Software – Page 3 – Absolutely Baching

Mission Accomplished!

Posted on 18th January 202421st January 2024 by hjr

My turn-of-the-year project to move this website off a vintage 2012 server running Ubuntu onto a slightly-less-vintage 2019 server running TrueNAS Core (an 'appliance' built on top of FreeBSD) is now complete. What's more, there's a backup of it running on a TrueNAS Scale server (another 'appliance' built on top of Debian), on a server I was gifted when the company I was working for in Australia in 2012 sold itself off to a rival and all the staff were made redundant. It's my oldest-ever server, I think: vintage 2010 or thereabouts, but I've specc'd it up with 2 12-thread Xeon CPUs (so, 24 threads in all) running at 2.8GHz, and with 192GB of RAM. So definitely old, but not exactly shabby -and more than capable of running the 30 or so virtual machines I need to test my software against most varieties of Linux and Windows, in addition to acting as my music, video and website backup server.

Apart from a couple of outages today as the final moves of the (very noisy!) servers into their designated loft space took place, I don't think anyone would have noticed much by way of change or disaster! In fact, 95% of the move was finished on January 1st, well before my own announced deadline. The other 5% has been getting the backup server configured properly, which took longer than I expected because I chose to upgrade the CPUs and the RAM... and then managed to buy two sticks of faulty RAM and had to wait for replacements to be shipped from Germany. [...]

End-of-Year Report

Posted on 31st December 202331st December 2023 by hjr

As 2023 draws to its close, I thought I'd trawl through my Giocoso music player's database and work out what I've spent the past twelve months doing, as far as listening to classical music goes.

The headline news is that I've played 3,007 unique recordings this year which, cumulatively, lasted for about 69 days (68.93 if you want to be accurate about it!). [...]

Bug-hunt!

Posted on 6th September 20236th September 2023 by hjr

I've reached the persnickety bug-hunting phase of Giocoso Version 3 development! This is good, because it means a release of Version 3 is not too far away. It's bad, though, because as you uncover new, obviously stupid bugs, you spend your days thinking, 'How could I be so stupid!'

A case in point was just triggered by what I thought was going to be a trivial little addition to this website: adding a 'play count' column to my music play history listing. Adding the column itself and getting it populated from my Giocoso database was indeed quite simple. What wasn't expected was this: [...]

An IT Tour

Posted on 20th August 202320th August 2023 by hjr

A recent correspondent put me in mind of the fact that, having at last settled into my new home, it was perhaps time to do a sort-of guided tour through it as far as explaining what, technologically speaking, makes my music play. I notice, for example, that just a few weeks ago I took a photo of my music 'cabinet' in which an Apple Mac Mini (vintage 2012) took pride of place as the music-producing PC. Well, that's not true these days (as regular readers will probably know, I suffer from a bad case of operating system re-installationitis, with consequent side-effects of PC moving-aroundism):

As you can see, I don't exactly do a lot of dusting! As you can also see, the Mac Mini has been replaced by my Raspberry Pi 4: though it can have a fan fitted to keep it cool, mine is housed within an aluminium case that acts as a very good passive heatsink. Temperatures are therefore seldom above 50°C, and I've accordingly not bothered to fit the fan: the Pi is completely silent in operation in consequence ...and that's a key requirement of any IT equipment that sits in my music listening room (for hopefully obvious reasons!) [...]

A minor detail...

Posted on 18th July 202318th July 2023 by hjr

I am old-school. I remember doing X server stuff in 1987. I like X Server. The ability to pipe a desktop across the ends of the Earth, courtesy of X and a bit of Ethernet never ceases to amaze me.

But X is old-hat, not just old-school and Wayland is the new kid on the block, stealing its milk money and cigarettes. [...]

Software Updates

Posted on 22nd April 2023 by hjr

Before this website goes offline for nearly a fortnight, I thought I'd better release a couple of software updates that have been in my 'pending' tray for quite a while now.

