Classical Music – Page 4 – Absolutely Baching

A word about Emby

Posted on 29th January 202229th January 2022 by hjr

Sometimes, it takes someone asking a question to make you realise you've been doing something dumb for quite a long time! This post will tell the story of one such question, realisation and (most importantly) the fix! So, my thanks to Jeff in advance for having asked the question that made me realise I've been doing Emby wrong all these years!

But first, of course, I have to explain what 'Emby' is! Well, it's a mostly-free, but not open source, media server. You install it on a spare computer and it catalogues whatever media files you point it at. They can be music, photographs or videos -so Emby can manage a collection of movies or photo albums as well as a large classical music collection. By the power of networking, this Emby server makes the assorted media it knows about available to any other device that you can point at it. These Emby clients can be nothing more complex than a web browser, but they can also be dedicated apps, available for all sorts of operating systems and devices. To put it as simply as I can, then, Emby lets my carefully-curated music collection be accessed from a phone in a car; or from a laptop in a Polish hotel when I'm on holiday; or from a new Android tablet I might be using when score-reading in the garden. [...]

Putting it simply...

Posted on 27th January 202225th February 2022 by hjr

A reader recently got in touch to ask about my Axioms of Classical Tagging article, giving me the strong impression that my article makes it all sound too hard to tag things correctly... and I think he may have been right on that score! So I thought I'd simplify that article here, reducing its long, discursive justification of things to a few simple principles. If you want to understand why things should be as I'm about to spell it out, read the full article. For a short-cut guide to tagging correctly, however... read on!

There are just three basic principles to grasp from the outset, namely: [...]

Autopilot Scores

Posted on 21st January 202221st January 2022 by hjr

An autopilot, says Wikipedia, is a system used to control the path of an aircraft, car, marine craft or spacecraft without requiring constant manual control by a human operator. Autopilots do not replace human operators. Instead, the autopilot assists the operator's control of the vehicle, allowing the operator to focus on broader aspects of operations (for example, monitoring the trajectory, weather and on-board systems).

In that spirit, I've long wanted to produce 'autopilot full scores': that is, full scores of orchestral or choral works which have controls that allow swift and accurate navigation by the reader through the score, without requiring constant manual (and maniacal) page-turning whenever a repeat or a jump is called for. They won't replace the reader's intervention completely, but they should be able to let the reader focus on more important things than mere score navigation -like, the spectacular nature of the orchestration being employed by the composer or the economy with which the composer achieves a particular effect or other. [...]

"Automated" Music Score Navigation

Posted on 14th January 202219th January 2022 by hjr

In a mad fit of recent birthday spending, I decided to shell out rather more than I'd intended on a new Android tablet -the one you can see at the left. It's a "Chuwi HiPad Plus", which isn't a name you're likely to find tripping off the lips of many any time soon, I think! It is, however, readily available from Amazon UK.

The reason for the purchase? Well: I like listening to my music whilst following along with a full score. I have a bookcase full of such orchestral and operatic scores, and I find that seeing the music as you listen to it very helpful for drawing your attention to this or that nuance of orchestration. Trouble is, orchestral scores are fiendishly expensive to buy new... which is why I've long made a habit of trying to buy them second-hand when possible! Even el-cheapo second-hand scores, however, have a tendency to be very big and very heavy, and not something that's trivially easy to hold whilst listening to music in your favourite comfy chair! [...]

Cleaning PDFs

Posted on 22nd December 202123rd December 2021 by hjr

When I buy digital music from the likes of Prestoclassical, it often (though not always) comes with a digital PDF version of the booklet that would have accompanied the physical CD in its jewel case. An example of the front page of one such PDF is shown at the left, belonging to a digital download of the film music of William Alwyn I bought back in October.

The trouble with such digitised booklets, however, is that the PDF often contains data embedded within the file that is not necessarily something you want to keep. In this case, for example, if I open the purchased booklet PDF in my standard PDF viewer (on Kubuntu, that's Okular) and select File -> Properties, I see this: [...]

Target Achieved!

Posted on 3rd December 2021 by hjr

Back on 5th November, I wrote about how I was steadily listening to more and more of my previously-unplayed (in Giocoso, at least!) recordings. With some graphing and a line or two of best-fit, I predicted I might get to the 50%-unplayed mark by about "December 3rd or 4th" -though with some uncertainties around Benjamin Britten Day and the ever-constant acquisition of new recordings, maybe causing that date to blow out a bit.

