hjr – Page 13 – Absolutely Baching

Colour Perception and Sorting

Posted on 13th March 202112th March 2021 by hjr

This is yet another story about AMP (my ever-evolving music player) being updated. This one, however, has a subtle twist that most of you probably won't care about, let alone make use of.

It's all to do with colour. In all my software, I try to use just four colours in a consistent way: (1) Terminal Default Foreground; (2) Bright Red; (3) Bright Yellow; and (4) Bright Blue. The terminal default will depend on what colour scheme you've configured your terminal to use. Commonly, as in the screenshot on the left, it's bright green for me and my desktops. It's used to display fairly 'static informational' text: things like the program name, the data labels and so on. Bright Red is used to display error or out-of-condition messages or alerts to program behaviours. Bright yellow is used to display user-input or fairly static information derived from user input (such as the folder path/name from which you're currently playing music). Finally, Bright Blue is used to display fairly dynamic text derived from user input (the name of the database you're using, for example, or any override switches you've specified that affects what music will be selected for play). I may not always be entirely consistent with the way I use my colours, but that's the general scheme I try to use and stick to, anyway! [...]

Cute Cat

Posted on 10th March 2021 by hjr

For no particular reason, other than wanting to post something that didn't involve a new update to some software script or other, I would like to take this opportunity to share with you all the latest picture of Harper, my cat. He was a rescue cat -though the pound wouldn't tell us why and what he was rescued from. He did have an aversion to feet for a long time, though, so we figured he might have been the victim of some injudicious kicks in his time. I called him Harper because of the lines in 'To Kill a Mockingbird': "Remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird. Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy…but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird." It's a sin to kick a cat, too.

Anyway, he wouldn't have anything to do with me for the first year he was at home (in Australia). Literally: he wouldn't come to me for anything, wouldn't jump on my lap, nothing. A no-contact order was clearly in place. [...]

Tweaks and Twiddles

Posted on 9th March 20219th March 2021 by hjr

Another round of software tweaks and twiddles -mostly minor, some a little more significant.

First, AMP has been bumped a couple of notches to 1.16. It's mostly to do with a few colour tweaks, but also an annoying bug dealing with distros that don't have the 'bc' utility installed by default. Those should all now work fine (so that's OpenSuse, Endeavour OS, Debian, Arch and Raspbian). [...]

SACD ISO: Knifing a Fork!

Posted on 7th March 20219th March 2021 by hjr

The world of open source software can sometimes be confusing, because if someone likes your code, they can take it and 'fork' it -that is, essentially, copy it and declare it to be a new piece of software altogether. As a mere user, it can then be difficult to know if you're supposed to use the original, or the copy (which, potentially, might be better than the original).

This is precisely what has happened to me and the utility needed to unpack/convert SACD ISO music files. [...]

Roller-coaster Ride

Posted on 5th March 20216th March 2021 by hjr

Today has been fun, in an up-and-down and terrifying sort of way!

First the good news: I finally managed to build a pure Arch-based virtual machine with no slip-ups, mistakes or catastrophes. Installing Arch is never for the faint-hearted and I've done it lots of times in the past... but never done it 'quite right', with always something missing or not-quite-working! I accordingly long ago gave up hope of ever achieving something that seemed stable and functional. But that run of ducks was broken today! Hurrah. (And I've written up how I did it here). [...]

Pi-faced!

Posted on 3rd March 20213rd March 2021 by hjr

A correspondent from the west coast of the USA recently got in touch to say that whilst he enjoyed using some of my music-related software, he regretted having to point out that the code didn't run properly on his Raspberry Pi running the Raspbian Linux distro ...but that he'd hacked a way to get it to work anyway.

A couple of thoughts came to mind when I read that. First, the grumpy-me thought that it was no wonder that the software didn't work on Raspbian, because I go to the effort of listing the distros I've actually tested my stuff on... and Raspbian isn't listed there! [...]

New! AMP Combo Deals!

Posted on 1st March 20211st March 2021 by hjr

Today, I'm releasing another new version of AMP (this one is version 1.12) with a slightly-tweaked ability to use override switches to control the randomness of what gets played.

Specifically, version 1.09 introduced the ability to specify a --genre= OR a --composer= switch to force AMP to randomly select a work that falls into a specific genre, or that was written by a specific composer. [...]

A couple of changes...

Posted on 25th February 20218th March 2021 by hjr

You will perhaps have noticed a dramatic change to the 'look and feel' of the website: the result of getting bored with what had been the look-and-feel for nearly 2 years, I'm afraid! I've gone minimal and, I hope, more 'punchy' and easier to read in consequence.

There may be a few colour/font tweaks and twiddles in the days and weeks to come, but I think most of the disruption is done and dusted. [...]

Duration-based Plays

Posted on 23rd February 20216th March 2021 by hjr

Another week, another new version of the Absolutely Baching Music Player (AMP to its friends). We move from 1.10 to 1.11... and the new release contains two basic new features being introduced!

First, a new run-time parameter is provided called --artsize=xxx. The 'xxx' values permitted are 'small', 'medium' and 'large', with 'medium' being the default if the parameter is not supplied at all, or if it's supplied with an otherwise invalid value. [...]

Negation…

Posted on 14th February 202117th February 2021 by hjr

Another day, another new version of the AMP Player!

This one is a fairly minor release to version 1.10, bringing with it a new command line switch: --negate and some miscellaneous and fairly minor bug-fixes. [...]

Another new AMP version

Posted on 12th February 202112th February 2021 by hjr

A few days ago, I reported that I had finally re-balanced by 'plays': my top ten composers were no longer so dominant in my history of composition plays as they had once been.

I mentioned then that I had, by way of response, been able to remove my 'top ten' from the excludes.txt which prevented AMP from playing anything by those composers. I had hoped that, in response, AMP would start playing at least something of my top ten! Sadly, the maths is against them still: if there are 500 composers in a collection, then the odds of any of the top ten being picked for a random play is 1 in 50, or about 2%. I wouldn't want to bet on a horse with those odds! [...]

AMP and CCDT Updates

Posted on 9th February 20219th February 2021 by hjr

Another couple of software updates to announce.

AMP is bumped to version 1.08. The code changes are mostly minor and cosmetic and to do with displaying a count-down timer indicating when play of the currently-playing music will end. Slightly unfortunately, a side-effect of this new time display is that if you were to Ctrl+Z to pause play, the countdown timer would be wrong on playback resumption, and two pieces of music would play simultaneously when the resumed piece gets near its end. I may revisit this in the future, but for now, I've just disabled Ctrl+Z completely. If you want to pause playback, hit Ctrl+C and terminate it completely (which actually was my original design goal anyway!) [...]