Category: Classical Music

Out of retirement!

Posted on by hjr

I have been a member of the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society for just about ten years now: this will perhaps shock some regulars who, probably, expect me to blowing the Benjamin Britten trumpet, for they famously didn't get along, though RVW was always kinder about Britten than Britten was ever able to be about RVW. But there it is: I have been a member in good standing for a decade and on two continents. I've thus long enjoyed receiving a thrice-yearly copy of their Journal in the post, the extremely high-quality society magazine-newsletter.

In a twist of fate that I certainly wasn't expecting, their long-time editor announced his pending retirement a few months ago and a call went out in the last issue of the Journal for a replacement editor... which no-one responded to. An email plea then went out to members for someone to volunteer to step up to the plate... and I therefore put up my hand, fully expecting 50 other far-more-qualified editors and RVW aficionados to do likewise and thus to never really hear from them again, except perhaps for a polite email of rejection. [...] 

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Oops...

Posted on by hjr

For reasons all to do with my incompetence, I managed to release Giocoso Version 3.30 with an installer that did not download two of the release's key new features (global resume and global notes). If you upgraded using the one-off upgrade script, no problem; but if you did a fresh install, you'd be missing files needed for full functionality.

Noticing this, I fixed the issue ...and introduced a regression that meant the installer tried to pull down files from a completely non-existent folder on this website. Meaning nothing got installed at all 🙁 Some fix. [...] 

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Happy Benjamin Britten Day ...in advance!

Posted on by hjr

It being the 22nd November tomorrow, I would usually spend all day listening to nothing but the music of Benjamin Britten, who was born on that day in 1913. It's something of an annual tradition in these parts, faithfully observed since at least 2007.

Unfortunately, family matters have intervened this year and instead of sitting down and enjoying the delights of Paul Bunyan, Peter Grimes or the Cello Symphony, I shall instead be driving towards the nearest airport and picking up a relative for a couple of days of home cooking and more alcohol than is probably good for you. Which isn't, of course, unfortunate in the least ...but does rather mean Britten has, for once, to go on the back-burner this year. No doubt I will squeeze in as much of his music as I can next week. And there is always December 4th, for example, which is the anniversary of his death. [...] 

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Behold! I tell you a mystery... Adventures with ffmpeg

Posted on by hjr

The tool which my Giocoso classical music player uses to actually produce audio output is called ffmpeg, a command line audio and video de-coder and player. It is something of a truism to say that it is an absolute nightmare to use! It's command structure is truly ghastly, with a typical example looking like this:

ffmpeg -i example.mp4 -i LM_logo.png -filter_complex "[1:v] scale=150:-1 [ol], [0:v] [ol] overlay=W-w-10:H-h-10" -codec:a copy example_marked.mp4 [...] 

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A note on Dave Hurwitz and ClassicsToday.Com

Posted on by hjr

Dave Hurwitz is, as he repeatedly tells us, the "Executive Editor of ClassicsToday.com". Classicstoday is an excellent classical music resource (and I'll refer to it hereafter as ct.com) and is worth your time to investigate their reviews and critiques. Unfortunately, a lot of their content is behind a paywall: meaning, sign up with credit card details and the like, to reveal all. I have no problem with the 'pay to view' proposition ...but it behoves a site that takes your money and your credit card details to demonstrate that they care about security and preservation of personally identifiable information -and ct.com does none of those things.

You can assess a website's security standards in a number of ways. Me: I check the Mozilla Observatory and SecurityHeaders. [...] 

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Semplice Version 2.03 Released

Posted on by hjr

It's only been a week since version 2.02 of Semplice was released, but today I've released yet-another-new version: 2.03.

The new version contains two small enhancements, which I describe in the Changelog, but which can be summarised as 'SuperFLACs get automatically cleaned when first created' and 'More information is provided when performing volume boosts on FLACs'. [...] 

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Semplice Version 2.02 Released

Posted on by hjr

I wasn't particularly aware that this was a thing, but JPGs, PNGs and other image files are constructed using particular 'colourspaces'. A colourspace is simply a way of internally representing colours. There are basically two principal means of doing this with digital artwork: use an additive colour model (where red+green gives yellow), or a subtractive colour model, where red is what you get when taking the difference between magenta and yellow. The additive model we call the RGB model (because you add red, to green, to blue to get the full gamut of possible colours). The subtractive model is called the CMYK model, because you use cyan, magenta and yellow, plus black (the 'K'!) to construct the gamut.

Generally speaking, computers and their monitors should use the RGB model, because LCDs monitors are generally natively black or dark and have individual 'lights' (LEDs) projecting shades of red, green or blue to construct complex colours on top of a dark background -so adding colours to a dark background is right up their street. Printers, on the other hand, tend to use the CMYK model, because they work with inks which are manufactured in cyan, magenta, yellow and black hues and which are laid on top of a usually pure-white background (i.e., a sheet of paper!), so printers need to start bright white and remove colours from that to construct a colour image. [...] 

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Giocoso Version 3.08 Released

Posted on by hjr

A tiny enhancement (or, possibly, a bug-fix... I can't quite decide which!) has been made to Giocoso and its version bumps to 3.08 as a result.

The fix is that during playback, Giocoso would display a tiny and mostly-inconspicuous cursor marker somewhere along the bottom-right of the program display. Now it doesn't. Details, such as they are, are in the changelog! [...] 

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Reaching the limits

Posted on by hjr

The graph at the left tells a tale! The context for that tale is that since June 3rd 2021, I've been using Giocoso to play (almost exclusively) only those recordings which have not previously been recorded as having been played, in an attempt to ensure that by the time I come to kick the bucket, I can say, hand-on-heart, that I've listened to every recording I ever bought. On the one hand, the tale is of good news: the graph shows that only 7.1% of my entire collection has not yet been played by Giocoso. So, I've played around 93% of it, which is pretty good going.

It's even better going when you consider that for much of the time since June 2021, I've had time restrictions on my plays: in other words, I've told Giocoso 'play unplayed recordings that last less than 20 minutes' or something similar. As a result, I haven't listened to Wagner's Ring cycle with Giocoso, but I know for certain I've played those recordings multiple, multiple times in the years before 2021. Which is to say: even the 7.1% I haven't 'officially' played contains substantial chunks of recorded music which I know I've played using different tools... so the amount of my collection which is truly unplayed is significantly less than 7%. [...] 

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Work in Progress: Semplice Version 2

Posted on by hjr

It's finally time to mention what I've been up to for the past couple of months: re-writing Semplice, my digital music file manager. It's the tool that lets you tag your FLACs, volume boost them, merge them into 'SuperFLACs' (and split them back out into per-track FLACs if you prefer), convert them into MP3s or most other audio formats, analyse them to make sure they're really high resolution FLACs, and much more besides.

To be honest, I didn't think there was a lot wrong with the original version of Semplice (currently sitting at version 1.02). There wasn't a huge amount of functionality that was missing, in other words: it was more that the user interface was a bit klunky and old-fashioned, particularly in light of the user interface advances I'd implemented when developing Giocoso Version 3. So, Semplice Version 2 was going to be more of a user interface refresh than anything else... but, as I suspected it would, mission creep has resulted in a few additions to Semplice functionality that it turns out I'm rather fond of! [...] 

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