technology – Absolutely Baching

Behold! I tell you a mystery... Adventures with ffmpeg

Posted on 20th November 2024 by hjr

The tool which my Giocoso classical music player uses to actually produce audio output is called ffmpeg, a command line audio and video de-coder and player. It is something of a truism to say that it is an absolute nightmare to use! It's command structure is truly ghastly, with a typical example looking like this:

ffmpeg -i example.mp4 -i LM_logo.png -filter_complex "[1:v] scale=150:-1 [ol], [0:v] [ol] overlay=W-w-10:H-h-10" -codec:a copy example_marked.mp4 [...]

Service Interruption!

Posted on 12th May 20243rd June 2024 by hjr

A couple of months ago, I bought an old 27" iMac and installed it with Endeavour OS (an Arch Linux derivative) as its operating system. All has been fine since: Linux doesn't understand how to do the iMac's 5K screen resolution, but has no problem with the hardware otherwise and the 4K resolution I'm currently using is a delight. I've never previously used anything higher than 1980x1200, so 3840x2160 has been a (literally!) eye-opening experience. I'm never going back to 'standard high res' after this, anyway. Short version is, therefore: Apple make gorgeous hardware and an appalling operating system, but at least with Intel Macs, you can have the hardware with a sensible operating system after all!

Unfortunately, just last Thursday I attempted to install ZFS on the PC and although the installation seemed to work fine, rebooting the computer resulted in a 'no boot disk found' error state. I thought perhaps the internal SSD had failed, which would have been an expensive thing to fix... but, booting a live distro from a USB stick, the internal SSD was there, present and correct. Clearly, I had mangled its 'bootability' somehow, however, and rather than faff around with a bazillion possible fixes, I decided to wipe and re-install. [...]

All Change!

Posted on 1st January 202431st December 2023 by hjr

As previously wished, I hope you all have a Happy New Year, with as much classical music listening pleasure as I'm expecting it to bring me! 🙂

Just a heads-up, however: things will shortly be happening to this website [...]

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!) [...]

Adventures in Spectrum Analysis

Posted on 18th December 202218th December 2022 by hjr

I've been aware for years that it's possible to produce the sorts of images you see in the thumbnail at the left of this post: frequency analysis graphs of an audio file of one sort or another. Audiophiles have been swooning over them for years, but I never have. If my ears were satisfied with the sound of a recording, what additional good would it do me to do a spectrum analysis of that recording?

Well: for the most part, I still think that's true... but I had a very specific reason for dabbling in them lately, which then led me down the rabbit hole of finding them fascinating! I thought I'd share a little about it. [...]

First Impressions

Posted on 17th April 202230th April 2022 by hjr

I've now been using my "new" (i.e., second-hand and thus old!) Mac Mini for about a week, and it has been very much an enjoyable learning experience! There is much about it (and macOS) that I like a lot; there has also been much that has been mystifying or infuriating 🙂 I thought I would keep a sort-of 'diary' of things I've come across, as I came across them, so that any other Windows or Linux users out there even considering moving to the world of Apple will have at least a taste of what might be in store for them. I should emphasise that what follows is what a complete Mac neophyte (with about 40 years of Windows, Linux and Unix familiarity) is experiencing: I did once touch a G4 Mac back in about 2009, for around 20 minutes. I also once ran a drawing program for about an hour on the original Apple Mac back in 1985. Apart from those two brief brushes with the world of Apple, however, I had precisely zero familiarity with or understanding of macOS... so I came to this completely and utterly 'blind'. Long-term Mac users are probably, therefore, going to be tearing their hair out in despair at my clutzy approach to things, for which I apologise in advance: hold on to those hair follicles!

