Absolutely Baching – Page 9 – ♬♪ A Voyage Around My Ears ♬♪

A word about Emby

Posted on 29th January 202229th January 2022 by hjr

Sometimes, it takes someone asking a question to make you realise you've been doing something dumb for quite a long time! This post will tell the story of one such question, realisation and (most importantly) the fix! So, my thanks to Jeff in advance for having asked the question that made me realise I've been doing Emby wrong all these years!

But first, of course, I have to explain what 'Emby' is! Well, it's a mostly-free, but not open source, media server. You install it on a spare computer and it catalogues whatever media files you point it at. They can be music, photographs or videos -so Emby can manage a collection of movies or photo albums as well as a large classical music collection. By the power of networking, this Emby server makes the assorted media it knows about available to any other device that you can point at it. These Emby clients can be nothing more complex than a web browser, but they can also be dedicated apps, available for all sorts of operating systems and devices. To put it as simply as I can, then, Emby lets my carefully-curated music collection be accessed from a phone in a car; or from a laptop in a Polish hotel when I'm on holiday; or from a new Android tablet I might be using when score-reading in the garden. [...]

Putting it simply...

Posted on 27th January 202225th February 2022 by hjr

A reader recently got in touch to ask about my Axioms of Classical Tagging article, giving me the strong impression that my article makes it all sound too hard to tag things correctly... and I think he may have been right on that score! So I thought I'd simplify that article here, reducing its long, discursive justification of things to a few simple principles. If you want to understand why things should be as I'm about to spell it out, read the full article. For a short-cut guide to tagging correctly, however... read on!

There are just three basic principles to grasp from the outset, namely: [...]

Giocoso Update - 1.08

Posted on 23rd January 202223rd January 2022 by hjr

A small announcement that I've just released a new version of Giocoso: the current version number is accordingly bumped to 1.08.

The changes made in this version are really quite minor and inconsequential. Principally, they consist of a better tidying up of temporary files when the Giocoso player is interrupted (by a Ctrl+C) or has finished playing something. In earlier versions, if a 'cuesheet' had been produced for a play, that cuesheet would be left lying in the $HOME/.local/share/giocoso folder when the play had finished (or been terminated early). Now, the program deletes such cuesheets as soon as the play terminates for whatever reason. [...]

Autopilot Scores

Posted on 21st January 202221st January 2022 by hjr

An autopilot, says Wikipedia, is a system used to control the path of an aircraft, car, marine craft or spacecraft without requiring constant manual control by a human operator. Autopilots do not replace human operators. Instead, the autopilot assists the operator's control of the vehicle, allowing the operator to focus on broader aspects of operations (for example, monitoring the trajectory, weather and on-board systems).

In that spirit, I've long wanted to produce 'autopilot full scores': that is, full scores of orchestral or choral works which have controls that allow swift and accurate navigation by the reader through the score, without requiring constant manual (and maniacal) page-turning whenever a repeat or a jump is called for. They won't replace the reader's intervention completely, but they should be able to let the reader focus on more important things than mere score navigation -like, the spectacular nature of the orchestration being employed by the composer or the economy with which the composer achieves a particular effect or other. [...]

"Automated" Music Score Navigation

Posted on 14th January 202219th January 2022 by hjr

In a mad fit of recent birthday spending, I decided to shell out rather more than I'd intended on a new Android tablet -the one you can see at the left. It's a "Chuwi HiPad Plus", which isn't a name you're likely to find tripping off the lips of many any time soon, I think! It is, however, readily available from Amazon UK.

The reason for the purchase? Well: I like listening to my music whilst following along with a full score. I have a bookcase full of such orchestral and operatic scores, and I find that seeing the music as you listen to it very helpful for drawing your attention to this or that nuance of orchestration. Trouble is, orchestral scores are fiendishly expensive to buy new... which is why I've long made a habit of trying to buy them second-hand when possible! Even el-cheapo second-hand scores, however, have a tendency to be very big and very heavy, and not something that's trivially easy to hold whilst listening to music in your favourite comfy chair! [...]

Cleaning PDFs

Posted on 22nd December 202123rd December 2021 by hjr

When I buy digital music from the likes of Prestoclassical, it often (though not always) comes with a digital PDF version of the booklet that would have accompanied the physical CD in its jewel case. An example of the front page of one such PDF is shown at the left, belonging to a digital download of the film music of William Alwyn I bought back in October.

The trouble with such digitised booklets, however, is that the PDF often contains data embedded within the file that is not necessarily something you want to keep. In this case, for example, if I open the purchased booklet PDF in my standard PDF viewer (on Kubuntu, that's Okular) and select File -> Properties, I see this: [...]

Target Achieved!

Posted on 3rd December 2021 by hjr

Back on 5th November, I wrote about how I was steadily listening to more and more of my previously-unplayed (in Giocoso, at least!) recordings. With some graphing and a line or two of best-fit, I predicted I might get to the 50%-unplayed mark by about "December 3rd or 4th" -though with some uncertainties around Benjamin Britten Day and the ever-constant acquisition of new recordings, maybe causing that date to blow out a bit.

