1.0 Introduction
Niente is a FLAC integrity checker for Linux, Windows 10 & 11, macOS and Raspberry Pi.
You point it at a tree structure of folders full of FLACs and let it construct a database of what FLAC files exist. At any point after that initial folder scan, you can tell Niente to step through each file found in its database and analyse it for physical corruption and logical inconsistencies. After that, and at your leisure, you tell Niente to generate reports about the various sorts of corruption it has found.
Physical corruption is perhaps the most serious issue (caused by bit-rot and hard disk corruption) and is detected because during every analysis run, Niente computes a digital 'fingerprint' of the audio signal found in each file, storing the results in its database. Every subsequent analysis triggers the calculation of fresh audio fingerprints for each FLAC. Should the new fingerprint ever not match the previous one, you immediately know that some sort of physical corruption of the audio signal has taken place -at which point, you re-rip the original CD or revert to a known-good backup.
In addition to checking for physical corruption or degradation in this way, Niente will scan for various types of logical corruption or inconsistencies, as follows:
- Is the YEAR (or DATE) tag completely empty?
- If the YEAR tag contains data, is it consistent with what date is found in the ALBUM tag?
- Is the PERFORMER tag completely empty?
- If the PERFORMER tag contains data, does it match something found in the COMMENT tag?
- Are there recordings which have under-sized (or non-square) embedded album art?
- Are there recordings whose peak volume levels are significantly below what they could be (and thus could use a 'volume boost')?
Anything listed with these sorts of logical inconsistencies can be simply fixed up with a little bit of re-tagging or volume boosting (perhaps using my own Semplice program!)
Crucially, Niente will only ever perform these checks in a manner that doesn't alter the FLAC files themselves: files are only ever read from, never written to.
A large music collection can take a long time to analyse fully (my own 16,000+ FLACs take about 24 hours to scan on a 7 year old laptop, for example). Fortunately, Niente helps in this regard by allowing you to do 'partial analysis' as well as 'full analysis': partial runs only process the files which haven't already been processed. An infrequent full analysis can then be scheduled infrequently (say, once a month or so) to analyse from scratch every music file in your collection. Niente also offers a much quicker 'logical only' analysis, where it is allowed to perform its inter-tag consistency analysis without ever once worrying about whether your music files are physically corrupted: this is a much faster check altogether as a result.
New in Version 4, Niente is now run from a simple-to-use menu interface. Its file-scanning and integrity checking tasks can also, however, be automated as non-interactive command line tasks, so that time-consuming analysis of a large music collection can be scheduled during the night or at other 'off-peak' hours. It therefore shares the same characteristics (in appearance and behaviour) as its 'cousins', Giocoso (the FLAC player) and Semplice (the FLAC manager). Users of those other programs will feel comfortable with Niente from the outset, I hope.
2.0 The Name
If you are a classical music fan, you will probably already know that niente means ‘a gradual dying away of volume until ...nothing’ -and if you aren't, then: now you know!
The point of the name was to suggest that the ultimate goal for checking your FLACs for physical integrity and logical consistency is that you want a report that lists a bunch of zeroes: nothing in your music collection falls foul of the physical or logical tests. Additionally, the software itself should fade away from your notice until only a bare recollection of its existence is left: it's ideally to be left to run as a background task that you pay no attention to, unless problems are detected. Otherwise, it should just disappear from view!
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