A bunch of small developments to announce this time.
Firstly, the installer scripts for all my music management/playing programs have been updated so that they set the terminal's background colour to black (with yellow text) regardless of the configured colour scheme your terminal might be using: this helps the installer's text messages display correctly, no matter what your usual terminal colour choices might be. If you're not re-installing any of the programs, you won't see this change and it will have no significance for you, but it is worth mentioning as it was another good suggestion from Scott. An additional change to the installers is that they now all check for the pre-existence of ncurses. Most Linux distros have this installed by default anyway, but Niente now checks that it exists and if it doesn't, will warn you and quit. It won't install it for you, but merely tell you to install it yourself, using your distro's standard package management capabilities.
Secondly: Niente has had yet another point-release this morning, bumping it to version 4.02. It's only 4 days since it reached version 4.01, so you can guess that the new release is probably related to that earlier one! Sure enough, Niente's new 4.01 ability to store sample rates depends on interrogating strings of text -and that requires the 'grep' program to be properly identified in an environment variable. That variable was being set correctly, provided you used the main program window to launch your integrity checks... but if you were using Niente's non-interactive modes (i.e., you had configured cron to run a task such as "niente4.sh --check-differential") to do such checks, it wasn't. Now fixed. I also added a tiny bit of on-screen feedback to indicate task progression in this non-interactive mode, even though -by definition!- you're unlikely to be sat staring at the screen when a non-interactive task is run.
Third: all programs (i.e., Niente, Giocoso and Semplice) have had minor coding errors fixed to harmonise the nature of the environment variables they set when first run. Sloppy coding on my part meant there were inconsistencies and plain cock-ups that meant some things weren't set for some Linux distros that should have been. Since these corrections are merely corrections of my own errors, rather than new features or feature-specific bug-fixes, I haven't bumped the version numbers for the programs, despite them now all using newer code. You should therefore simply take the 'Check for software updates' in each program's Administration menu and perform a precautionary check for newer code releases and proceed with the updates if and when prompted: exit the program after the update is applied and re-launch it. The version number won't have changed, but the corrected code will be running anyway.
Finally: Giocoso will soon receive an enhancement update, bringing it up to version 3.11. I am still testing it at the moment, so haven't yet pushed it to production. You can read about what will be released here: as that page itself says, I'm hoping testing will be completed for a release on 20th October.