Finally!
Hurrah!
Finally, a nearly two-year effort to re-balance my classical music listening efforts came to a conclusion. [...]
Author: hjr
AMP - Updates
I last wrote about changes and updates to AMP (the Absolutely Baching Music Player), way back on January 10th.
I thought the start of a new month would be a good idea to catch up on them, particularly as the pace of AMP development is slowing down and the thing appears to have just about reached a final form I can live with! [...]
AMP Doing Its Job
It's been a little over a fortnight since I modified my AMP player to work with a database -and, when it does so, to record every 'play' it decides on in a database table of its own.
So now, 15 days later, I can analyze that 'plays' table to determine if AMP has been doing the job I designed it for: picking a wide variety of composers and music genres, at random, and thus not creating any 'favourites'! [...]
CAO - Updated Already
Well, that didn't take long!
First, I discovered rather late in the day that a cue sheet describing a large 'super-FLAC' audio file cannot, by technical design, list more than 99 files. So, if you've got more than 99 FLAC-tracks that you want to combine into a single super-FLAC then, you can't, because the cue sheet cannot contain enough entries to describe it all. [...]
Compositions-at-once!
I've been having an interesting discussion of late, over on the Talk Classical forums.
It began life as someone saying they still preferred to use physical media for their classical music listening pleasure rather than any of the streaming, YouTube or similar 'consume-but-don't-own' musical options available these days. [...]
AUAC Bug Fixes
I have bumped the Absolutely Baching Universal Audio Converter script up to version 2.0 (from 1.13). The changes are minor and mostly cosmetic, but there are some bug fixes applied too, so the upgrade is recommended. Upgrade by downloading the script by clicking this link. Then, assuming you downloaded it to your $HOME/Downloads folder, just issue this command:
sudo mv $HOME/Downloads/auac.sh /usr/bin/auac.sh
The full documentation has been corrected slightly, too. [...]
Let's not get physical!
I had a slight mishap with my main PC on New Years' Eve: Manjaro released a new kernel and I installed it without thinking -and, though I believe the PC rebooted fine, I couldn't actually see anything on my monitor, so whether it had or not was really kind of moot!
So, a swift rebuild later, and we're back in business -though it's not quite how I imagined I would spend my New Years' Eve! [...]
Birthday Presents
It soon being my birthday (and Christmas having just been and gone), it seemed appropriate to buy myself some presents.
The results are as you see them on the left (which you can click on, to make bigger), which encapsulates the current state of my study's approach to things audio-visual. [...]
The Absolutely Minimal Media Player...
I suppose it had to come sooner or later: since all my media manipulation is done by scripts I've written myself (and which are freely available to download for anyone capable of installing ffmpeg and one or two other packages), it seemed appropriate to consider creating a scripted, minimally-functional media player.
The Absolutely Baching Media Player (AMP, to its friends) is the result. [...]
Distinguishing Artists
In the post-pudding Christmas after-glow, I have come to the conclusion that if I am going to put the recording year into the ALBUM tag (because only by including it there do we properly and completely use recorded classical music's primary key), we might as well not fear duplicating data in another important matter: namely, the business of declaring who is the "distinguishing artist" for a recording.
It should already be common practice to have this data already present in the ALBUM tag (it's why I own Symphony No. 5 (Karajan - 1970) for example). [...]
Happy Christmas!
A Happy Christmas to all my readers.
It's been a pretty rough year, but hopefully there are happier (and healthier!) times ahead. [...]
Overflow
Once you've been collecting music for a while, you will suffer from an abundance of riches: those 15 different versions of the Beethoven symphonies; those 5 complete sets of Bach cantatas; at some point, they will all become difficult to navigate and make playing any particular recording increasingly difficult.
It is for such times that an 'overflow' library is a good idea: a separate physical storage area on disk where you move your lesser-played recordings to as you come to realise that they aren't your favourite performances any more. They're still there on disk, though: so they can be restored from the overflow folder back into the main library if you change your mind later on! Or (more pertinently), they can be played at will whether they are considered 'overflow' or not. [...]