hjr – Absolutely Baching

Out of retirement!

Posted on 30th April 202527th April 2025 by hjr

I have been a member of the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society for just about ten years now: this will perhaps shock some regulars who, probably, expect me to blowing the Benjamin Britten trumpet, for they famously didn't get along, though RVW was always kinder about Britten than Britten was ever able to be about RVW. But there it is: I have been a member in good standing for a decade and on two continents. I've thus long enjoyed receiving a thrice-yearly copy of their Journal in the post, the extremely high-quality society magazine-newsletter.

In a twist of fate that I certainly wasn't expecting, their long-time editor announced his pending retirement a few months ago and a call went out in the last issue of the Journal for a replacement editor... which no-one responded to. An email plea then went out to members for someone to volunteer to step up to the plate... and I therefore put up my hand, fully expecting 50 other far-more-qualified editors and RVW aficionados to do likewise and thus to never really hear from them again, except perhaps for a polite email of rejection. [...]

Shocking!

Posted on 22nd April 202522nd April 2025 by hjr

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: [...]

In Search of New Iconography...

Posted on 22nd April 202522nd April 2025 by hjr

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: [...]

Semplice Version 2.10 is out...

Posted on 20th April 202520th April 2025 by hjr

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). [...]

Niente and Giocoso Updates

Posted on 10th April 2025 by hjr

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. [...]

Distro Updates, Giocoso and Other Stuff...

Posted on 5th April 20255th April 2025 by hjr

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: [...]

Semplice Version 2.09 Released

Posted on 2nd April 2025 by hjr

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. [...]

Scheduled Maintenance

Posted on 21st March 202523rd March 2025 by hjr

This website is now scheduled to undergo periodic maintenance for about 1 hour at 05:00 UTC (about 9PM in California) every 23rd of the month, starting in two days' time.

Apologies for any inconvenience caused by this, but the ability to take a disk image of the website is something I've long wanted to be able to do ...and now we're running in a Linux KVM guest, I can finally do it! [...]

Down for Maintenance...

Posted on 17th March 202521st March 2025 by hjr

~~This website will be offline for several hours, intermittently, over the next day or so. My apologies...~~

I believe the website is now back online for the most part. There may be one or two random outages in the next few hours, but we're nearly sorted! Thank you for your patience... [...]

Oops...

Posted on 14th March 202514th March 2025 by hjr

For reasons all to do with my incompetence, I managed to release Giocoso Version 3.30 with an installer that did not download two of the release's key new features (global resume and global notes). If you upgraded using the one-off upgrade script, no problem; but if you did a fresh install, you'd be missing files needed for full functionality.

Noticing this, I fixed the issue ...and introduced a regression that meant the installer tried to pull down files from a completely non-existent folder on this website. Meaning nothing got installed at all 🙁 Some fix. [...]

Volume Boosting in Bulk

Posted on 12th March 2025 by hjr

My attention has recently been turning to Niente, which hasn't had a new release in something like 5 months. I'm planning a new release for it at the start of April, though there are a few new floors being fitted throughout the house in the meantime, so that schedule might slip!

Anyway: I couldn't but help notice the more than 3000 folders of music in my collection that Niente thought could do with a volume boost. Since I've only got about 17,000 recordings in total, that's quite a sizeable chunk that is, in some way, less than ideal. It arises from the fact that I was ripping CDs in 1999 and only got round to writing volume-boosting technology into Semplice in around 2019! Short of going to each sub-volume-boosted folder, one by one, and running Semplice there to apply a retroactive volume boost, this wasn't going to be fixed any time soon: thirty or forty would have been fine; three thousand or more, less so! [...]

Giocoso Version 3.30 Released - Welcome to Pro!

Posted on 7th March 20257th March 2025 by hjr

After a bit of a delay, but slightly ahead of the previously-advised revised schedule, I've today released Giocoso Version 3.30. The changelog, as usual, details all the fixes and enhancements and changes that have gone into the new release.

The short version is, however: Giocoso Pro. This is Giocoso's new-found ability to communicate with a remote database and thereby share its play history with other devices. That also allows one device to make a note about a recording and an entirely different device to read that note later (a feature called 'Global Notes'). There's also 'Global Pause', which allows one device to pause playback and another device to resume it: a feature I find incredibly handy when I listen to music at night on the laptop then want to resume it in the main listening room the next morning. Less obvious, but equally as significant: the default music search algorithm underwent a significant re-write, making it more efficient, but potentially leading to new outcomes that would have been impossible in earlier releases. [...]