Software – Page 5 – Absolutely Baching

Spring Cleaning

Posted on 13th March 202214th March 2022 by hjr

A glance at my software downloads page will tell you that it wasn't just Giocoso which had lately developed a problem with accented characters on Manjaro+KDE. In fact, every piece of software I've written which uses the metaflac utility to read FLAC metadata tags suffered from the same problem. Accordingly, all needed to be fixed and all now have been fixed; each utility can therefore be updated whenever you're ready, using the utility name plus the --checkver run-time switch.

In other words, if you wanted to bump AES to its latest version, you'd type aes --checkver. If you needed to upgrade Niente, it would be niente --checkver. And so on. [...]

Tiny, but useful...

Posted on 9th March 20229th March 2022 by hjr

I mentioned last time that the new Giocoso version 1.12 also contained a very small new enhancement that had been intended to be released as version 1.11. That feature is... (drum roll, please)... early termination of playback.

Yeah. Wow. 🙂 [...]

Foreign Character Woes...

Posted on 8th March 202228th March 2022 by hjr

As I mentioned a couple of posts back, I recently re-installed Manjaro on a new small form factor Lenovo PC. All has been running well, except that in the last couple of days I noticed that Giocoso had developed a strange habit of not displaying "accented characters" properly: that is, Giocoso suddenly didn't seem able to display letters with their correct diacritic marks, such as é, ê, ß, ö, ç and so on.

For example, this is what Giocoso displayed this morning: [...]

Giocoso 1.10 Released ... And Ukraine Invaded

Posted on 24th February 202225th February 2022 by hjr

Well, it seems a bit superfluous to release a slightly-modified version of Giocoso on the day Russia decided to invade Ukraine, on zero rational, reasonable pretext.

But I'm going to do it anyway, albeit briefly: version 1.10 is out, with a new --autocolor (or --autocolour) option. This simply applies the Monopoly™ colour combinations mentioned in the post announcing version 1.09 in a sequential manner, depending on what day of the week it is. If it's a Monday, you'll get Old Kent Road colours; if it's a Tuesday, it'll be the light blues of the Angel Islington; Wednesdays will be Pall Mall purple; Thursdays will be Vine Street Orange; Fridays the scarlet of the Strand; and Saturdays will be the bright yellows of Piccadilly. Finally, on Sundays, you'll get the rich green of Bond Street. All the colours occur in sequence, as though you were traveling around the Monopoly™ board progressively. Unfortunately, because Monopoly™ has 8 colour sets and there are only 7 days in a week, the Park Lane/Mayfair colours would never ordinarily be used by the autocolor option, but I've added an extra bit of calculation: if it's the first day of a month, regardless of what day of the week it is, those Mayfair colours will be used anyway. [...]

A Touch of Monopoly®

Posted on 12th February 202212th February 2022 by hjr

Another month, another little update to Giocoso.

This time, the version number is bumped to 1.09 because I've found that picking appropriate colours for the album art caption bar is harder than it should be! That is to say, when Giocoso starts playing a new piece of music, if album art is being displayed, it will try to display the composer and composition name in a coloured bar underneath the actual album art embedded in the FLAC file being played. [...]

Emby Episode 4

Posted on 1st February 202212th February 2022 by hjr

To recap the story so far: I organise my music on disk in a Composer/Genre/Composition hierarchy. I sometimes play music via the Emby Media Server. Emby does not, however, really support a Composer/Genre/Composition hierarchy, tending to go directly from Composer to Composition. Fortunately, if you use Folders view, Emby will mirror your physical layout of files and folders on disk exactly. But -and this is the point we reached in the last post- Composer artwork you may have applied to Emby's Artist View doesn't display in the Folders view... but, if you arrange for JPGs of each composer to be present in each composer folder, named precisely the same as the folder, it will display composer artwork in Folders view automatically.

This gets us 90% of the way to a usable Emby interface -but, unfortunately, it leaves us with some fairly ugly display screens to wade through on the way to finding a particular piece of music to play. [...]

Fixing Emby

Posted on 30th January 2022 by hjr

To begin with, a bit of a recap of the past two blog pieces.

