Page Category: Giocoso

1.0 Introduction

Giocoso has no real play controls to speak of (by design, I hasten to add!) You cannot pause, rewind or fast-forward through playback, for example. You don't pause a concerto in mid-movement at the concert hall, do you? Right: Giocoso follows that exact same model of play. Once started, you listen until the end 🙂 This remains true in Giocoso Version 2: you still cannot pause playback.

Of course, you can stop play in Giocoso: simply press Ctrl+C and playback will be terminated immediately. There might be a couple of seconds of music that continue to play from data that's been buffered already, but generally termination of playback is pretty much instantaneous. Bear in mind that a play that is terminated by Ctrl+C is regarded as never having happened at all. There will thus be no record of it having taken place in Giocoso's destination database (assuming there is one); it won't get scrobbled to Last.fm (even if scrobbling was configured and asked for); and the composer of the interrupted piece won't be subject to a time-bar, since Giocoso doesn't recognise him (or her) as having been played to any degree... even if you were 3 hours 15 minutes in to a 3 hour 16 minute-long opera! Giocoso will terminate cleanly when it has played to the end of the last possible 'selection' it has been asked to play (i.e., whatever number of recordings was requested by use of the --selections= runtime parameter). There can be anything between 1 and 99 selections specified, with the default being 1 -meaning that by default, Giocoso will play a single piece of music and then quit cleanly. [...] 

1.0 Introduction

Giocoso's database not only stores details about what music you have in your collection, but also what music you've played from your collection. As each play of a recording completes, the fact of that play is noted in the database. Giocoso then provides a number of runtime parameters which you can use to query things about that play history -and, indeed, about your music collection generally. These reporting runtime parameters trigger Giocoso's querying of its database, rather than the playing of any new music.

By definition, all reporting parameters must be used together with the --dbname=xxxx runtime parameter, so that we know precisely what database you are wanting to report on. Note that rather than specifying the database name as a runtime parameter, you can set it in the Giocoso persistent configuration file (DBNAME=xxxx). If that's set in the configuration file, then the runtime parameter is not needed -though if it's provided anyway, it overrides whatever the configuration file may be set to. [...] 

1.0 Introduction

Giocoso's default mode of working with a back-end database is first to pick a composer at random, and then to pick something written by that composer, again at random. This two-fold randomness ensures that Giocoso doesn't end up playing lots and lots of Mozart (say), simply because he has contributed a huge amount of music to your collection: during that first-pass randomisation process of composer, Mozart stands as much chance of being selected as Qigang Chen or Frederic Cliffe. If you randomise the composer, you end up distributing plays of compositions across all of them, roughly equally.

But that is only Giocoso's default way of playing music: if you prefer, you can always 'intervene' in the randomisation process by specifying a number of runtime parameters to 'guide' Giocoso in its randomisation process. There are five selective runtime parameters that force Giocoso to consider: [...] 

1.0 Introduction

"Scrobbling" is the slightly odd name that means 'sending details of the music to which I've been listening up to a cloud service' -and the 'cloud service' everyone usually thinks of in this context is Last.fm. The vast majority of software music players for the PC do this reporting because it can be a useful way of building up a long-term history of your listening habits. That in turn can lead you to realise you've over-listened to this composer's music and under-listened to this one, and thus the history of your past listening can guide and influence your future adventures in music.

Giocoso can scrobble details of everything it plays to Last.fm, just as all those other software music players do. However, it doesn't do so by default (for obvious privacy-related reasons) and if you want it to scrobble, you must first configure it to do so. Those are two entirely separate steps. You can configure-to-scrobble without then enabling actual scrobbling, in which case no scrobbling takes place even though it could do so. You can also not-configure-to-scrobble but still ask Giocoso to perform scrobbling, in which case no scrobbling takes place because Giocoso simply doesn't know how to. You have to do both things to get scrobbling working in other words, and this article will tell you how. [...] 

1.0 Introduction

Giocoso will display album art whenever a new recording starts to play. How -and whether- it does so is controlled by the --artsize runtime parameter. That parameter takes four possible values:

• small (300x300 pixels)
• medium (450x450 pixels)
• large (900x900 pixels)
• none

If the value supplied is 'none' then no album art is displayed at all. If any of the other three values are supplied, then album art will be displayed, at the various different sizes indicated. Giocoso only displays embedded album art: that is, album artwork which is physically stored within the FLAC file itself. External album art (such as 'folder.jpg', which is commonly found on Windows) will not be displayed under any circumstances. [...]