Software – Page 9 – Absolutely Baching

SACD ISO: Knifing a Fork!

Posted on 7th March 20214th July 2025 by hjr

NOTE: This article was originally published in 2021. It compared the Sound Linux More version of the 'sacd' utility with its original source, the Robert Tari-written program called odio-sacd. Unfortunately, as of July 2025, Robert Tari appears to have disappeared off the Internet: his software repositories have all been pulled and are now publicly inaccessible. The comparison was therefore valid four years ago, but is no longer relevant: the odio-sacd software is simply unobtainable, whilst the sacd utility remains easily downloadable. Any recommendations made in 2021 to use odio-sacd should therefore now not be followed.

I will note that the original article's mentioning that 'sacd' relies on Intel/AMD CPU features and that odio-sacd did not still applies. This means that using sacd is not possible at all on Raspberry Pi single board computers using ARM CPUs. [...]

Roller-coaster Ride

Posted on 5th March 20216th March 2021 by hjr

Today has been fun, in an up-and-down and terrifying sort of way!

First the good news: I finally managed to build a pure Arch-based virtual machine with no slip-ups, mistakes or catastrophes. Installing Arch is never for the faint-hearted and I've done it lots of times in the past... but never done it 'quite right', with always something missing or not-quite-working! I accordingly long ago gave up hope of ever achieving something that seemed stable and functional. But that run of ducks was broken today! Hurrah. (And I've written up how I did it here). [...]

Pi-faced!

Posted on 3rd March 20213rd March 2021 by hjr

A correspondent from the west coast of the USA recently got in touch to say that whilst he enjoyed using some of my music-related software, he regretted having to point out that the code didn't run properly on his Raspberry Pi running the Raspbian Linux distro ...but that he'd hacked a way to get it to work anyway.

A couple of thoughts came to mind when I read that. First, the grumpy-me thought that it was no wonder that the software didn't work on Raspbian, because I go to the effort of listing the distros I've actually tested my stuff on... and Raspbian isn't listed there! [...]

New! AMP Combo Deals!

Posted on 1st March 20211st March 2021 by hjr

Today, I'm releasing another new version of AMP (this one is version 1.12) with a slightly-tweaked ability to use override switches to control the randomness of what gets played.

Specifically, version 1.09 introduced the ability to specify a --genre= OR a --composer= switch to force AMP to randomly select a work that falls into a specific genre, or that was written by a specific composer. [...]

Duration-based Plays

Posted on 23rd February 20216th March 2021 by hjr

Another week, another new version of the Absolutely Baching Music Player (AMP to its friends). We move from 1.10 to 1.11... and the new release contains two basic new features being introduced!

First, a new run-time parameter is provided called --artsize=xxx. The 'xxx' values permitted are 'small', 'medium' and 'large', with 'medium' being the default if the parameter is not supplied at all, or if it's supplied with an otherwise invalid value. [...]

Negation…

Posted on 14th February 202117th February 2021 by hjr

Another day, another new version of the AMP Player!

This one is a fairly minor release to version 1.10, bringing with it a new command line switch: --negate and some miscellaneous and fairly minor bug-fixes. [...]

Another new AMP version

Posted on 12th February 202112th February 2021 by hjr

A few days ago, I reported that I had finally re-balanced by 'plays': my top ten composers were no longer so dominant in my history of composition plays as they had once been.

I mentioned then that I had, by way of response, been able to remove my 'top ten' from the excludes.txt which prevented AMP from playing anything by those composers. I had hoped that, in response, AMP would start playing at least something of my top ten! Sadly, the maths is against them still: if there are 500 composers in a collection, then the odds of any of the top ten being picked for a random play is 1 in 50, or about 2%. I wouldn't want to bet on a horse with those odds! [...]

AMP and CCDT Updates

Posted on 9th February 20219th February 2021 by hjr

Another couple of software updates to announce.

AMP is bumped to version 1.08. The code changes are mostly minor and cosmetic and to do with displaying a count-down timer indicating when play of the currently-playing music will end. Slightly unfortunately, a side-effect of this new time display is that if you were to Ctrl+Z to pause play, the countdown timer would be wrong on playback resumption, and two pieces of music would play simultaneously when the resumed piece gets near its end. I may revisit this in the future, but for now, I've just disabled Ctrl+Z completely. If you want to pause playback, hit Ctrl+C and terminate it completely (which actually was my original design goal anyway!) [...]

Finally!

Posted on 7th February 20217th February 2021 by hjr

Hurrah!

Finally, a nearly two-year effort to re-balance my classical music listening efforts came to a conclusion. [...]

AMP - Updates

Posted on 1st February 20211st February 2021 by hjr

I last wrote about changes and updates to AMP (the Absolutely Baching Music Player), way back on January 10th.

I thought the start of a new month would be a good idea to catch up on them, particularly as the pace of AMP development is slowing down and the thing appears to have just about reached a final form I can live with! [...]

AMP Doing Its Job

Posted on 23rd January 202123rd January 2021 by hjr

It's been a little over a fortnight since I modified my AMP player to work with a database -and, when it does so, to record every 'play' it decides on in a database table of its own.

So now, 15 days later, I can analyze that 'plays' table to determine if AMP has been doing the job I designed it for: picking a wide variety of composers and music genres, at random, and thus not creating any 'favourites'! [...]

CAO - Updated Already

Posted on 16th January 202123rd February 2021 by hjr

Well, that didn't take long!

First, I discovered rather late in the day that a cue sheet describing a large 'super-FLAC' audio file cannot, by technical design, list more than 99 files. So, if you've got more than 99 FLAC-tracks that you want to combine into a single super-FLAC then, you can't, because the cue sheet cannot contain enough entries to describe it all. [...]