Software – Page 6 – Absolutely Baching

Giocoso on [K]ubuntu

Posted on 7th October 20218th November 2021 by hjr

Back in April of this year, as I mentioned previously, I bought myself a new Minisforum UM250 small-form-factor PC. The experiment with using it with Arch and/or Manjaro proved less than successful -so I reverted back to my vintage 2012 PC and retired the UM250 back to its box, in which it has sat ever since, on one of the bookshelves in my study.

Around June of this year (I think), I happened to be laid up in bed (after one of my Covid-19 vaccine shots) and was thus using an old laptop for browsing the web. It was a 2016-vintage Dell of some bog-standard sort. But way-back-when, I had installed multiple operating systems on it, so I could boot into Windows 10, Ubuntu 18.x and Manjaro as and when I chose... and I happened to notice that the laptop's fan noise was considerably worse when booted into Manjaro than it was if I booted into Ubuntu. I can't remember if it was any worse or better in Windows, but it struck me at the time that in the presence of laptop-style hardware, Ubuntu seemed to have a better lid on thermal management than Manjaro did. I don't know if that's actually true or not -or, if it is, why that might be. But if made me think that if I had conducted my earlier Minisforum experiment with Ubuntu (or one of its derivative flavours) rather than with Arch or Manjaro, maybe it would have run more quietly too, and thus the outcome might have been happier all round. [...]

Worst Transition Ever!

Posted on 24th September 202124th September 2021 by hjr

This website is brought to you from a server in my loft. It's been that way for over a year now, I think. That is only possible, of course, because my Internet Service Provider provides a reasonably-fast, robust connection with a static IP address. For the past 18 months, Vodafone has provided such a service, for around £24 a month, using Fibre-to-the-Cabinet technology. That means that whilst Vodafone provides fibre connections to a green box/cabinet half-way up my street, the 'last mile' connection to my home is in the form of a fairly standard phone line, using DSL technology.

It's certainly been robust and reasonably cheap -and whilst the speed has been adequate, it's never been great. Downloads have usually maxed out at around 1.4MBps (Megabytes per second), with uploads at around 1MBps. Not great, but just about sufficient. [...]

A Musical Guessing Game?

Posted on 20th September 202120th September 2021 by hjr

I don't know about you, but if I tune into the radio randomly as a piece of classical music is playing, I then like to test myself and see if I can guess the composer of the piece before the announcer returns to give away the crucial information. I'll maybe even try guessing the name of the piece, if I'm feeling particularly confident. Once or twice, I've even gone for a guess as to who the conductor or soloist might be: those ones usually don't pan out so well, but I'm pretty good with composers and not so bad at the piece-names.

Anyway: I've been using Giocoso since June 2021 (and AMP for six months before that) to play all my classical music and thus have built up a 'listening history' of some 6000+ recordings in just over 9 months, as you can see from the bottom of my 'all time graphs' listening history page. And since Giocoso says I've listened to all those pieces of music, I ought to be able to recognise them when I hear selections from them again, right? [...]

Giocoso Bug-fix for Dual Screen Setups

Posted on 7th September 2021 by hjr

Another small bug-fix, this time to Giocoso.

It was occasioned by my switching away from using a 4K TV as my monitor and replacing it with two 1920x1200 monitors in a dual-screen setup. Since I had never used a dual screen display before, I had not realised that when Giocoso is asked to display album art as a new recording plays, it would break when confronted with the decision as to which monitor it would display the art on! [...]

ISO-handling Bug Fixes

Posted on 31st August 202131st August 2021 by hjr

If you rip SACDs to ISO files, which I've previously documented how to do, you will subsequently need to be able to split the ISOs out into separate FLAC files, in order to catalogue and tag them properly. If you do, you need to be aware of a couple of bug-fixes that have recently been made to the AUAC script and associated software.

The usual approach I take is to break apart an ISO is to issue the command: auac -i=iso. But that recently failed to work correctly, and here's why. [...]

Giocoso - First Update

Posted on 28th July 202128th July 2021 by hjr

Somewhat annoyingly, I just discovered an error in Giocoso's --stats reporting function. It's not a particularly terrible one: more a question of labelling the various numbers.

The stats report shows how many recordings you've got that last for various 'time bands' (i.e., 0 to 5 minutes long, 5 to 10 minutes long and so on). One of the bands said '10 to 30 minutes'... but the actual query submitted to the Giocoso database was querying for durations between 600 seconds and 1200 seconds. [...]

