♬♪ A Voyage Around My Ears ♬♪
Just a short note to say that the Classical CD Tagger has been updated to version 2.12.
There were a few code tidy-ups. For example, the utility now puts up proper 'you need to install...' error messages if it detects that certain software prerequisites are not already installed: [...]
That screenshot left of this text contains the answer to an obscure-looking Linux command's query: when did the file system on my /dev/sdc1 disk partition get created?
The answer is November 23rd, 2019. [...]
The Classical CD Ripper (CCDR) has been updated and a new version (Version 3.0, for anyone keeping count!) is now available for download. Upgrading consists of merely deleting your existing copy of the shell script, downloading the new one in its place, and remembering to make it executable (chmod +x ccdr.sh).
The changes from the previous version are extensive. Out goes all the coloured text and other attempts to prettify its output: it's a text-based application, so deal with it! [...]
This blog post's title is a bit of a stretch! For starters, I almost exclusively use FLAC audio files for my primary music store, so my need to be able to handle other audio formats is not exactly great. Still less do I need to handle so many different audio formats that you could describe a tool that handles them all as truly 'universal'!
But I do have need to create MP3 copies of my FLAC music files -because I upload them to OneDrive and am able to play them from there on my phone. If I'm listening to music on my phone, it means I am visiting family, staying in a hotel, at an airport or on a train: so the loss of audio 'fidelity' inherent in the transition from lossless FLAC to lossy MP3 is tolerable. Those environments are not suitable for audiophile ears at the best of times! [...]
Never mess with old code and expect the results to be perfect!
The recent spate of software updating I posted about last time resulted in an "improvement" in the CCDT code that handles making file names "NTFS-safe". The improvement turned out to alter file names after they had been selected for tagging, but before they were actually tagged, meaning that when it came time to modify the tags associated with an audio file, the modifications were written to a file that no longer existed. Result: failed modifications! 🙁 [...]
As we are all now experiencing 'lockdown woes', I decided I had time enough on my hands for it to be worthwhile for me to look again at my various bits of music management software. The Classical CD Ripper and Tagger scripts accordingly got a work-over: little tweaks to make each program work slightly more in ways that suit me than not! I use the Tagger program on a daily basis, so it's important to me that it works efficiently, which I think it now does 🙂
I then tackled the Flac Checker script, which hadn't been modified since October 2019. It has been in daily use since then, but the output was messy and that made it harder to spot corruption happening to my collection of digital music files than it should have been. I have accordingly re-worked the program so extensively that it's now up to version 2.0. I am confident that I've improved the logging sufficiently that any corruption detected will be extremely obvious and easy to locate. [...]
I am old enough to remember that my first experiences of listening to serious music on serious equipment involved visits to my brother-in-law and borrowing his component hifi for the afternoon!
I "progressed" from that to, in the late eighties, listening on my very own 'integrated' hifi (which, given my income levels at the time, was pushing the term 'hifi' to its limits, I now realise!) [...]