Author: hjr

Artists' Artistry

Posted on by hjr

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!). [...] 

Continue Reading

Turning up the volume...

Posted on by hjr

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! [...] 

Continue Reading

Another AUAC Update - Volume Matters!

Posted on by hjr

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. [...] 

Continue Reading

Universal Audio Converter - Updated

Posted on by hjr

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. [...] 

Continue Reading

Classical CD Ripper - Updated

Posted on by hjr

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. [...] 

Continue Reading

Happy Birthday, Benjamin Britten!

Posted on by hjr

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. [...] 

Continue Reading

Fixing Mistakes #3: Fixing the ALBUM tag

Posted on by hjr

This is the last in my series of three posts explaining what I've done to fix up a silly cataloguing error in my extensive music library. The problem was first described back here. But to recap: whilst I have always "allowed" the inclusion of a recording year in the ALBUM tag where it was necessary (to distinguish, for example, between Boult's 1959 and 1968 recordings of Vaughan Williams' 9th symphony), I only added the recording date rarely, and as an exception to the norm. Rethinking the logic of what counts as recorded music's primary key, however, I realised that the recording date should always and without exception be included in a recording's ALBUM tag.

So, the past few posts have been about the scripts I wrote to (a) check every recording had a recording year stored in its YEAR tag; (b) to check that those recordings that had a date included in their ALBUM tag matched there what their YEAR tag said should apply as the recording date. [...] 

Continue Reading

Fixing Mistakes #2: Checking the ALBUM tag

Posted on by hjr

So, this is the next in a mini-series of posts, explaining how I went about fixing up the discovery that I'd tagged my music files incorrectly after all these years, despite knowing better!

The short version is that I always knew the recording date was an important factor in distinguishing between recordings of the same work by the same artist, but since I didn't often have duplicates, I assumed I'd get away without including it in the ALBUM tag for a composition. And then I realised that though I might well get away with it today, a new acquisition here or there could well mean that I wouldn't get away with it for ever: if the information is theoretically necessary to distinguish recordings, then it ought to be present, always. [...] 

Continue Reading