♬♪ A Voyage Around My Ears ♬♪
In my last post, I pointed out the shenanigans that ensue when you use Easytag to update the metadata associated with your FLAC music files. Specifically, I demonstrated how Easytag will silently, and without the opportunity to configure the behaviour, change the name of a tag from COMMENT to DESCRIPTION.
When you then go on to use software which expects a tag to be called COMMENT, this causes problems! [...]
I had been subsconsciously aware of a problem for quite a while, but had paid it no real attention: whenever I looked, a lot of my music files seemed to lack proper performer details! The tracks played fine and everything else about them seemed OK, but just no 'conducted by, orchestra playing is, soprano singing is...' stuff. I'd noticed it, in a casual sort of way, from time to time... but because you can live without knowing that particular information at your fingertips, I mostly just did.
I had also vaguely registered (erroneously, as it turns out!) that the problem was with a lot of music I remember buying in the 1990s and ripping in the early 2000s, so I put it down to sloppy tagging habits, waaay back before I knew any better. But it wasn't and isn't. It is a tale of software shenanigans and garbage programming that really kind of ticks me off, to be frank. So, first: let me show you the problem... [...]
In order to get media around the house, to various rooms and devices, on an as-needed basis, I've deployed various mechanisms in my time -including such things as DLNA servers and other various forms of home-brew wonderment.
A couple of years back, I lighted on Plex Media Server, which is a really very capable music- and video-streaming programme with a reasonable media management library attached. It is open-source and thus entirely free of charge, but there are some "value-add" options available which are only available if you shell out for a 'Plex Pass'. That's quite expensive: it's listed on the page I've just linked to at £4 per month or £95 for a "lifetime" pass (I put the quotes around 'lifetime' only because I don't honestly know how long these open source projects will last before egos and desire for profit make the thing pass like ships in the night!). [...]
Before I accidentally wiped the web server that runs this site, I had been blogging about the problem of SACDs and the fact that they are often mastered with absolute peak volumes set to about 6dB quieter than they really should be (for technical reasons). I thus modified by AUAC audio converter program to automatically boost SACD rips by whatever it took to get the loudest track on a CD to be as loud as it could reasonably go without becoming distorted.
Which is fine for SACDs... but there are times you think to yourself (especially with some recordings on really old CDs) that the volume levels on even ordinary CDs aren't entirely what they should be. Whilst incorporating a volume boost into an SACD extraction tool is a good idea, a standalone volume boosting utility sounded like it might be quite useful, too! [...]
Visitors to the website over the past ~12 hours or so will have noticed... errors. Lots of errors!
My apologies. [...]
If you've been reading the last few posts hereabouts, you'll know that I've recently updated most of my audio-processing scripts. The AbsolutelyBaching Universal Audio Converter (AUAC) in particular received a significant new piece of functionality: when extracting high-res audio from an SACD ISO, it will now boost the resulting FLAC files' audio volume by 6dB (6 decibels).
This was done because I had noticed that SACD extractions usually had much quieter audio than the same music mastered onto ordinary CD -and, asking around, I discovered that for assorted, obscure technical reasons, the music industry records SACDs at -6dB, to prevent distortion. So the quietness is built in. The recent AUAC update therefore built it back out again, by increasing the volume by the same amount the industry reduces it to prevent audio artefacts getting encoded into the signal. This is a safe thing to do, since we're no longer mastering and recording the audio, and thus at risk of creating artefacts. We're just, essentially, turning up the volume knob after all the processing and mastering has long since been completed. [...]
Since all my other software scripts have recently gotten a bit of a re-work, I thought I should probably re-visit the program I use most often myself: the AbsolutelyBaching Universal Audio Converter, or AUAC for short.
For the uninitiated, AUAC is a shell script which provides the convenient ability to convert almost any audio file format into practically any other. Thus auac -i=ape -o=flac will convert a bunch of Monkeys Audio files into FLAC ones. [...]
To accompany the updates to all my other audio-related scripts which have been published of late, the Classical CD Ripper has also now been updated. As with all the other software updates of late, the changes are in three basic categories: cosmetic, distro-awareness and year-in-album functionality.
The cosmetic changes are just to add a little colour to the various prompts and warning messages, so that you can tell the difference more easily between questions the software asks (white text) and the answers you type (yellow). Errors or other unusual conditions will now display in red. Not all terminals will display the colours, but they won't garble their displays if they can't handle the colours either. [...]
Another short note to let you know that the Absolutelybaching Flac Checker (AFC to its friends) has been updated to version 2.02.
As with the recent update to CCDT, the changes are cosmetic for the most part, but also contain a significant piece of new functionality. [...]
Today would have been Benjamin Britten's 107th birthday.
His music was the first 'serious' music I ever encountered, thanks to Mr. Harold Vafeas and the Senior School Choir he directed that sang "proper" music like Vivaldi, Orff ...and Britten. I hated the music Harold made us sing of Britten's. Absolutely hated it! It was difficult, complex and... "modern", at least to my ears. But if you practice a single piece for a term or more at a time, as we did, it gets under your skin, and by the time we came to give a public performance of Rejoice in the Lamb, I adored the piece. [...]
Just a short note to say that the Classical CD Tagger has been updated to version 2.12.
There were a few code tidy-ups. For example, the utility now puts up proper 'you need to install...' error messages if it detects that certain software prerequisites are not already installed: [...]
That screenshot left of this text contains the answer to an obscure-looking Linux command's query: when did the file system on my /dev/sdc1 disk partition get created?
The answer is November 23rd, 2019. [...]