♬♪ A Voyage Around My Ears ♬♪
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: [...]
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. [...]
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. [...]
I've long been an advocate for registering the fact you just played concerto X or symphony Y with a web-accessible store of data, such as Last.fm. I've been doing precisely that with everything I've played since January 8th 2008, so Last.fm have a record of about 14 years of my listening history. The thumbnail at the left shows you that's quite considerable: 202,000+ "scrobbles" (i.e., a record of the completion of a 'play') have been received in that time,
My top 'plays' as recorded by Last.fm are (in descending order) Britten, JS Bach, Vaughan Williams, Handel and Sibelius -which isn't so hugely different from what has been recorded on this very website since June 2021. [...]
It's only three months late (!), but Semplice, the all-new, all-singing, all-dancing FLAC manager for Linux, Windows, macOS and Raspberry Pi, has just been released and is available for download, with instructions for doing that available from its web page.
In a nutshell, Semplice allows you to (1) tag FLACs; (2) apply volume boosts to FLACs; (3) concatenate per-track FLACs into single-file, whole-composition SuperFLACs; (4) split SuperFLACs back out into being per-track FLACs; and (5) convert audio files from and to about 7 or 8 different audio codecs (so, FLAC to MP3, for example; or SACD's DSF to super hi-res FLACs). [...]
A minor update to Giocoso has just been released, pushing it to version number 2.02.
It's minor because it only includes a single bug-fix and one enhancement, details of which are described at the top of the Giocoso changelog. On the other hand, the bug being fixed is quite a significant one, so I wouldn't dismiss it as an unimportant bug-fix! [...]
Like everyone else, I expect, I had been aware that Queen Elizabeth II was in declining health and was unlikely to last much longer (though I personally had my fingers crossed that she'd last until her centenary, at which point she would have beaten Louis XIV to the title of longest-ever reigning monarch: that's the competitive historian in me, I guess!) I was nevertheless taken aback when the news broke that the decline had been faster, and more terminal, than anticipated.
I am neither ardent monarchist nor fervent republican: I just think the Head of State mostly does ceremonial duties and therefore the person performing the ribbon-cutting doesn't really matter. On the other hand, if you elect Heads of States directly, they tend to become Presidential and centers of power in their own right -which doesn't suit the Westminster system very well at all. Plus, certain Presidents (mentioning no names, but the French and US ones spring to mind) tend to behave as quasi-monarchs anyway, so if you're going that route, what's the difference?! Appointing former political leaders to the ceremonial Head of State role also doesn't sit well, I think: they have a past, and past allegiances and loyalties to mates, and one of the nice things about a hereditary Head of State is that they owe no-one any favours. It's quite a nice check-and-balance to have, in other words, where the ultimate referee of the constitutional game is beholden to no-one for their position. [...]
With Giocoso version 2 finally out the door, I thought I would share with you some of my plans for my digital music-related software. As you can tell from the thumbnail to this post, the news is going to be quite drastic!
In a nutshell, nearly all of my existing software will be killed off. No more CCDT, no more CAO, no more MAXV or AUAC. Instead, they will all be replaced by a single piece of software which I'm naming Semplice (because one piece of software is simpler to deal with than four!). [...]
At last, Giocoso version 2 is now available for download. And it's only taken me four months to write and test it 🙂 My apologies for the delay.
The program has undergone significant revision and bug-fixing and has acquired a bunch of new features. The really big ticket items are, probably: [...]
I just wanted to offer a further update on the progress of Giocoso Version 2, as I'd originally hoped (and possibly promised!) that it would be out by the end of June... and I can tell you now that that's a target date that isn't going to happen!
The short version is, that it's coming along nicely and though release dates have slipped, I think we're looking only a couple more weeks before final release. Unfortunately, I keep finding something new to tweak and fiddle with: I've had to implement a development freeze to stop that sort of mission creep becoming a habit! [...]
I thought it was probably time for a progress report or two!
First, Giocoso Version 2.0 is practically ready. The only thing holding it back is the business of preparing documentation for it -and the fact as a new piece gets written, I get slightly annoyed with something or other and decide I need to tweak the code a bit to deal with it. Which then means going back and making sure all previously-written documentation still correctly describes the way I originally said the program works. It's a bit like a snake eating its own tail: we'll get there eventually, once I stop fiddling with things. But meanwhile, all the fiddling is making nice, if minor, improvements to things. I am still aiming for a June release ...but what with the Platinum Jubilee, summer weather and the like, it may yet slip into July. But it's close! [...]
The thumbnail to this post, when clicked on, will show you a fairly significant development in the Giocoso story: it now runs on Windows!
The screenshot is of Windows 10 (fully updated, so it's running version 22H1) on my fairly ancient 2016-vintage Dell laptop, successfully playing some Benjamin Britten -complete with album art display- in Version 2 of Giocoso. [...]