Page Category: Niente

1.0 Introduction

Niente has long been able (thanks to the Integrity Checks menu, Option 6 or 7) to analyse your FLAC files for their peak loudness: this is documented in the User Manual (see Section 3.5) but by way of a quick refresher:

• Music files reach their loudest non-distorting volume when their peak loudness is measured at 0 dB
• Files quieter than this have negative decibel values for their peak loudness: so a -3dB file is almost as loud as it could be, but a -19dB file is very quiet and far from its maximum possible peak loudness

If you have performed an Option 6 or 7 integrity check, you might see something like this when running a Niente Aggregate Statistics report: [...] 

1.0 Introduction

Arch being a fairly tricky distro to install in an entirely reliable way, various 'child' distros of it have sprung up, each trying to make the installation process simpler and more consistent. Garuda Linux is one of the weirder 'child distros' to have arisen as a result of this need for 'Arch made simpler', with a unique look and style which will repel many, whilst simultaneously endearing it (I'd imagine!) to rather a lot 🙂 I personally cannot stand it and wouldn't touch it with a bargepole... but, at the time of writing, it's 15th on the Distrowatch popularity table, so Niente needs to be able to run on it! Fortunately, it does so with as much ease as it does on any Arch-flavoured distro.

As with all these installation articles, I assume a fresh, default installation of the underlying operating system. I always assume, however, that any installer-provided options to install third-party programs, drivers or audio codec support are taken: not that it makes any difference to the way Niente works, but I just like to be clear on what my working assumptions are 🙂 [...] 

1.0 Introduction

Arch being a fairly tricky distro to install in an entirely reliable way, various 'child' distros of it have sprung up, each trying to make the installation process simpler and more consistent. Endeavour OS is possibly one of the more obscure 'child distros' to have arisen as a result of this need for 'Arch made simpler'.

As with all these installation articles, I assume a fresh, default installation of the underlying operating system. I always assume, however, that any installer-provided options to install third-party programs, drivers or audio codec support are taken: not that it makes any difference to the way Niente works, but I just like to be clear on what my working assumptions are 🙂 [...] 

1.0 Introduction

Arch being a fairly tricky distro to install in an entirely reliable way, various 'child' distros of it have sprung up, each trying to make the installation process simpler and more consistent. Manjaro is probably one of the more popular Arch 'child distros' to have arisen as a result of this need for 'Arch made simpler'! The distro generally behaves as 'proper Arch' would do and thus Niente runs on it without drama and the Niente installation process is identical to that you'd perform on Arch itself, too.

As with all these installation articles, I assume a fresh, default installation of the underlying operating system. I always assume, however, that any installer-provided options to install third-party programs, drivers or audio codec support are taken: not that it makes any difference to the way Niente works, but I just like to be clear on what my working assumptions are 🙂 [...] 

1.0 Introduction

Suse-based distros are a little bit tricky: SLES is the Suse Linux Enterprise Server and is a commercial, server-grade, heavy duty distro. The community release of that same software is called OpenSuse Leap. The 'preview' code that will eventually become OpenSuse Leap (and hence SLES) is available in the form of OpenSuse Tumbleweed. Think of Tumbleweed as a rolling distribution that's ever so slightly unstable; Leap is a rather more stable version of that; and SLES is the final, commercial-grade release of that stabilised code.

Since SLES costs money and I'm too cheap to part with any, Niente has not been tested on SLES, but it has been tested to run perfectly fine on both Leap and Tumbleweed -so you might reasonably expect it to cope with SLES, too: I just can't tell you it does or not, because I literally don't have the relevant software to test on. [...] 

1.0 Introduction

Fedora Linux is a 'consumer' distro that is effectively owned and governed by Red Hat, which makes it a hard pass from me these days, though I was a regular user of it back in 2012-2015 or so. Niente installs and runs on it without issue, with the only potential 'curly bit' being its requirement for the RPM Fusion Free repository to be enabled.

For this article, I'm using Fedora 39 with its default Gnome-based desktop environment, but Niente doesn't particularly care what desktop environment you use. [...] 

