♬♪ A Voyage Around My Ears ♬♪
I bought a digital download of the Naxos CD you see at the left the other week.
As with most downloads I purchase these days, the music files I bought came pre-tagged with all sorts of pieces of metadata. Which is kind of the record companies, I guess -in this case, Naxos. [...]
May has been a month of progress on something I made a New Year's resolution to do (but then put off for four months!): catalogue the enormous pile of ripped CD files I've built up over the past year or so. Click on the graph at the left and you'll see how I've done: I started the month with 485.1GB of music files sitting in the 'temporary' area of my hard disk (which has been pretty permanent for at least 2 years now!), in the form of 10,007 individual FLAC files. As of this afternoon, I'm down to 13.6GB and just 625 files. Most of that is a 'collected works of Messiaen' box set, which will take ages to catalogue and tag-up properly, because French is slow to type, what with all its accents (but maybe not as slow as German. And definitely way faster than Czech!)
Undertaking all this cataloguing has meant using my own CCDT tagging program, of course. As a result, I decided to make a couple of little changes to CCDT. The important one is a new run-time switch, called --namereplace. Run CCDT with that in the launching command and CCDT changes the way it handles music files that already have a track title tag. [...]
Fresh from my war with a new mini PC (which I lost, you'll recall), I remained determined to do something to upgrade my old workstation-class desktop PC. I bought it second-hand a few years ago: it's a Dell Precision T3610, which is a bit of a monster, and was originally constructed (I think) in around 2012 or 2013: its warranty says it started in February 2014 and expired in February 2017, so it's somewhere in that ball-park.
It shipped with a Xeon E5-1620 v2 CPU CPU, which was launched in the third quarter of 2013, so that also helps date the machine. That CPU has (inevitably, as far as Intel was concerned back then!) 4 cores and thus 8 threads when hyperthreading was enabled. Nothing too remarkable, but not exactly shabby, either. I think when I bought it, it came with 16GB of RAM: I soon bumped that up to 96GB. So, it's not memory constrained either! It also shipped with an Nvidia Quadro K4000, which was cutting edge at the time, but has long since been eclipsed by newer graphics cards: since I don't play games beyond Solitaire, however, I don't particularly care how out-of-date my graphics capabilities are! [...]
Yesterday was not a happy day!
At the end of April (the 23rd, to be precise), I took delivery of the small form factor PC you see at the left. It's a "Minisforum UM250" and comes with 16GB RAM, a 512GB M2-SSD hard drive and an AMD Ryzen 8-core processor. It is my first brush with an AMD Ryzen processor, which I've been keen to get my hands on for quite some time... so I was pretty excited. I was concerned at how noisy a small form factor PC might be: the thermals in such a small space are not great, and my intention was to use this as my main music-playing PC, so quietness is quite important. A review I read on Ars Technica suggested the sound levels were acceptable, so I bit, paid up, and took delivery the very next day. [...]
Yeah, I know I promised last time no more tinkering with AMP and the next release would be called version 2.
But version 1.22 is out anyway, representing a tiny, tiny, puny little bug-fix! [...]
I am aware that as new AMP feature follows new AMP feature, it can feel like a never-ending ride to who-knows-where, prompting the 'Oh God, not another one!' reaction, as well as the 'Will it never end?' one -as well as the one alluded to in the thumbnail at the right!
For the record, I think we are closing in on a feature-complete AMP that needs no major bug-fixes nor has use for substantial new pieces of functionality. [...]
A quick mention that CAO ("Composition-At-Once") has been updated to fix a mildly serious bug.
CAO turns standalone FLACs into single-file 'superFLACs' with an embedded cuesheet, so you still know within the one big file where all the separate tracks are meant to start and finish. CAO can also use that same information to split a superFLAC apart back into its constituent single-file FLACs. It's an important design requirement of CAO, in other words, that it should always be completely reversible: what it joins together, it should be able to split apart later, should the user so desire. [...]
Let's start with a warning: this is quite a long post and covers quite a lot of ground! I don't normally 'section up' my posts, but I will on this occasion, to try to make things clearer. So, this time we have:
Taking each of those in turn, therefore... [...]
The Classical CD Tagger (CCDT) has been updated today (to version 3.10)
The usual slew of bug-fixes and code optimisations are this time accompanied by a brand-new feature: auto-volume maximisation and auto-composition-at-once. [...]
I hate to keep banging on about hi-res audio formats (especially when I am not keen on them myself), but now that AUAC can do DSF as well as ISO conversions (see my last post), some interesting things have come out of the woodwork that needed tackling. It's also the case that as lockdown finally eases, this will likely draw to a close a period of time in which I obsess about software and not a lot else... so, it's probably best to get these things out of the way whilst there's not a lot else to be doing!
First off is the question of why AUAC treats SACD ISOs differently from SACD DSFs. In other words, when you say auac -i=iso, you have to specify -o=hires if you want high resolution FLAC files extracted from the source SACD ISO (otherwise you get standard resolution ones)... but, if you say auac -i=dsf, you don't (you'll get hi-res ones by default). [...]
I have just updated the Absolutely Baching Universal Audio Converter (AUAC), bumping it to version 2.06.
This release adds quite a significant new feature: DSF is now accepted as an input format. [...]
A short follow-up on the last post.
I mentioned that all my software scripts were now fully updated and capable of working with hi-res audio files... except that CAO, whilst perfectly happy merging per-track hi-res FLACs into single composition-at-once hi-res FLACs was unable to reverse the process (whereas, for standard CD-audio resolution FLACs, the processes are completely reversible in either direction). [...]