First, Giocoso is bumped from version 2.03 to 2.04. The updates are mostly minor and inconsequential -except for one 'bugfix'. All versions of Giocoso have long contacted this website to obtain a new version of the program's error/messages file, whenever it detects that the program version number doesn't match the error/messages file version number. That all works fine, when this website is up! If, however, this site is not contactable (because, say, its host managed to blow up its Hungarian webserver!) then the program sits there, apparently locked up, trying to contact the uncontactable. Eventually it gives up and resumes working as normal -but now without the ability to display any error or progress message text at all. The new version now adds in a 'ping test' before trying to fetch the new message file: if the site's not accessible for some reason, Giocoso shouldn't hang for minutes trying to reach it, and the old error messages file is retained, not wiped. [...]

Houston, we have a problem... Part 4...

Posted on 4th April 202318th July 2023 by hjr

This is the last in my series about how the new Niente Version 3.0 has revealed past cataloguing 'issues' with my music collection. In previous episodes, I've dealt with:

- - - In this one, I'm turning my attention to the problem identified in the Niente Quick Aggregate Statistics report as statistic number 11, "Missing sample rates in filenames". As you can see from this screenshot, I'm missing this data in over 14,600 files (and I've only got 17,656 in the collection, so that's most of them!): [...]

Houston, we have a problem... Part 3...

Posted on 28th March 20233rd April 2023 by hjr

Following on from my two earlier escapades in fixing up my music collection's tagging, it is time to turn my attention to my penultimate big issue:That 'Folders with multiple tracks' statistic (number 12 in the list) is something that is not officially a problem, but it annoys me nonetheless! It is counting the number of times a folder contains more than one FLAC. Now, if you rip a symphony off most classical music CDs, you probably expect to end up with four separate 'tracks', each track representing one movement of the symphony -so the presence of more than one FLAC in a folder might not seem to be surprising or particularly 'wrong'.

You would be entirely correct in thinking that, I hasten to add: there is absolutely nothing wrong in having parts of a composition represented by a separate 'track' and there is nothing in my Axioms of Classical Tagging article to say otherwise. In fact, it's entirely silent on the subject. [...]

Houston, we have a problem... Part 2...

Posted on 17th March 202321st March 2023 by hjr

A brief reminder, if any were needed, that my music collection is, in some ways, in a bit of a pickle. Pickles which I hadn't realised it was in, that is, until some damn fool or other (that would be me!) released Niente Version 3! With that program's new-found ability to analyse for physical corruption and logical failings (or, if you prefer, failures to live up to the strictures and precepts of the Holy Text of the Axioms of Classical Tagging), it's now easier than ever to discover you've been merely mucking about with your music cataloguing all these years, even though you thought you were being rather good at it at the time!

A blog post or two ago, I pointed out that a lot of my album art was undersized, oversized or ok-sized-but-not-square. A bout of bulk-fixing via a fixart.sh script, plus a spot of intensive manual acquiring of good album art, plus a lot of manual re-tagging, means all those problems are now behind me. Sadly, however, that wasn't the only tagging issue Niente showed me I had! [...]

Houston, we have a problem... Part 1...

Posted on 4th March 202321st March 2023 by hjr

It is certainly not in the same league as having your space craft blow up whilst half-way to the moon, but the unfortunate thing about writing a tool like Niente to keep an eye on how logically-consistent your tagging of your music collection has been over a span of about 23 years is that... it has a horrible tendency to show you've been making silly mistakes all these years!

Here's my current situation, which is indeed a bit of a problem: [...]

Niente Version 3.0 - Now Released

Posted on 26th February 202326th February 2023 by hjr

As promised (rather longer ago than I'd like to admit!), Niente Version 3.0 has finally been released. It's my 'FLAC checker' tool, just as Giocoso is my FLAC player and Semplice is my FLAC tagger.

It's a very substantial re-working of the Version 2 code, so upgrading is non-trivial and you'd basically better commit to completely re-working your crontabs to schedule it, and so on. The principle new feature is that it now runs on MacOS and Windows. [...]

New Year Software Releases

Posted on 14th January 202314th January 2023 by hjr

A little late (but a birthday bash in Bruges will do that to a man!), but Happy New Year for 2023, and by way of making up for my tardiness, I give you two new software releases.

First is Semplice 1.01. The program has acquired the usual slew of bugfixes and minor tweaks and twiddles, but also a couple of nice enhancements and new features. The main new features are: the ability to extact and/or display embedded album art; the ability to create spectrum analysis graphs of the audio signal in a FLAC; and the ability to directly edit the contents of any cuesheet embedded within a FLAC. See the changelog for details. [...]