The Giocoso Hardware Player

Posted on by hjr

At the left, in the thumbnail, you see my brand new media player. It's totally silent. It's a complete mess of cables and chaos. And it's smaller than a coke can.

I am, of course, using Giocoso as my software to play music. I've been doing that for a long time, using assorted standard PCs, small form factor PCs, tiny PCs, laptops and Lord knows what else. The trouble with all of those modes of playback: every single computing device has involved a fan somewhere. If not on the CPU itself, at least in its power supply. Now, fans make noise... and the one thing you definitely do not want in your music room is a source of noise. So for absolutely ages, I've been after a way to run Giocoso that's completely silent: what you see in the thumbnail to the left (which you can click on to get a full-sized version) is the first tentative steps on that road. [...] 

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Niente Version 3.0 - Now Released

Posted on by hjr

As promised (rather longer ago than I'd like to admit!), Niente Version 3.0 has finally been released. It's my 'FLAC checker' tool, just as Giocoso is my FLAC player and Semplice is my FLAC tagger.

It's a very substantial re-working of the Version 2 code, so upgrading is non-trivial and you'd basically better commit to completely re-working your crontabs to schedule it, and so on. The principle new feature is that it now runs on MacOS and Windows. [...] 

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Offer accepted...

Posted on by hjr

Well, that turned out quicker than expected!

A house was viewed about a week ago in south Lincolnshire (about due east from the current home, close to The Wash and thus within striking distance of all things East Anglian). An offer was made ...and accepted within the time it took to drive half-way back home! [...] 

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Moving on...

Posted on by hjr

After nearly six years living in Nottingham, we've decided it's time to move on. Our house has, in fact, already sold (but the English system of house purchase means that "sold" doesn't have a really good definition: either party can pull out, for any reason, right up until the time money hits your bank account!). We therefore find ourselves now doing frequent day-trips to Norfolk and Suffolk, our preferred new counties of potential habitation. Unfortunately, we haven't yet found a suitable replacement for the place we are shortly to be required to move out of, so further day-trips are required.

That, in turn, means little time is presently available for software development, so the new Niente is likely to be delayed a bit. Sorry about that. [...] 

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New Year Software Releases

Posted on by hjr

A little late (but a birthday bash in Bruges will do that to a man!), but Happy New Year for 2023, and by way of making up for my tardiness, I give you two new software releases.

First is Semplice 1.01. The program has acquired the usual slew of bugfixes and minor tweaks and twiddles, but also a couple of nice enhancements and new features. The main new features are: the ability to extact and/or display embedded album art; the ability to create spectrum analysis graphs of the audio signal in a FLAC; and the ability to directly edit the contents of any cuesheet embedded within a FLAC. See the changelog for details. [...] 

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Adventures in Spectrum Analysis

Posted on by hjr

I've been aware for years that it's possible to produce the sorts of images you see in the thumbnail at the left of this post: frequency analysis graphs of an audio file of one sort or another. Audiophiles have been swooning over them for years, but I never have. If my ears were satisfied with the sound of a recording, what additional good would it do me to do a spectrum analysis of that recording?

Well: for the most part, I still think that's true... but I had a very specific reason for dabbling in them lately, which then led me down the rabbit hole of finding them fascinating! I thought I'd share a little about it. [...] 

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Bye-bye, Last.fm

Posted on by hjr

I've long been an advocate for registering the fact you just played concerto X or symphony Y with a web-accessible store of data, such as Last.fm. I've been doing precisely that with everything I've played since January 8th 2008, so Last.fm have a record of about 14 years of my listening history. The thumbnail at the left shows you that's quite considerable: 202,000+ "scrobbles" (i.e., a record of the completion of a 'play') have been received in that time,

My top 'plays' as recorded by Last.fm are (in descending order) Britten, JS Bach, Vaughan Williams, Handel and Sibelius -which isn't so hugely different from what has been recorded on this very website since June 2021. [...] 

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Semplice Version 1.0 - Now Available for Download

Posted on by hjr

It's only three months late (!), but Semplice, the all-new, all-singing, all-dancing FLAC manager for Linux, Windows, macOS and Raspberry Pi, has just been released and is available for download, with instructions for doing that available from its web page.

In a nutshell, Semplice allows you to (1) tag FLACs; (2) apply volume boosts to FLACs; (3) concatenate per-track FLACs into single-file, whole-composition SuperFLACs; (4) split SuperFLACs back out into being per-track FLACs; and (5) convert audio files from and to about 7 or 8 different audio codecs (so, FLAC to MP3, for example; or SACD's DSF to super hi-res FLACs). [...] 

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Happy Benjamin Britten Day!

Posted on by hjr

It seems numerically appropriate that 22/11/22 should be signifcant, but it would be significant anyway as the 109th anniversary of the birth of Benjamin Britten (and St. Cecilia's Day, patron saint of music). As is customary in these parts, Britten's will be the only music played today.

It is full of wit, orchestral brilliance, profound pain and darkness and unerring insight into the mind of Man. His is not the sweet, pastoral music that comforts without challenge, but it is extremely well-crafted and brings its own rewards in good time -and I commend it to anyone that wants to listen to some of the best music of the 20th Century.# [...] 

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QEII

Posted on by hjr

Like everyone else, I expect, I had been aware that Queen Elizabeth II was in declining health and was unlikely to last much longer (though I personally had my fingers crossed that she'd last until her centenary, at which point she would have beaten Louis XIV to the title of longest-ever reigning monarch: that's the competitive historian in me, I guess!) I was nevertheless taken aback when the news broke that the decline had been faster, and more terminal, than anticipated.

I am neither ardent monarchist nor fervent republican: I just think the Head of State mostly does ceremonial duties and therefore the person performing the ribbon-cutting doesn't really matter. On the other hand, if you elect Heads of States directly, they tend to become Presidential and centers of power in their own right -which doesn't suit the Westminster system very well at all. Plus, certain Presidents (mentioning no names, but the French and US ones spring to mind) tend to behave as quasi-monarchs anyway, so if you're going that route, what's the difference?! Appointing former political leaders to the ceremonial Head of State role also doesn't sit well, I think: they have a past, and past allegiances and loyalties to mates, and one of the nice things about a hereditary Head of State is that they owe no-one any favours. It's quite a nice check-and-balance to have, in other words, where the ultimate referee of the constitutional game is beholden to no-one for their position. [...] 

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