Well, the graph at the left tells you the original prediction was fairly accurate after all: the 50% unplayed/50% played mark was finally achieved late on November 30th. [...]

Happy Benjamin Britten Day!

Posted on 22nd November 20214th December 2021 by hjr

The thumbnail at the left will tell those in the know where I have spent the past day: it's the beach at Aldeburgh, in Suffolk. It was the home of Benjamin Britten and his partner Peter Pears for about 20 years from the late 1950s on.

The reason for the visit now? Well, today is 22nd November, which is St. Cecilia's Day (Cecilia being the Patron Saint of Music). It also happens to be Benjamin Britten's birthday! Coincidence? I think not!! [...]

Minisforum UM250 Thermals

Posted on 7th November 20218th November 2021 by hjr

Stock picture of a Minisforum UM250 small form factor PC

About a month ago, as I wrote at the time, I stopped using my 2012-vintage PC and once again started using the Minisforum UM250 small form factor PC you see at the left as my main PC. I had tried once before (back in May), but had been put off by the tendency of the Minisforum to crash or have strange graphical glitches. Second time was mostly a charm, however: the use of Kubuntu, rather than Arch or Manjaro, seems to have calmed the beast down to the point where it didn't crash and didn't do weird things with screen drawing.

I've accordingly been using the Minisforum UM250 very happily for a month or so. It doesn't have the memory heft of my old PC (that had 96GB of ECC RAM; this only has 16GB of ordinary stuff!) and its CPU, though a shiny (but not-so-new) AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 2500U, doesn't seem to have the raw power of my former Intel Xeon CPU E5-2680 v2: despite dating from 2013, its 20 threads seem to easily outpace the Minisforum's mere 8. [...]

Where we're at...

Posted on 5th November 20211st December 2021 by hjr

I thought maybe a 'year in review' as regards to listening to music might be in order. It has been almost a year since I wrote and started using the 'Absolutely Baching Music Player' or AMP, beginning on January 9th 2021. On June 1st, AMP was superseded by Giocoso. But, using one or the other, I've been playing my music in more-or-less randomised form for the best part of a year.

I say 'more or less', because -by means of Giocoso's run-time switches- I've been tweaking and influencing what 'random' means. For example, when I started playing things in Giocoso on 1st June, it turned out that some 87% of my music collection was listed as having not been played in either player. That is, AMP or Giocoso between them only had records of having played a mere 13% of my music collection. [...]

News from Niente

Posted on 1st November 20215th December 2021 by hjr

Today, I'm releasing Version 2.0 of my Niente FLAC integrity-testing tool. It comes about 4 months after version 1.0 was made available -and during those 4 months I've spent a lot more time focussed on PC migrations and cataloguing my backlog of new music acquisitions than on checking the internal integrity of my existing music files (which is never a wise trade-off!) But hopefully that explains the distinct lack of updates to Niente in all that time: I was barely paying it any attention at all, to be honest.

Had I been doing so, however, I would have swiftly realised that whatever medication I was taking at the time of the Version 1.0 release (and I think at this point I'm going to blame the Covid vaccine; or Aspirin; or something!), it was having serious effects on my coding abilities! Because, putting it bluntly, I've spent the past couple of weeks reviewing the code and wondering what on Earth I thought I was doing releasing it at all, since it was total rubbish, to the point where if you didn't run it with the --force switch, it barely did anything functional! [...]

Giocoso on [K]ubuntu

Posted on 7th October 20218th November 2021 by hjr

Back in April of this year, as I mentioned previously, I bought myself a new Minisforum UM250 small-form-factor PC. The experiment with using it with Arch and/or Manjaro proved less than successful -so I reverted back to my vintage 2012 PC and retired the UM250 back to its box, in which it has sat ever since, on one of the bookshelves in my study.

Around June of this year (I think), I happened to be laid up in bed (after one of my Covid-19 vaccine shots) and was thus using an old laptop for browsing the web. It was a 2016-vintage Dell of some bog-standard sort. But way-back-when, I had installed multiple operating systems on it, so I could boot into Windows 10, Ubuntu 18.x and Manjaro as and when I chose... and I happened to notice that the laptop's fan noise was considerably worse when booted into Manjaro than it was if I booted into Ubuntu. I can't remember if it was any worse or better in Windows, but it struck me at the time that in the presence of laptop-style hardware, Ubuntu seemed to have a better lid on thermal management than Manjaro did. I don't know if that's actually true or not -or, if it is, why that might be. But if made me think that if I had conducted my earlier Minisforum experiment with Ubuntu (or one of its derivative flavours) rather than with Arch or Manjaro, maybe it would have run more quietly too, and thus the outcome might have been happier all round. [...]