I began this mini-series by reiterating the way I catalogue my music. Fundamentally, it's just organised in Composer/Genre/Composition order. Then, in the second episode, I explained how I used Emby Media Server to share my music around the house, to the car and to overseas hotel rooms... but that Emby didn't honour the cataloguing hierarchy I'd adopted, but instead simply displayed things in Composer/Composition order, missing out the Genre. This was a failing I could live with, though, since Emby isn't the main way I listen to music. [...]

A word about Emby

Posted on 29th January 202229th January 2022 by hjr

Sometimes, it takes someone asking a question to make you realise you've been doing something dumb for quite a long time! This post will tell the story of one such question, realisation and (most importantly) the fix! So, my thanks to Jeff in advance for having asked the question that made me realise I've been doing Emby wrong all these years!

But first, of course, I have to explain what 'Emby' is! Well, it's a mostly-free, but not open source, media server. You install it on a spare computer and it catalogues whatever media files you point it at. They can be music, photographs or videos -so Emby can manage a collection of movies or photo albums as well as a large classical music collection. By the power of networking, this Emby server makes the assorted media it knows about available to any other device that you can point at it. These Emby clients can be nothing more complex than a web browser, but they can also be dedicated apps, available for all sorts of operating systems and devices. To put it as simply as I can, then, Emby lets my carefully-curated music collection be accessed from a phone in a car; or from a laptop in a Polish hotel when I'm on holiday; or from a new Android tablet I might be using when score-reading in the garden. [...]

Giocoso Update - 1.08

Posted on 23rd January 202223rd January 2022 by hjr

A small announcement that I've just released a new version of Giocoso: the current version number is accordingly bumped to 1.08.

The changes made in this version are really quite minor and inconsequential. Principally, they consist of a better tidying up of temporary files when the Giocoso player is interrupted (by a Ctrl+C) or has finished playing something. In earlier versions, if a 'cuesheet' had been produced for a play, that cuesheet would be left lying in the $HOME/.local/share/giocoso folder when the play had finished (or been terminated early). Now, the program deletes such cuesheets as soon as the play terminates for whatever reason. [...]

Cleaning PDFs

Posted on 22nd December 202123rd December 2021 by hjr

When I buy digital music from the likes of Prestoclassical, it often (though not always) comes with a digital PDF version of the booklet that would have accompanied the physical CD in its jewel case. An example of the front page of one such PDF is shown at the left, belonging to a digital download of the film music of William Alwyn I bought back in October.

The trouble with such digitised booklets, however, is that the PDF often contains data embedded within the file that is not necessarily something you want to keep. In this case, for example, if I open the purchased booklet PDF in my standard PDF viewer (on Kubuntu, that's Okular) and select File -> Properties, I see this: [...]

Target Achieved!

Posted on 3rd December 2021 by hjr

Back on 5th November, I wrote about how I was steadily listening to more and more of my previously-unplayed (in Giocoso, at least!) recordings. With some graphing and a line or two of best-fit, I predicted I might get to the 50%-unplayed mark by about "December 3rd or 4th" -though with some uncertainties around Benjamin Britten Day and the ever-constant acquisition of new recordings, maybe causing that date to blow out a bit.

Well, the graph at the left tells you the original prediction was fairly accurate after all: the 50% unplayed/50% played mark was finally achieved late on November 30th. [...]

News from Niente

Posted on 1st November 20215th December 2021 by hjr

Today, I'm releasing Version 2.0 of my Niente FLAC integrity-testing tool. It comes about 4 months after version 1.0 was made available -and during those 4 months I've spent a lot more time focussed on PC migrations and cataloguing my backlog of new music acquisitions than on checking the internal integrity of my existing music files (which is never a wise trade-off!) But hopefully that explains the distinct lack of updates to Niente in all that time: I was barely paying it any attention at all, to be honest.

Had I been doing so, however, I would have swiftly realised that whatever medication I was taking at the time of the Version 1.0 release (and I think at this point I'm going to blame the Covid vaccine; or Aspirin; or something!), it was having serious effects on my coding abilities! Because, putting it bluntly, I've spent the past couple of weeks reviewing the code and wondering what on Earth I thought I was doing releasing it at all, since it was total rubbish, to the point where if you didn't run it with the --force switch, it barely did anything functional! [...]