1.0 Introduction

Ubuntu is a derivative of Debian and thus the Niente installation on the one goes about as well as you'd expect on the other: Ubuntu is, in fact, an excellent Niente host. There are no particular dramas and everything works as intended after it completes. I've tested it on Ubuntu 23.10 and 22.04, but assume it should work equally well on any other vaguely recent version, too.

For this article, I'm using Ubuntu 23.10 with its default Gnome-based desktop environment, but Niente doesn't particularly care what desktop environment you use, so I imagine it works just fine on similar 'flavours' of Ubuntu, such as Kubuntu, Lubuntu and so on. [...] 

1.0 Introduction

Arch is a slightly awkward distro to document because it starts off as a very minimal operating system and is thereafter highly customised by each user, resulting in a platform that is quite possibly unique -with a unique bunch of 'issues' and 'quirks' that might mean that anything I describe below might not actually apply to you or work as intended!

Accordingly, this document starts with a disclaimer: I'm running Gnome-on-Arch, installed according to the instructions I give in an older article. I am reasonably confident that the Niente Version 4 installation will work fine on any Arch platform that follows those sorts of installation instructions ...but obviously cannot guarantee it! [...] 

Debian is one of the oldest active distros around and is the 'parent' for many child distros: you can argue the entire Ubuntu family tree descends ultimately from Debian, too. It's therefore good to know that Niente is a first-class citizen on Debian and all its progeny: indeed, Niente Version 4 was developed on Debian 12 (using KDE).

The only real point of weirdness as far as Niente-on-Debian is concerned arises (potentially) from the fact that, by default, the non-root user created when installing Debian itself does not get given sudo privileges. That's a problem for Niente, because it needs to access the /usr/bin folder, which requires elevated privileges: without them, the installation would fail. Accordingly, Niente tests for the existence of sudo privileges and, if it finds them, proceeds exactly as it would do on any other distro. If it discovers that you lack sudo privileges, however, then it will ask you to supply the root user password first. With root privileges acquired, it will add you to the /etc/sudoers file. With that done, the Niente installer can then ask you to supply your own password to access your new sudo privileges. After that, everything proceeds normally. This makes for a fairly clumsy 'two-password' installation process, but is a necessary evil! [...] 

1.0 Introduction

When you populate a Niente database, you fill it with data about which FLACs exist -and nothing much else. Here is a screenshot of the Niente database in a third-party tool that understands how to read and display databases after scanning for FLACs (Database menu, Option 2) but before performing any integrity checks:

You'll note that each row lists FLAC files found: that's the data which a Database menu Option 2 scan generates. You'll also note, however, that each row in this TRACKS table is supposed to have 13 columns of data -from MD5 hash values, to extracted PERFORMER, COMMENT and ALBUM tag data (to mention just a few). Immediately after a file scan all these columns are NULL for all rows: Niente knows nothing at all about the FLAC files, except for the fact that they exist. [...] 

1.0 Introduction

Niente is a database-driven program. It requires that a database exists which records the existence of all the FLACs in your music collection. Apart from the initial discovery of these FLACs, Niente does not do file system visits or scans: when it's producing a report, for example, it's obtaining all the data in the report from its database, not by taking a fresh look at the FLACs directly. Similarly, when Niente performs a new integrity check, it's reading the FLACs it knows about because they're listed in its database: it's not doing an on-the-fly scan for FLACs, but simply reading the contents of the ones the database tells it to visit. Without a database populated with details of which FLACs exist where, therefore, Niente can do nothing useful!

It's therefore important that, when you first run Niente, you immediately 1) create a fresh database and 2) populate that database with details of which FLACs exist in your music collection. That's why the Database menu is the one you always open Niente at when it is first launched. [...] 

1.0 Introduction

By way of a whirlwind tour of how you go about installing then using Niente Version 4, the following article documents a typical 'workflow'. It assumes only that you've taken care of letting your PC 'see' your music collection already. If it's stored locally, that's fine. If it's stored on a remote server, it needs to be made accessible to the PC running Niente somehow, whether that's via a mounted NFS or Samba share. On my own Niente server, for example, I have this line in its /etc/fstab:

192.168.1.64:/mnt/bulkdata/music     /sourcedata/music       nfs     rw,hard,intr,rsize=8192,wsize=8192,timeo=14 0 0 [...]