Giocoso - A New Randomising FLAC Player

Posted on 15th July 202126th July 2021 by hjr

Today, I'm announcing the initial release of Giocoso, the randomising FLAC player for Linux, which is a replacement for my old AMP program. Giocoso is built on much the same code-base as AMP, but with quite a few changes. The most significant differences between Giocoso and AMP are, probably:

AMP scrobbled by default and had to be told not to; Giocoso does not scrobble by default, and has to be told to do so if it's required.
AMP scrobbling required the installation and running of a separate 'amp-scrobbler' script. Giocoso uses no external functionality to scrobble: it's all built-in to the main program.
AMP had acquired a bunch of 'statistical overrides' (such as --levelup, --xlevelup and --xxlevelup); those are now gone from Giocoso.
AMP could only apply --minduration and --maxduration filters after selecting something to play. This could result in a significant pause before stumbling across something randomly selected that happened to have the correct duration. Giocoso now knows the durations of pieces from the get-go, so duration-based selections are done successfully within fractions of a second.
AMP only displayed album art; when Giocoso displays album art, it adds a 'caption' to it, with its text derived from the ALBUM tag of the music being played: the album art can therefore now visually provide you with all information about what, precisely, is being played.

There are lots of other differences, detailed in Appendix A of Giocoso's User Manual, which is available for download on Giocoso's new product page. [...]

Niente - A New FLAC Integrity Checker

Posted on 1st July 20211st July 2021 by hjr

I recently signed up to a Personal Backblaze cloud backup subscription. The product has some severe limitations: it only runs on Windows, for example; and it takes no notice of -and refuses to back up- anything a Windows PC is connected to via the network. It's one huge saving grace, however, is that for US$55 per year, you get unlimited backup capacity. If, for example, you plug in a 12TB external hard disk via USB to your Windows PC... that counts as local storage and therefore gets backed up to Blackblaze within the personal backup allowance. Add two more 12TB USB drives to the PC and you've just got 36TB of cloud storage for peanuts!

Yes, not working on Linux is a bit of a drawback for someone who stopped using Windows at all in about 2016 (and had spent the 20 years before that trying to!)... but it's not exactly hard to find an old PC and throw Windows 10 on it and then script something on Linux to push my music collection across to it. Once the music collection has been copied to the Windows PC, it heads off to the cloud, courtesy of Backblaze. I already have six copies of my music collection on various NAS devices and external USB drives. I even have an offline copy, on a pair of disks which only get plugged into a PC once a month for a refresh. But thanks to Backblaze, I now have an offsite backup. You know, for those times when the house catches fire or falls into a sinkhole. [...]

AMP Per-Cycle Pause

Posted on 8th June 20218th June 2021 by hjr

Today, I'm releasing yet another new version of AMP (version 1.28 if you're keeping count).

It's main reason for existence is that it contains a new feature: you have been able to get AMP to do multiple 'cycles' of play since the very earliest versions, by setting the --selections=x run-time parameter. Replace 'x' with 2, for example, and AMP will randomly select one piece of music to play, play it from start to finish, then pick a second piece of music and play it from start to finish, and only then stop playing anything further. [...]

Another AMP Release

Posted on 5th June 20215th June 2021 by hjr

Just a day or two after the last one, there's a new AMP release (version 1.27). I am heroically trying to reduce the rate of version releases, I hasten to add! But if I come across a bug that needs fixing, my hands are rather tied to making the fixes available as soon as possible!

Sure enough, whilst this releases introduces a useful new feature, it also fixes a quite significant bug I just encountered. [...]

The Loudness Wars...

Posted on 4th June 20215th June 2021 by hjr

Just a quick note to report that I've just released a couple of software fixes related to the problem of sub-optimal loudness levels in music files ripped from CDs or other sources.

Firstly, MAXV has been bumped to version 1.08, because of the addition of a tiny bux-fix that stops the grep utility sometimes thinking that what it's being asked for is a binary file rather than a text file. It's not a major deal, and if you choose not to upgrade, you probably won't be missing out on much, as the bug raises its head only exceptionally rarely. But, it's there if you want it. Run maxv --checkver to get it. [...]

AMP Version 1.26 Released

Posted on 3rd June 20213rd June 2021 by hjr

Just a quick note to mention that I've today released a new version of AMP: version 1.26.

The new version contains a couple of new features, rather than any bug-fixes (for once!). Firstly, I've increased the maximum time-bar for a composer to 999 hours (up from the previous maximum of just 9 hours). That's approximately 42 days, so by running amp --timebar=999, you are effectively saying 'don't randomly select a composer for a new play that has previously had anything played within the past month or so'. Added as a new feature largely because I kept being offered Beethoven things to play and there's only so much Beethoven a man can take one month at a time! [...]