♬♪ A Voyage Around My Ears ♬♪
As 2023 draws to its close, I thought I'd trawl through my Giocoso music player's database and work out what I've spent the past twelve months doing, as far as listening to classical music goes.
The headline news is that I've played 3,007 unique recordings this year which, cumulatively, lasted for about 69 days (68.93 if you want to be accurate about it!). [...]
I uncovered a silly bug in Giocoso Version 3 on Boxing Day: I had switched off random-play mode and instead instructed the program to play a playlist constructed from anything containing the word 'Christmas' in its ALBUM tag. The music itself all played fine, and everyone was pleased with the festive mood thus created 🙂 Unfortunately, I noticed that by the time the eighth piece was being played, Giocoso was reporting its duration to be over 10 hours! Going back over the play history for that day (now fixed), I saw that Percy Grainger's Sussex Mummers' Christmas Carol was recorded as having played for over 11 hours -when it's actually a piece that lasts about 5 minutes, tops!
What I immediately spotted was that the recorded durations for each piece was in fact the cumulative duration for all pieces played up to that point, from the playlist. If the playlist had said to play pieces that were (say) 5, 20, 13, 12 and 15 minutes long, the first piece would have been recorded as lasting for 5 minutes; the next as lasting for 25 minutes; the third as being 38 minutes in length; the fourth as being 50 minutes long; and the last would be recorded as having played for 1 hour 5 minutes. And so on. Throw a couple of Christmas Oratorios into the mix and a piece that should have been recorded as lasting 15 minutes would instead have been recorded as lasting for 10+ hours! [...]
Today is November 22nd 2023. It happens to be Benjamin Britten's 110th birthday; the feast day of St. Cecilia, the patron saint of music and musicians... and, at last, the release day of Giocoso Version 3, this website's homebrew classical music listening software. It all seems so spookily appropriate!
The user manual for it is now therefore available in the usual place. I encourage you to read all of it, of course: but if not that, then at least Sections 2, 3 and 4. [...]
Behold my "new" hardware classical music player!
Yeah: it's not exactly a beauty, nor redolent of tech-nerd sex appeal, I realise. It is, in fact, an HP T620 Flexible Thin Client and dates from 2013 or so. So I just bought myself a wheezingly underpowered ten year-old computer: what was I thinking?! [...]
I'm now in Giocoso 3 documentation mode: writing up what functionality exists; what functionality doesn't exist; and how best to use the software to do its principal job of playing classical music in a quasi-intelligent way.
There are (pause to count...) 28 distros to install onto, perform functional tests and make notes on quirks, weirdnesses and showstoppers. Each distro tends to ship with three or four desktop environments (KDE, Gnome, Budgie, Pantheon, XFCE and the like), so the number of permutations at this stage is a bit bewildering. Not to say, time consuming. [...]
The Other Half has long berated me for not selling my software, or otherwise attempting to monetise this site. I have long resisted doing so -but as buying new music or new computers to test and develop things on is getting expensive, I've finally relented, in a modest way: I've just opened an account at 'buy me a coffee', a trustworthy site that takes donations from grateful members of the public and sees them on their way to creators. I've labelled my account as 'buy me a music score', as that's what I'll probably end up doing with any amounts of cash I get from it, though a newer desktop PC is on the wishlist, too!
There's zero obligation and I'm not going to promote it heavily, but if you value anything I've produced here and can spare a fiver or so, I'd be grateful (and it might just keep the Other Half quiet, too!). Check it out at: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/absolutelybaching [...]
I've reached the persnickety bug-hunting phase of Giocoso Version 3 development! This is good, because it means a release of Version 3 is not too far away. It's bad, though, because as you uncover new, obviously stupid bugs, you spend your days thinking, 'How could I be so stupid!'
A case in point was just triggered by what I thought was going to be a trivial little addition to this website: adding a 'play count' column to my music play history listing. Adding the column itself and getting it populated from my Giocoso database was indeed quite simple. What wasn't expected was this: [...]
A recent correspondent put me in mind of the fact that, having at last settled into my new home, it was perhaps time to do a sort-of guided tour through it as far as explaining what, technologically speaking, makes my music play. I notice, for example, that just a few weeks ago I took a photo of my music 'cabinet' in which an Apple Mac Mini (vintage 2012) took pride of place as the music-producing PC. Well, that's not true these days (as regular readers will probably know, I suffer from a bad case of operating system re-installationitis, with consequent side-effects of PC moving-aroundism):
As you can see, I don't exactly do a lot of dusting! As you can also see, the Mac Mini has been replaced by my Raspberry Pi 4: though it can have a fan fitted to keep it cool, mine is housed within an aluminium case that acts as a very good passive heatsink. Temperatures are therefore seldom above 50°C, and I've accordingly not bothered to fit the fan: the Pi is completely silent in operation in consequence ...and that's a key requirement of any IT equipment that sits in my music listening room (for hopefully obvious reasons!) [...]
At last, I've just added the 600th composer to my music collection. The composer in question is Cipriano Potter, whose grim visage you see at the left. Despite his first name, he was born and bred in London, UK (in 1791, in fact, dying some 80 years later, in 1871). His music is not especially well-known, though he was on first name terms with Beethoven (who thought him 'a good fellow') and Wagner called him an 'amiable contrapuntist'. His obscurity owes much to his decision to stop composing completely around his 45th year so that he could concentrate on his administration duties at the Royal Academy of Music, of which he was then principal. He was thus influential on English music, without necessarily having composed a lot of it (though he still managed to write nine symphonies, three piano concertos and a bazillion solo piano pieces).
I mention the new addition only because I remember being ticked off by a good friend of mine in Sydney, back in around 2005, that the fact that my music collection consisted mostly of Britten and Handel was "a bit sad". A pursuit of musical diversity on my part thus ensued, and I think my friend would be pleased today with the sexta-centennial results of his gentle nagging! [...]
I am old-school. I remember doing X server stuff in 1987. I like X Server. The ability to pipe a desktop across the ends of the Earth, courtesy of X and a bit of Ethernet never ceases to amaze me.
But X is old-hat, not just old-school and Wayland is the new kid on the block, stealing its milk money and cigarettes. [...]
Just a short note to advise that at some point today†, we're having solar panels fitted. That means the electricity will have to be turned off for (so we are told) "a number of hours". That in turn means the web server hosting this site will... er, stop hosting it, for a number of hours!
The short version is: I'll have to go off-line at some point today†, but normal service should resume a few hours thereafter. [...]
The photograph you see at the left was taken on April 30th, 2023 -about four days after we've physically moved into our new house. You'll note that one of the rooms cannot really be walked into, since it is jam-packed with boxes and belongings! The rest of the house was never quite that bad, but it was pretty bad: there were 150+ boxes and on day four I think we'd unpacked about 4 of them 🙂
Around three weeks later (on May 24th, to be exact), the room destined to become my music room looked like this: [...]