Today, at last, I'm finally releasing Version 4.0 of the Niente FLAC checking program. I've been using it daily for around 2 months now, so I reckon most of its quirks and foibles (and bugs!) have been ironed out by now!
Niente performs physical and logical integrity checks on your FLAC collection, without ever modifying the FLACs themselves. Physically, it makes sure that the music contents of your FLACs hasn't changed over time (due to silent corruption or 'bit rot'). Logically, it takes this website's axioms on how classical music ought to be tagged and checks whether your FLAC tags match the axiomatic requirements. For example, it will check that, if you've said 'Karajan' is the distinguishing artist on a recording, that the name 'Karajan' also appears in the COMMENT tag for the FLACs associated with that recording. It can also do checks to ensure you've embedded nicely-sized album art in each of your FLACs, or whether all your FLACs are at their maximum-possible non-distorting volume.
This new release is a major bump from the prior 3.01 version: the program acquires the same sort of menu-driven interface that both Giocoso and Semplice sport already. The standout new features are that Version 4.0 makes the distinction between scanning for new FLACs and integrity-testing them much clearer. File scanning comes in obviously distinct "full" and "new-files-only" modes; integrity checking is likewise "full" or "differential", depending on whether you're re-scanning all FLACs or merely wanting integrity checks applied to newly-added files. Finally, Niente Version 4 gets a stack of re-worked runtime options that are designed to permit scheduled, non-interactive running of both file scans and integrity checks. There's even a runtime option to produce the sort of integrity check report that you see on this very website. Under the hood, though not particularly visible to a user, the program also just got a whole lot more modular (and thus easier to bug-fix and update).
The fundamentals of how Niente works and what it does under the hood haven't changed significantly between version 3 and 4, but it's workflow is definitely more streamlined and it is (I think) an easier program to use accordingly. There is a new user manual to accompany the new software release. I'd recommend a waltz through its 'Installing Niente' and 'Quick Start Guide' sections at a minimum. For a really short guide to installing the new program, however: open a terminal and type
cd
wget doco.absolutelybaching.com/neninst
bash neninst
Provide the sudo password when prompted and let the installer do its stuff. After that, launch the program using the graphical launcher provided on your desktop or the Multimedia (or equivalent) start menu options; or open a terminal and type the bare command niente. After that, it's a matter of creating a database and then running integrity checks: the user manual will guide you on the detail of all that, of course.
The new version of Niente does not modify any prior version your may have installed. It is installed alongside prior versions. That means you can continue to use the old version until you're happy with the way Niente 4.0 works. The Version 4 installer adjusts things slightly so that the plain command 'niente' would launch Niente 4.0; if you wanted to run Niente 3.x you'd have to type the command '/usr/bin/niente3.sh' in full. Once you're comfortable with Version 4.0, you can simply delete version 3.x files manually.
This release marks the end of development of Niente Version 3: it goes to the used code scrapyard of doom immediately and gets no further enhancements or bug-fixes. Version 4 is where it's all 'at' now!!
This now completes the smorgasbord of software I've written for use with classical music: Semplice tags it, Niente checks it, Giocoso plays it. Working together, all three programs ensure you can enjoy well-tagged, visually appealing and logically and physically coherent FLACs at your pleasure 🙂 As such, today also marks the end of significant development effort for Giocoso, Semplice and Niente: they're now all in a state where I'm generally happy they do what I want them to do, in the way I want them to do it. There will still be bug-fixes, tweaks and enhancements of course. But major and fundamental development is probably over for a considerable period (it's been two years since Giocoso first made an appearance, so it's taken me a while to get to this point!) That finally means I get to just listen to music, catalogue my long backlog of new music acquisitions and sort out the equally large backlog of website maintenance issues, such as trying to write thumbnail biographies for all the composers in my collection. This makes me happy!
I recommend the new release to you and trust you'll find it useful, too.