♬♪ A Voyage Around My Ears ♬♪
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'! [...]
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. [...]
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! [...]
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. [...]
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). [...]
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. [...]
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!). [...]
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. [...]
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. [...]
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. [...]
