Software – Absolutely Baching

Giocoso Changes Afoot...

Posted on 27th November 20241st December 2024 by hjr

Note: I've updated this post since originally written. The next release of Giocoso was due to be 3.13. I've subsequently decided to make it 3.20. I've therefore mentioned that version number in the update.

Giocoso Version 3.20 promises to be a really big version bump (so big, in fact, that I was thinking of calling it Version 4.0, but ultimately decided against it). It is currently scheduled for release in mid-December (after I've dog-fooded it for another few weeks). For anyone interested, the list of changes that are in the pipeline for the next release of Giocoso is visible in the program's changelog. [...]

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

Posted on 20th November 2024 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 [...]

Giocoso Version 3.12 Released

Posted on 11th November 202411th November 2024 by hjr

Today, I've released Giocoso Version 3.12. It is a major release, with full details available in the Changelog, as usual.

The most significant changes have occurred with Mgiocoso, the subsidiary 'control panel' application that is used to pause/resume/terminate/etc other Giocoso sessions. It's had a complete makeover as far as aesthetics and functionality goes. [...]

New PC, New Semplice Bug, New Semplice Version!

Posted on 1st November 20241st November 2024 by hjr

Three days ago, I treated myself to a new PC (a Beelink SER 5, using an AMD Ryzen CPU that's a lot more modern than the 2017-vintage i7 I was using before). I took the opportunity to install a fresh copy of EndeavourOS, an Arch derivative that I've used before and which tends to ship with a lot more up-to-date software than my previous distro, Debian 12. It's all working extremely well and is pretty much silent, which is essential given its location within my music listening room (though I do need to get a quieter keyboard: a previous choice for a mechanical keyboard with Cherry Blue switches means mine currently sounds like a thousand typists are at work!)

Anyway, the point is that everything I need to work worked well ...until I tried to tag up a new CD rip using my own Semplice program. The tagging bit itself was fine, but trying to embed album art within the FLACs produced this weird error: [...]

Semplice Version 2.06 Released

Posted on 24th October 2024 by hjr

I've just released Semplice Version 2.06 into the wild, a few days earlier than planned, due to social commitments at the beginning of November. I've been using it in earnest for about 10 days, however, and therefore think it's ready for a production release! It is a relatively significant release.

The details are available in the Changelog, but the short version is that Semplice can (a) now guess far more tags for you, if it's launched within a folder that is named according to this site's "axioms of classical tagging". In fact, the only things that can't now be guessed are the composer's name and the distinguishing artist's first name; and (2) obliterate all track-specific tags in one hit, which is useful when they're all full of garbage and the one-track-at-a-time Ctrl+U trick isn't looking terribly efficient. [...]

Using Giocoso Remotely

Posted on 23rd October 202423rd October 2024 by hjr

A short note to mention that I just recently published an article about how I run Giocoso non-locally. That is, if I'm sat on my desktop PC in one corner of my listening room, how do I get Giocoso running on a completely different PC in another corner of that room?

To networking old-timers, the answer isn't terribly surprising (over SSH!), but even to them, the business of creating nice shortcuts on your desktop to initiate remote execution of Giocoso may be of interest; especially when doing that last bit involves completely different techniques, depending on your choice of desktop environment! [...]

Giocoso Version 3.11 Released

Posted on 20th October 202420th October 2024 by hjr

As promised last time, a new version of Giocoso has just been released, bringing its version number up to 3.11.

It's a relatively significant update, especially as it introduces a new configuration parameter which may not be set to the value you'd prefer. Specifically, a parameter called 'Automatically launch Mgiocoso Control Panel' has been added and it defaults to a 'yes' value. It means that by launching Giocoso, you'll also trigger the automatic launch of the standalone mgiocoso controller window. If you'd prefer that not to happen, you need to use the Administration menu, Option 3 to edit your configuration file. Find the page for 'Parameters requiring yes/no answers' and look to the bottom of the page: [...]

Developments...

Posted on 12th October 202412th October 2024 by hjr

A bunch of small developments to announce this time.

Firstly, the installer scripts for all my music management/playing programs have been updated so that they set the terminal's background colour to black (with yellow text) regardless of the configured colour scheme your terminal might be using: this helps the installer's text messages display correctly, no matter what your usual terminal colour choices might be. If you're not re-installing any of the programs, you won't see this change and it will have no significance for you, but it is worth mentioning as it was another good suggestion from Scott. An additional change to the installers is that they now all check for the pre-existence of ncurses. Most Linux distros have this installed by default anyway, but Niente now checks that it exists and if it doesn't, will warn you and quit. It won't install it for you, but merely tell you to install it yourself, using your distro's standard package management capabilities. [...]

Niente Version 4.0 Released

Posted on 10th September 202410th September 2024 by hjr

Today, at last, I'm finally releasing Version 4.0 of the Niente FLAC checking program. I've been using it daily for around 2 months now, so I reckon most of its quirks and foibles (and bugs!) have been ironed out by now!

Niente performs physical and logical integrity checks on your FLAC collection, without ever modifying the FLACs themselves. Physically, it makes sure that the music contents of your FLACs hasn't changed over time (due to silent corruption or 'bit rot'). Logically, it takes this website's axioms on how classical music ought to be tagged and checks whether your FLAC tags match the axiomatic requirements. For example, it will check that, if you've said 'Karajan' is the distinguishing artist on a recording, that the name 'Karajan' also appears in the COMMENT tag for the FLACs associated with that recording. It can also do checks to ensure you've embedded nicely-sized album art in each of your FLACs, or whether all your FLACs are at their maximum-possible non-distorting volume. [...]

A Problem of Dates in Giocoso - Fixed

Posted on 29th August 202429th August 2024 by hjr

As I discussed in the last post here, Giocoso can be affected by the problem of 'fake, duplicate play completions' being inserted into its PLAYS table one second later than the real completion of a play is recorded.

I promised a fix: today is therefore the release day for Giocoso Version 3.09. The new version adds a trigger to the PLAYS table that prevents such fake duplicate plays being created in the future. The fix does not go back and eliminate any existing fake duplicates, since that would involve automatically deleting data from PLAYS, and that sort of thing is very tricky to get 100% right and thus not endanger good data. [...]

A Problem of Dates in Giocoso

Posted on 27th August 202429th August 2024 by hjr

I was viewing my music play history this morning and noticed this:

That seems to be indicating that a recording which lasts for 14 minutes completed two plays at precisely 7.08pm on the evening of 26th August. That physically makes no sense, of course! So, I checked the database within which Giocoso stores its play history: [...]

Semplice Version 2.01 Released

Posted on 14th July 202415th July 2024 by hjr

As previously promised, an upgrade release of Semplice Version 2 has now been made available. It fixes the issue whereby several distros now appear to be shipping Version 7 of ImageMagick (the image manipulation program) rather than the Version 6 that was being shipped on all distros when Semplice Version 2 first shipped. If you try issuing Version 6 commands when you have Version 7 of ImageMagick installed, you get ugly warnings about 'convert is deprecated in IM7'.

Since it's not entirely clear to me which distros have decided to run with ImageMagick 7 and which have chosen to stick with ImageMagick 6, I've had to add code to Semplice which works out what version is installed and then use the appropriate image editing commands accordingly. [...]