Page Category: Giocoso

Introduction

Giocoso Version 2 has been tested on most of the Linux distros that were, as of May 2022, in the top 20 of the DistroWatch Page Hit Ranking, so hopefully almost all regular Linux users will be covered! Broadly speaking, anything based on Ubuntu, Debian, OpenSuse and Arch should work without drama, along with some 'outliers' that appear not to be part of a larger distro 'family', such as Solus and Fedora. Giocoso runs happily on distros using PulseAudio and ALSA sound systems, and regardless of whether X11 or Wayland is being used as the graphical server mechanism. Your choice of desktop environment also makes no difference to whether Giocoso works or not: it runs happily on Cinnamon, MATE, XFCE, KDE, Gnome, Budgie, LXDE, LXQt and any number of other desktop environments and window managers.

In general, Giocoso requires installation of ffmpeg, flac, ImageMagick and Sqlite3 and will prompt for those things if they are not already present on your system. Despite my best efforts, it is still possible that Giocoso on a particular distro may prompt for the installation of (say) 'ImageMagick' (that is, in mixed upper/lower case) when that distro's package name is actually 'imagemagick' (i.e., all lower case). Similar case-confusion might arise elsewhere, too, but ImageMagick seems more susceptible to this issue than most other packages I'm aware of! Hopefully, incidents of this will be rare, but be prepared to switch case to achieve a successful prerequisites installation when 'unknown package' errors otherwise arise. [...] 

1.0 Introduction

Giocoso runs in a terminal session and expects the geometry of that terminal session window to be at least 106 characters wide and 26 lines deep. This is usually configured on most Linux distros by editing the 'Profile' associated with terminal sessions. Here, for example, is how Konsole does it within KDE:

You will usually also be able to configure a profile's default text colouring properties in the same general settings area. For example: [...] 

In Giocoso version 2, all selective parameters can be used with all the others, simultaneously. If you want to 'play previously-unplayed recordings by Britten that last between 20 and 40 minutes', you can do that now, by constructing a selective filter of --composer=britten --unplayedworks --minduration=20 --maxduration=40. The five principal filters (composer, performer, comment, genre and composition) can each be 'negated' by adding an asterisk to their parameter value. Thus --genre=choral --composer=beethoven* would mean 'play choral works by anyone other than Beethoven'. Unplayed and duration filters cannot be negated, mostly because it doesn't make logical sense to do so!

[Back to Front Page]|[Back to Parameter Front Page]|[Administrative Parameters]|[Appearance Parameters]|[Reporting Parameters] [...] 

[Back to Front Page]|[Back to Parameter Front Page]|[Administrative Parameters]|[Appearance Parameters]|[Selective Parameters]

[Back to Front Page]|[Back to Parameter Front Page]|[Administrative Parameters]|[Selective Parameters]|[Reporting Parameters]

[Back to Front Page]|[Back to Parameter Front Page]|[Appearance Parameters]|[Selective Parameters]|[Reporting Parameters]

1.0 Introduction

Giocoso's behaviour can be altered by invoking it with any of a large number of possible runtime parameters. These take the form of double-hyphen+keyword, sometimes with a value assigned to the keyword, sometimes with no value but merely the keyword alone. These parameters are 'tacked on' to the basic command to run Giocoso, so that Giocoso's default behaviour is modified or changed in some way. For example, the bare command giocoso actually means 'run Giocoso in Database Play Mode, the database name will be 'music', album art should be displayed at medium size, no scrobbling will take place' and so on. However, the command giocoso --dbname=main --artsize=none --scrobble means 'run Giocoso in Database Play Mode, the database name will be 'main', album art should not be displayed at all, scrobbling will take place once play has completed'.

The runtime parameters therefore give Giocoso flexibility and capabilities to exploit that you may not have realised could be exploited! There are, in fact, more than 45 possible runtime parameters at the time of writing: you do not need to be intimately familiar with more than a few of them, fortunately! Giocoso's defaults are such that most of them might never need to be used, unless you have very specific requirements. [...] 

1.0 Introduction

Giocoso version 2 is a major update to the original Giocoso classical music playing program, with dozens of new and changed features compared to the original version 1. Chief amongst these, perhaps, are the ability to run on macOS natively and Windows 10 via WSL2; the fact that all selection filters are now usable in any combination; and a persistent configuration file. There are also a number of features that have been dropped since version 1, plus a pile of bug fixes! On this page, I'll summarise each of these classes of change below. Where appropriate, I'll link to full documentation on the relevant features. Anyone that has used Giocoso version 1 will be immediately comfortable with version 2: the changes have not fundamentally altered the way things work!

For a changelog describing modifications to Giocoso version 2 since its first release, please see this separate page. [...] 

1.0 What is Giocoso?

Giocoso is a gapless, trackless, optionally-randomising, optionally-scrobbling command-line FLAC player, intended primarily for the playback of digital classical music, on Windows, Mac and Linux.

Which is a bit of a mouthfull! So let's break that down a bit: [...] 

These links take you to the various sections of the User Manual for Giocoso Version 2. This is an obsolete version of the Giocoso music playing software and you are strongly advised to read the Version 3 User Manual (and install the Version 3 program) instead. Version 2 still works, but it is no longer under active development: there'll be no further bug fixes or feature enhancements, for example.

If you are still insistent on using Giocoso Version 2, however, then I'd strongly advise reading the pages linked to below in their entirety, whilst conceding that, if you are in a hurry, at least read sections 4, 5, 6 and 7 (the program display explained, the way Giocoso works with your digital music collection, installation procedures and play modes). [...]