Month: July 2025

Outage: Advanced Warning

Posted on by hjr

I wanted to give advanced notice to readers: this website is likely to become unavailable around June 14th - 16th, ish.

The occasion is the upgrade to my broadband connection: it's being increased to 500Mbps from a measly 76Mbps. This should make the website load faster and be more responsive, which is a good thing. In theory, the switch over will be transparent and painless... and no-one will even know it's happening! Yeah, right: we all know how those sorts of ISP promises go in the end 🙁 [...] 

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Semplice Version 2.11 Released

Posted on by hjr

Today, I released Semplice Version 2.11. It contains the fixes I mentioned were needed last time, namely that the SACD ISO-handling software I had been relying on had suddenly decided to disappear from the Internet and thus needed replacing in its entirety. The fix essentially consists of switching to using sacd as the ISO extractor instead, which is still downloadable -though it doesn't appear to be actively maintained. I've also cloned the sacd repository so that, should that ever suddenly disappear, I'll have my own copy to rely on.

The irony here is that around five years ago, when I first wrote the precursor software to Semplice, I used sacd as the ISO extractor and only switched to odio-sacd when I realised that sacd was a fork of odio-sacd: I wrote an explanatory piece as to why I was, back then, choosing the odio-sacd software over the forked sacd offering. Several years later, the tables have turned, the original has been withdrawn and I'm forced to revert back to using the fork! [...] 

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Semplice SACD Woes...

Posted on by hjr

If you have already installed Semplice Version 2, then you can ignore this post, because something has 'come up' which only affects new installs but won't be an issue for any installation that has already been completed successfully.

Thanks to a kind reader from Goa (which sounds like the start of a limerick, but isn't!), I have been made aware of the fact that the developer of the odio-sacd program, which Semplice relies on to be able to convert from SACD rips to other audio formats, has destroyed his github software repository and, indeed, his entire website. This is unfortunate: when Semplice is first installed it pulled down the odio-sacd source code from the now-defunct repository and proceeded to compile and install it for you. That process no longer works, because the repository no longer exists. In fact, it now prompts you for non-existent github passwords a couple of times and then fails to pull down the software anyway. [...] 

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