Well, the graph at the left tells you the original prediction was fairly accurate after all: the 50% unplayed/50% played mark was finally achieved late on November 30th. [...]

Happy Benjamin Britten Day!

Posted on 22nd November 20214th December 2021 by hjr

The thumbnail at the left will tell those in the know where I have spent the past day: it's the beach at Aldeburgh, in Suffolk. It was the home of Benjamin Britten and his partner Peter Pears for about 20 years from the late 1950s on.

The reason for the visit now? Well, today is 22nd November, which is St. Cecilia's Day (Cecilia being the Patron Saint of Music). It also happens to be Benjamin Britten's birthday! Coincidence? I think not!! [...]

Where we're at...

Posted on 5th November 20211st December 2021 by hjr

I thought maybe a 'year in review' as regards to listening to music might be in order. It has been almost a year since I wrote and started using the 'Absolutely Baching Music Player' or AMP, beginning on January 9th 2021. On June 1st, AMP was superseded by Giocoso. But, using one or the other, I've been playing my music in more-or-less randomised form for the best part of a year.

I say 'more or less', because -by means of Giocoso's run-time switches- I've been tweaking and influencing what 'random' means. For example, when I started playing things in Giocoso on 1st June, it turned out that some 87% of my music collection was listed as having not been played in either player. That is, AMP or Giocoso between them only had records of having played a mere 13% of my music collection. [...]

A Musical Guessing Game?

Posted on 20th September 202120th September 2021 by hjr

I don't know about you, but if I tune into the radio randomly as a piece of classical music is playing, I then like to test myself and see if I can guess the composer of the piece before the announcer returns to give away the crucial information. I'll maybe even try guessing the name of the piece, if I'm feeling particularly confident. Once or twice, I've even gone for a guess as to who the conductor or soloist might be: those ones usually don't pan out so well, but I'm pretty good with composers and not so bad at the piece-names.

Anyway: I've been using Giocoso since June 2021 (and AMP for six months before that) to play all my classical music and thus have built up a 'listening history' of some 6000+ recordings in just over 9 months, as you can see from the bottom of my 'all time graphs' listening history page. And since Giocoso says I've listened to all those pieces of music, I ought to be able to recognise them when I hear selections from them again, right? [...]

Another Giocoso Update

Posted on 10th August 2021 by hjr

Just when I thought I'd got away with not having to do lots of updates to Giocoso, I found another bug in the Stats report. This time, it's a really silly one, based on a flawed piece of selection logic in the program's code.

The short version is: the Stats report was computing the number of things that have yet to be played by looking for composition names known to exist, but which haven't yet been recorded as played. That *almost* works (because we're talking about the 'extended composition name', which therefore includes the actual composition name, plus the 'significant artist' making the recording, plus the year of recording... so that combo is fairly unique). But it's not perfect, under edge cases I won't bore you with. [...]

Giocoso - A New Randomising FLAC Player

Posted on 15th July 202126th July 2021 by hjr

Today, I'm announcing the initial release of Giocoso, the randomising FLAC player for Linux, which is a replacement for my old AMP program. Giocoso is built on much the same code-base as AMP, but with quite a few changes. The most significant differences between Giocoso and AMP are, probably:

AMP scrobbled by default and had to be told not to; Giocoso does not scrobble by default, and has to be told to do so if it's required.
AMP scrobbling required the installation and running of a separate 'amp-scrobbler' script. Giocoso uses no external functionality to scrobble: it's all built-in to the main program.
AMP had acquired a bunch of 'statistical overrides' (such as --levelup, --xlevelup and --xxlevelup); those are now gone from Giocoso.
AMP could only apply --minduration and --maxduration filters after selecting something to play. This could result in a significant pause before stumbling across something randomly selected that happened to have the correct duration. Giocoso now knows the durations of pieces from the get-go, so duration-based selections are done successfully within fractions of a second.
AMP only displayed album art; when Giocoso displays album art, it adds a 'caption' to it, with its text derived from the ALBUM tag of the music being played: the album art can therefore now visually provide you with all information about what, precisely, is being played.

There are lots of other differences, detailed in Appendix A of Giocoso's User Manual, which is available for download on Giocoso's new product page. [...]

Record Companies need to lift their game

Posted on 26th May 202127th May 2021 by hjr

I bought a digital download of the Naxos CD you see at the left the other week.

As with most downloads I purchase these days, the music files I bought came pre-tagged with all sorts of pieces of metadata. Which is kind of the record companies, I guess -in this case, Naxos. [...]