♬♪ A Voyage Around My Ears ♬♪
This website tries to be image-rich -and finding sufficient royalty-free imagery for it can be a bit of a challenge at times (I'm too cheap to pay actual royalties!). So, for fits and giggles, I thought I'd experiment with a bit of ChatGPT artificial image creation.
So here is a very famous and very genuine photograph of Ralph Vaughan Williams with his cat, Foxy: [...]
After the recent bout of Giocoso, Semplice and Niente software updates, I had a few spare days to consider the poverty of my graphic design skills in allowing me to navigate my music collection via various means.
What I'm referring to is this: [...]
I've just released Semplice Version 2.10, a few days earlier than initially planned -but there seemed little point delaying the release!
The Changelog has all the details, as usual. Many of the features of this release are minor bug fixes. There are a couple of enhancements to Semplice's SuperFLAC functionality, especially in (a) checking your per-track FLACs are tagged to this website's axiomatic standards before attempting to create a SuperFLAC from them; and (b) ensuring SuperFLACs preserve any per-track Custom Tags you may have set (they were previously discarded). [...]
As previously promised, a new version of Niente has just been released: Version 4.03. It contains some minor bug fixes and a couple of enhancements (mostly due to the suggestions of regular user Scott: thank you, Scott!!)
In particular, a new column is added to the database table that stores details of all your recordings: TRACKTITLE. Though upgrading to Niente Version 4.03 adds this new column, it doesn't populate it: you'll need to do a new full integrity check for that to happen. A new 'Advanced SQL Reports' option has also been added to the Reports menu, allowing you to construct full-blown SQL queries of your own devising, if you're up to it! The other big(ish) new feature is that Niente menus now work the same way as Giocoso's or Semplice's do: pressing [Enter] on any top-level menu automatically means you're invoking the first named option within that menu, without you having to literally tap the number '1' each time. The aggregate statistics report can now be produced by tapping 'R' and then pressing [Enter] twice, for example. [...]
The thumbnail at the left is a screenshot of me testing Giocoso Version 3.30 on the still-in-Beta Fedora 42 (due for release in a couple of weeks): there were no surprises and, as you can see for yourself, everything works as expected.
The same thing happened on the still-in-Beta version of the next Ubuntu, I'm pleased to say, so this years crop of fresh distro updates do not appear to be posing a significant problem for existing versions of Giocoso, Semplice or Niente as far as I could tell: [...]
Somewhat delayed from the original plans, but I've just released Semplice Version 2.09 to production. You can upgrade to it in the usual manner: the Miscellaneous menu, Option 3 will walk you through the process. Fresh installations can also be performed in the standard way: wget doco.absolutelybaching.com/seminst and then bash seminst.
The new release contains a number of visual and work-flow enhancements, all very helpfully suggested by reader/user Scott, which were much appreciated. The changelog has the full details, as usual: perhaps the key one is that when converting between audio formats, Semplice now only shows you 'from' formats that physically exist within your current working folder, so you can't accidentally select to convert from a format that you don't possess. Another little enhancement makes the auto-tagging process clearer as to what it's doing at various points and what modified data gets saved or lost when you click 'Cancel' half-way through the process. [...]