Absolutely Baching

A relatively small, but nevertheless significant, enhancement to Giocoso has just been released, bringing the program up to Version 3.02.

To understand the new update, you first have to understand the specifics of how Giocoso makes a random selection of a recording to play. It's a two-stage affair: first, a composer is selected at random; second, a recording by that composer is selected. This ensures that an obscure composer has as much chance of being played as the likes of Bach, Beethoven or Brahms. [...] 

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. [...] 

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. [...] 

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! [...]