I should also perhaps explain that I have a very functional Linux PC at hand: my goal was, as far as possible, to match that experience on the Mac Mini, program for program. There may well be better programs available for the Mac than for either Windows or Linux -but learning what they are and how they work is a problem for another day. My present purposes simply require that what I do on my Linux PC I should be able to do equivalently on the Mac. Spoiler alert, however: there are already Mac-specific programs I prefer using to the open source options I've been using for years on Linux and Windows. For example, Apple Mail seems a perfectly decent alternative to Thunderbird; and Safari is a nice-enough browser that I've really cut back on the occasions when I'm running Firefox. There are probably other instances of the same sort of thing that will become apparent as I ramble on... [...]

PC Change... One More Time!

Posted on 19th February 202223rd February 2022 by hjr

Four months in, and for some unknown reason, my Minisforum UM250 running Kubuntu decided to go all graphical-glitchy on me, as it had previously done in Manjaro and Arch. It then seemed to get better after a while, before going all wonky once more. Currently, it's in an 'OK' phase, but who knows how long that will last! I assume some software got updated somewhere along the line -maybe a driver of some sort- and this introduced instabilities where there were none before. But, frankly, at this point I don't care any more: the Minisforum is destined to be retired from desktop duties and instead will be translated to the loft, where it can run something 'server-like' that doesn't require a GUI nor day-to-day interaction with it. I haven't thought what, precisely, it might end up doing, but I'm sure I'll think of something before too long!

It's a shame (not least, because it wasn't cheap!), but I can't be having my daily driver desktop doing random things at random times. [...]

Minisforum UM250 Thermals

Posted on 7th November 20218th November 2021 by hjr

Stock picture of a Minisforum UM250 small form factor PC

About a month ago, as I wrote at the time, I stopped using my 2012-vintage PC and once again started using the Minisforum UM250 small form factor PC you see at the left as my main PC. I had tried once before (back in May), but had been put off by the tendency of the Minisforum to crash or have strange graphical glitches. Second time was mostly a charm, however: the use of Kubuntu, rather than Arch or Manjaro, seems to have calmed the beast down to the point where it didn't crash and didn't do weird things with screen drawing.

I've accordingly been using the Minisforum UM250 very happily for a month or so. It doesn't have the memory heft of my old PC (that had 96GB of ECC RAM; this only has 16GB of ordinary stuff!) and its CPU, though a shiny (but not-so-new) AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 2500U, doesn't seem to have the raw power of my former Intel Xeon CPU E5-2680 v2: despite dating from 2013, its 20 threads seem to easily outpace the Minisforum's mere 8. [...]

CPU Shenannigans

Posted on 13th May 2021 by hjr

Fresh from my war with a new mini PC (which I lost, you'll recall), I remained determined to do something to upgrade my old workstation-class desktop PC. I bought it second-hand a few years ago: it's a Dell Precision T3610, which is a bit of a monster, and was originally constructed (I think) in around 2012 or 2013: its warranty says it started in February 2014 and expired in February 2017, so it's somewhere in that ball-park.

It shipped with a Xeon E5-1620 v2 CPU CPU, which was launched in the third quarter of 2013, so that also helps date the machine. That CPU has (inevitably, as far as Intel was concerned back then!) 4 cores and thus 8 threads when hyperthreading was enabled. Nothing too remarkable, but not exactly shabby, either. I think when I bought it, it came with 16GB of RAM: I soon bumped that up to 96GB. So, it's not memory constrained either! It also shipped with an Nvidia Quadro K4000, which was cutting edge at the time, but has long since been eclipsed by newer graphics cards: since I don't play games beyond Solitaire, however, I don't particularly care how out-of-date my graphics capabilities are! [...]

SACD ISO: Knifing a Fork!

Posted on 7th March 20219th March 2021 by hjr

The world of open source software can sometimes be confusing, because if someone likes your code, they can take it and 'fork' it -that is, essentially, copy it and declare it to be a new piece of software altogether. As a mere user, it can then be difficult to know if you're supposed to use the original, or the copy (which, potentially, might be better than the original).

This is precisely what has happened to me and the utility needed to unpack/convert SACD ISO music files. [...]

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! [...]

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'! [...]