Lockdown Tasks

As we are all now experiencing 'lockdown woes', I decided I had time enough on my hands for it to be worthwhile for me to look again at my various bits of music management software. The Classical CD Ripper and Tagger scripts accordingly got a work-over: little tweaks to make each program work slightly more in ways that suit me than not! I use the Tagger program on a daily basis, so it's important to me that it works efficiently, which I think it now does 🙂

I then tackled the Flac Checker script, which hadn't been modified since October 2019. It has been in daily use since then, but the output was messy and that made it harder to spot corruption happening to my collection of digital music files than it should have been. I have accordingly re-worked the program so extensively that it's now up to version 2.0. I am confident that I've improved the logging sufficiently that any corruption detected will be extremely obvious and easy to locate.

I don't myself use Windows 10 these days in anything other than a virtual machine which I keep around, grudgingly, just 'in case'. In case of what, I have yet to discover! But anyway: since it's there and I'd like to re-use my music tools intended for Linux on it, I've re-worked the articles on getting Linux scripts to run on Windows via Cygwin. There's a quick how-to for getting the Classical CD Tagger working on Windows 10 here, and a much more detailed work-through of the various steps here. Everything works as advertised, except (sadly) for the Classical CD Ripper. I don't know whether I'll ever get that working properly (and with EAC available for Windows, I'm not sure there's a lot of point in doing so!)

The Mozart catalogue is still a little in limbo: the final polish to sections 7 and 8 (chamber and vocal works) has still to be applied. With the corona virus lockdown continuing for the foreseeable future, I expect to get on to finishing those sections up before too long!!