A little late (but a birthday bash in Bruges will do that to a man!), but Happy New Year for 2023, and by way of making up for my tardiness, I give you two new software releases.
First is Semplice 1.01. The program has acquired the usual slew of bugfixes and minor tweaks and twiddles, but also a couple of nice enhancements and new features. The main new features are: the ability to extact and/or display embedded album art; the ability to create spectrum analysis graphs of the audio signal in a FLAC; and the ability to directly edit the contents of any cuesheet embedded within a FLAC. See the changelog for details.
Note that the new album art display function requires the manual addition of a new chunk of text to the end of your existing semplice.conf configuration file:
# DISPLAYONEXTRACT applies when you are extracting embedded album art from a FLAC. If set to 1,
# then as well as saving the album art to a file on disk, Semplice will display the extracted file.
# This is the default behaviour. If you set the parameter to 0, then album art will be extracted
# as normal, but no attempt will be made to automatically display it for you. (Version 1.01+)
# ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
DISPLAYONEXTRACT=1
If DISPLAYONEXTRACT=1 is set, then taking the new 'a' option from the Semplice main menu will not only extract the album art but will additionally display it in a pop-up, non-editable window in the middle of your monitor. Set that parameter to anything other than a value of 1, however (or don't set it at all), and album art will still be extracted, but won't then be auto-displayed.
Upgrading to the new Semplice version is a simple matter of running the command semplice --checkver, following the prompts and providing your sudo password when it's asked for. Make sure that curl is installed before you try this, however, otherwise the upgrade will fail silently. [Curl is, incidentally, now made a software prerequisite for initial installation of Semplice, for precisely this reason!]
Second: Giocoso 2.03 is now out. The changes since version 2.02 are only bugfixes: there are no new features! However, one of the bugs was quite severe, in that the code needed to perform proper randomisation when selection parameters were provided (such as 'maxduration' or 'composer name') was broken. It still played something, but wasn't randomising correctly: but that's now fixed. The changelog lists some specifics, but there aren't many of them to detail, even so!
Upgrading to the latest Giocoso is accomplished in the usual way: giocoso --checkver ...and follow the prompts.
Have fun upgrading and let me know ([email protected]) if you encounter any issues.
By the way, a new version of Niente is, ...er... imminent. I will endeavour to document it and release it before January is done, but prior experience suggests that a slip to February is on the cards!