hjr – Absolutely Baching

Giocoso Version 3.20 Released

Posted on 10th December 202410th December 2024 by hjr

Today, a few days earlier than planned, I'm releasing Version 3.20 of Giocoso. It's a very significant release and the version number has therefore jumped from 3.1x to 3.2x (specifically, from 3.12 to 3.20), as previously explained.

The two (relatively!) huge changes that have occurred are: 1) Ability to control a play (pause, resume, terminate, repeat etc) from within the playing Giocoso session's main play screen; and 2) Accurate timing information is now displayed (i.e., 'played X minutes of a piece that lasts Y minutes, therefore ending at Z clock time'). These were canvassed in some detail in an earlier blog piece. [...]

News from Nowhere

Posted on 1st December 20242nd December 2024 by hjr

We bought our current house in April/May 2023. It's been a slow slog since then: solar panels, new roof on the conservatory, new flooring throughout. One room remains to be tackled downstairs (upstairs gets dealt with next March!): the music listening room, otherwise known as the Holy of Holies, my Utopia, and Sanctuary!!

This week the plasterer was due, and then cancelled, and is now due next week (typical Lincolnshire, really). Which meant the listening equipment was removed from the room, then moved back, though not necessarily to the same places from whence they had come 🙂 Hopefully, next week (sometime) will be the charm... [...]

Giocoso Changes Afoot...

Posted on 27th November 20241st December 2024 by hjr

Note: I've updated this post since originally written. The next release of Giocoso was due to be 3.13. I've subsequently decided to make it 3.20. I've therefore mentioned that version number in the update.

Giocoso Version 3.20 promises to be a really big version bump (so big, in fact, that I was thinking of calling it Version 4.0, but ultimately decided against it). It is currently scheduled for release in mid-December (after I've dog-fooded it for another few weeks). For anyone interested, the list of changes that are in the pipeline for the next release of Giocoso is visible in the program's changelog. [...]

Happy Benjamin Britten Day ...in advance!

Posted on 21st November 2024 by hjr

It being the 22nd November tomorrow, I would usually spend all day listening to nothing but the music of Benjamin Britten, who was born on that day in 1913. It's something of an annual tradition in these parts, faithfully observed since at least 2007.

Unfortunately, family matters have intervened this year and instead of sitting down and enjoying the delights of Paul Bunyan, Peter Grimes or the Cello Symphony, I shall instead be driving towards the nearest airport and picking up a relative for a couple of days of home cooking and more alcohol than is probably good for you. Which isn't, of course, unfortunate in the least ...but does rather mean Britten has, for once, to go on the back-burner this year. No doubt I will squeeze in as much of his music as I can next week. And there is always December 4th, for example, which is the anniversary of his death. [...]

Behold! I tell you a mystery... Adventures with ffmpeg

Posted on 20th November 2024 by hjr

The tool which my Giocoso classical music player uses to actually produce audio output is called ffmpeg, a command line audio and video de-coder and player. It is something of a truism to say that it is an absolute nightmare to use! It's command structure is truly ghastly, with a typical example looking like this:

ffmpeg -i example.mp4 -i LM_logo.png -filter_complex "[1:v] scale=150:-1 [ol], [0:v] [ol] overlay=W-w-10:H-h-10" -codec:a copy example_marked.mp4 [...]

Giocoso Version 3.12 Released

Posted on 11th November 202411th November 2024 by hjr

Today, I've released Giocoso Version 3.12. It is a major release, with full details available in the Changelog, as usual.

The most significant changes have occurred with Mgiocoso, the subsidiary 'control panel' application that is used to pause/resume/terminate/etc other Giocoso sessions. It's had a complete makeover as far as aesthetics and functionality goes. [...]

New PC, New Semplice Bug, New Semplice Version!

Posted on 1st November 20241st November 2024 by hjr

Three days ago, I treated myself to a new PC (a Beelink SER 5, using an AMD Ryzen CPU that's a lot more modern than the 2017-vintage i7 I was using before). I took the opportunity to install a fresh copy of EndeavourOS, an Arch derivative that I've used before and which tends to ship with a lot more up-to-date software than my previous distro, Debian 12. It's all working extremely well and is pretty much silent, which is essential given its location within my music listening room (though I do need to get a quieter keyboard: a previous choice for a mechanical keyboard with Cherry Blue switches means mine currently sounds like a thousand typists are at work!)

Anyway, the point is that everything I need to work worked well ...until I tried to tag up a new CD rip using my own Semplice program. The tagging bit itself was fine, but trying to embed album art within the FLACs produced this weird error: [...]

A note on Dave Hurwitz and ClassicsToday.Com

Posted on 24th October 202426th October 2024 by hjr

Dave Hurwitz is, as he repeatedly tells us, the "Executive Editor of ClassicsToday.com". Classicstoday is an excellent classical music resource (and I'll refer to it hereafter as ct.com) and is worth your time to investigate their reviews and critiques. Unfortunately, a lot of their content is behind a paywall: meaning, sign up with credit card details and the like, to reveal all. I have no problem with the 'pay to view' proposition ...but it behoves a site that takes your money and your credit card details to demonstrate that they care about security and preservation of personally identifiable information -and ct.com does none of those things.

You can assess a website's security standards in a number of ways. Me: I check the Mozilla Observatory and SecurityHeaders. [...]

Semplice Version 2.06 Released

Posted on 24th October 2024 by hjr

I've just released Semplice Version 2.06 into the wild, a few days earlier than planned, due to social commitments at the beginning of November. I've been using it in earnest for about 10 days, however, and therefore think it's ready for a production release! It is a relatively significant release.

The details are available in the Changelog, but the short version is that Semplice can (a) now guess far more tags for you, if it's launched within a folder that is named according to this site's "axioms of classical tagging". In fact, the only things that can't now be guessed are the composer's name and the distinguishing artist's first name; and (2) obliterate all track-specific tags in one hit, which is useful when they're all full of garbage and the one-track-at-a-time Ctrl+U trick isn't looking terribly efficient. [...]

Using Giocoso Remotely

Posted on 23rd October 202423rd October 2024 by hjr

A short note to mention that I just recently published an article about how I run Giocoso non-locally. That is, if I'm sat on my desktop PC in one corner of my listening room, how do I get Giocoso running on a completely different PC in another corner of that room?

To networking old-timers, the answer isn't terribly surprising (over SSH!), but even to them, the business of creating nice shortcuts on your desktop to initiate remote execution of Giocoso may be of interest; especially when doing that last bit involves completely different techniques, depending on your choice of desktop environment! [...]

Giocoso Version 3.11 Released

Posted on 20th October 202420th October 2024 by hjr

As promised last time, a new version of Giocoso has just been released, bringing its version number up to 3.11.

It's a relatively significant update, especially as it introduces a new configuration parameter which may not be set to the value you'd prefer. Specifically, a parameter called 'Automatically launch Mgiocoso Control Panel' has been added and it defaults to a 'yes' value. It means that by launching Giocoso, you'll also trigger the automatic launch of the standalone mgiocoso controller window. If you'd prefer that not to happen, you need to use the Administration menu, Option 3 to edit your configuration file. Find the page for 'Parameters requiring yes/no answers' and look to the bottom of the page: [...]

Developments...

Posted on 12th October 202412th October 2024 by hjr

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. [...]