foibles (and bugs!) have been ironed out by now!

Niente performs physical and logical integrity checks on your FLAC collection, without ever modifying the FLACs themselves. Physically, it makes sure that the music contents of your FLACs hasn't changed over time (due to silent corruption or 'bit rot'). Logically, it takes this website's axioms on how classical music ought to be tagged and checks whether your FLAC tags match the axiomatic requirements. For example, it will check that, if you've said 'Karajan' is the distinguishing artist on a recording, that the name 'Karajan' also appears in the COMMENT tag for the FLACs associated with that recording. It can also do checks to ensure you've embedded nicely-sized album art in each of your FLACs, or whether all your FLACs are at their maximum-possible non-distorting volume. [...] 

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