Today, I've released Giocoso Version 3.12. It is a major release, with full details available in the Changelog, as usual.
The most significant changes have occurred with Mgiocoso, the subsidiary 'control panel' application that is used to pause/resume/terminate/etc other Giocoso sessions. It's had a complete makeover as far as aesthetics and functionality goes.
It now uses alphabetic menu shortcuts, rather than numbers, for example (though the old numbers still work, for backwards compatibility). So it's now P for pause/resume, not 5, for example; and T for termination of all playback, rather than 2. The main Mgiocoso program display are will now show what music is playing in the main Giocoso session: composer, performer, expected end-of-play time and so on. Somewhat crucially, Mgiocoso is now self-refreshing: as the main Giocoso session starts playing new music, Mgiocoso will now automatically pick up on the changes and display new information as appropriate. Previously, you had to manually take a 'refresh' menu option (which is now not there, as it's entirely redundant). Mgiocoso self-refreshes every 5 seconds or so: there may be a delay in picking up changes in the music-playing session, but they'll get there eventually!
The other significant change is that Mgiocoso's 'note taking' ability will now trigger the creation of a separate window in which a text editor can be used to make notes about a recording: previously, the editor only displayed in-program -which is a bit of an issue, given that Mgiocoso's program window was deliberately designed to only be 54 characters wide (so it would look OK on mobile devices, etc). When running on a desktop, this is just a silly limitation.
The main Giocoso window also gets a heavy make-over. Instead of the right 'pane' of the main display showing abridged help messages, it now displays a program logo, with the program version. That logo is animated as the main program launches, by the way: you can skip the animation by tapping any key as the logo scrolls. Additionally, the Giocoso Control menu now completely replicates the Mgiocoso main menu: both contain the same options, at last. Various under-the-hood technical improvements and bug-fixes have been made to Giocoso, too, that improve the way the program plays and terminates music and closes subsidiary programs (such as ffmpeg, ImageMagick and Mgiocoso) it may have launched. In particular, if you launched multiple Giocoso sessions in previous versions, quitting a second session would trigger termination of music playback happening in the first. That no longer happens.
Some additional software dependencies have been added to deal with distros that have updated their software suite: notably, whilst Giocoso 3.12 installs and runs just fine on Fedora 39 and 40, it produces an ugly display error ("img2sixel command not found") on Fedora 41. A fresh install of Giocoso on that platform will apply the fix for this automatically, but a mere upgrade won't: you'll instead have to manually install the libsixel-utils package after you've upgraded Giocoso itself. You can do that by running the command sudo dnf -i libsixel-utils or, as the Changelog mentions, by typing bash $HOME/.local/share/giocoso3/bin/aboscheck.sh install at a command prompt. Either way achieves the required fix, and a restart of Giocoso should then result in error-free program display.
For similar sorts of "weird-breakages" reasons, I've decided that support for running Giocoso 3 on Gecko Linux ends with the prior release of Giocoso. In other words, users of Gecko Linux should not upgrade to Giocoso 3.12. If you follow my previous Giocoso installation notes for that distro, you'll note that on various desktop environments, you'll need to install libnghtttp2 manually after installing Giocoso. That advice still holds and it's therefore possible to get Giocoso 3.12 running on Gecko just fine (see this screenshot for proof!), but I simply can't be bothered dealing with a distro which has breakages like this (and additional ones in ImageMagick version 7) from simply installing perfectly standard software packages! So: upgrade at your own risk and I'm simply never testing Giocoso 3 on Gecko ever again!!
Anyway: upgrading to the new version is achieved in the normal fashion: take the Administration menu, Option 4. Supply the sudo password when prompted. Quit Giocoso completely when the upgrade has been applied (ignoring any error messages that might be displayed as you do so), and then re-launch Giocoso from scratch to have the new changes properly picked up and applied. Good luck!