♬♪ A Voyage Around My Ears ♬♪
You will perhaps have noticed a dramatic change to the 'look and feel' of the website: the result of getting bored with what had been the look-and-feel for nearly 2 years, I'm afraid! I've gone minimal and, I hope, more 'punchy' and easier to read in consequence.
There may be a few colour/font tweaks and twiddles in the days and weeks to come, but I think most of the disruption is done and dusted. [...]
Another week, another new version of the Absolutely Baching Music Player (AMP to its friends). We move from 1.10 to 1.11... and the new release contains two basic new features being introduced!
First, a new run-time parameter is provided called --artsize=xxx. The 'xxx' values permitted are 'small', 'medium' and 'large', with 'medium' being the default if the parameter is not supplied at all, or if it's supplied with an otherwise invalid value. [...]
Another day, another new version of the AMP Player!
This one is a fairly minor release to version 1.10, bringing with it a new command line switch: --negate and some miscellaneous and fairly minor bug-fixes. [...]
A few days ago, I reported that I had finally re-balanced by 'plays': my top ten composers were no longer so dominant in my history of composition plays as they had once been.
I mentioned then that I had, by way of response, been able to remove my 'top ten' from the excludes.txt which prevented AMP from playing anything by those composers. I had hoped that, in response, AMP would start playing at least something of my top ten! Sadly, the maths is against them still: if there are 500 composers in a collection, then the odds of any of the top ten being picked for a random play is 1 in 50, or about 2%. I wouldn't want to bet on a horse with those odds! [...]
Another couple of software updates to announce.
AMP is bumped to version 1.08. The code changes are mostly minor and cosmetic and to do with displaying a count-down timer indicating when play of the currently-playing music will end. Slightly unfortunately, a side-effect of this new time display is that if you were to Ctrl+Z to pause play, the countdown timer would be wrong on playback resumption, and two pieces of music would play simultaneously when the resumed piece gets near its end. I may revisit this in the future, but for now, I've just disabled Ctrl+Z completely. If you want to pause playback, hit Ctrl+C and terminate it completely (which actually was my original design goal anyway!) [...]
Hurrah!
Finally, a nearly two-year effort to re-balance my classical music listening efforts came to a conclusion. [...]
I last wrote about changes and updates to AMP (the Absolutely Baching Music Player), way back on January 10th.
I thought the start of a new month would be a good idea to catch up on them, particularly as the pace of AMP development is slowing down and the thing appears to have just about reached a final form I can live with! [...]
It's been a little over a fortnight since I modified my AMP player to work with a database -and, when it does so, to record every 'play' it decides on in a database table of its own.
So now, 15 days later, I can analyze that 'plays' table to determine if AMP has been doing the job I designed it for: picking a wide variety of composers and music genres, at random, and thus not creating any 'favourites'! [...]
Well, that didn't take long!
First, I discovered rather late in the day that a cue sheet describing a large 'super-FLAC' audio file cannot, by technical design, list more than 99 files. So, if you've got more than 99 FLAC-tracks that you want to combine into a single super-FLAC then, you can't, because the cue sheet cannot contain enough entries to describe it all. [...]
I've been having an interesting discussion of late, over on the Talk Classical forums.
It began life as someone saying they still preferred to use physical media for their classical music listening pleasure rather than any of the streaming, YouTube or similar 'consume-but-don't-own' musical options available these days. [...]
I have bumped the Absolutely Baching Universal Audio Converter script up to version 2.0 (from 1.13). The changes are minor and mostly cosmetic, but there are some bug fixes applied too, so the upgrade is recommended. Upgrade by downloading the script by clicking this link. Then, assuming you downloaded it to your $HOME/Downloads folder, just issue this command:
sudo mv $HOME/Downloads/auac.sh /usr/bin/auac.sh
The full documentation has been corrected slightly, too. [...]
I had a slight mishap with my main PC on New Years' Eve: Manjaro released a new kernel and I installed it without thinking -and, though I believe the PC rebooted fine, I couldn't actually see anything on my monitor, so whether it had or not was really kind of moot!
So, a swift rebuild later, and we're back in business -though it's not quite how I imagined I would spend my New Years' Eve! [...]