Classical Music – Page 6 – Absolutely Baching

Scarlatti In Bulk

Posted on 17th March 202117th March 2021 by hjr

Thanks to another recent video by David Hurwitz, I was finally persuaded to bite the bullet and splash out on the complete Domenico Scarlatti keyboard sonatas as performed by Scott Ross (the album artwork of which appears off to the left). It's a 34-CD collection, available for purchase from Presto Classical at only around £2.50 a box, which seems reasonable value to me.

Curiously, this collection of works has previously been discussed by me in comments on this blog piece, where I was asked by 'DACO' how I would go about tagging the multiple Chopin Nocturnes or the even more multitudinous Scarlatti keyboard sonatas. I had to answer DACO in that exchange in the abstract, since I didn't at that point actually own the Scarlatti. The general principle I advanced, however, was: group lots of little pieces together in whatever way makes them accessible and attractive to play. Thus, I could speak from experience: a CD of Britten arrangements of folksongs would be ripped and catalogued as a single collection of folksongs, rather than 21 short pieces of (usually) less than 3 minutes' duration. Similarly, I had only just completed a re-rip of the complete works of Percy Grainger, where because of the quantity of music involved, and its overall great similarity, I found it more expedient to essentially rip entire CDs as 'Grainger Compilations' than try to separate out each individual composition as its own 'album'. [...]

New! AMP Combo Deals!

Posted on 1st March 20211st March 2021 by hjr

Today, I'm releasing another new version of AMP (this one is version 1.12) with a slightly-tweaked ability to use override switches to control the randomness of what gets played.

Specifically, version 1.09 introduced the ability to specify a --genre= OR a --composer= switch to force AMP to randomly select a work that falls into a specific genre, or that was written by a specific composer. [...]

Finally!

Posted on 7th February 20217th February 2021 by hjr

Hurrah!

Finally, a nearly two-year effort to re-balance my classical music listening efforts came to a conclusion. [...]

AMP - Updates

Posted on 1st February 20211st February 2021 by hjr

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

Posted on 23rd January 202123rd January 2021 by hjr

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'! [...]

Compositions-at-once!

Posted on 15th January 202115th January 2021 by hjr

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. [...]

Let's not get physical!

Posted on 10th January 202110th January 2021 by hjr

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! [...]

The Absolutely Minimal Media Player...

Posted on 30th December 202030th December 2020 by hjr

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

Posted on 27th December 20209th March 2021 by hjr

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). [...]

Overflow

Posted on 24th December 202026th December 2020 by hjr

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. [...]

It's not just Easytag... :(

Posted on 22nd December 202028th July 2022 by hjr

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! [...]

Easytag Garbage Creation

Posted on 18th December 202025th December 2020 by hjr

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... [...]