technology – Page 2 – Absolutely Baching

Distinguishing Artists

Posted on 27th December 20209th March 2021 by hjr

In the post-pudding Christmas after-glow, I have come to the conclusion that if I am going to put the recording year into the ALBUM tag (because only by including it there do we properly and completely use recorded classical music's primary key), we might as well not fear duplicating data in another important matter: namely, the business of declaring who is the "distinguishing artist" for a recording.

It should already be common practice to have this data already present in the ALBUM tag (it's why I own Symphony No. 5 (Karajan - 1970) for example). [...]

Turning up the volume...

Posted on 8th December 20208th December 2020 by hjr

Before I accidentally wiped the web server that runs this site, I had been blogging about the problem of SACDs and the fact that they are often mastered with absolute peak volumes set to about 6dB quieter than they really should be (for technical reasons). I thus modified by AUAC audio converter program to automatically boost SACD rips by whatever it took to get the loudest track on a CD to be as loud as it could reasonably go without becoming distorted.

Which is fine for SACDs... but there are times you think to yourself (especially with some recordings on really old CDs) that the volume levels on even ordinary CDs aren't entirely what they should be. Whilst incorporating a volume boost into an SACD extraction tool is a good idea, a standalone volume boosting utility sounded like it might be quite useful, too! [...]

Time for a change...

Posted on 14th November 202015th November 2020 by hjr

That screenshot left of this text contains the answer to an obscure-looking Linux command's query: when did the file system on my /dev/sdc1 disk partition get created?

The answer is November 23rd, 2019. [...]

Down for Maintenance - Advanced Notice

Posted on 6th October 20208th October 2020 by hjr

This weekend, I hope to move this website from its current virtual machine host onto a dedicated physical server. The aim is to improve the speed and responsiveness of the site: though the virtual machine it's currently running on is generously provisioned with RAM and virtual CPUs, I think the site 'sticks' for longer intervals than I'm entirely comfortable with. Hopefully, on a reasonably powerful physical server that is also generously provisioned, things should be more fluid and performant.

Unfortunately, transferring to a new machine means there will be an interval when the old virtual machine goes down before the new physical server can take its place. Potentially, that interval could be in the order of a few hours. The site will be completely inaccessible for those hours. My apologies for that in advance. Hopefully, it's a one-off and normal service will be resumed (and stay resumed) fairly swiftly thereafter! [...]

Coming Home

Posted on 3rd June 20204th June 2020 by hjr

If you're reading this, it means that my move to self-hosting my website has gone more-or-less according to plan!

I've been paying a reasonable amount to Linode for many years now to run a server in New York on which to host this site. It's not a lot of money (US$12 a month, if you're really interested), but since this site is now merely a hobby and nothing at all to do with earning an income, it didn't seem to be a good idea to keep shelling out the dollars for it when I have a loft full of spare PCs, servers and laptops (most definitely in the geriatric category, but all capable of running a decent 64-bit Linux distro in 8GB RAM) that could be tasked to do the job for free instead. [...]

Windows Music Players

Posted on 13th November 201913th November 2019 by hjr

I am old enough to remember that my first experiences of listening to serious music on serious equipment involved visits to my brother-in-law and borrowing his component hifi for the afternoon!

I "progressed" from that to, in the late eighties, listening on my very own 'integrated' hifi (which, given my income levels at the time, was pushing the term 'hifi' to its limits, I now realise!) [...]