Page Category: Semplice

1.0 Introduction

Back at the beginning of January 2021, I wrote a blog post in which I deplored the tendency of classical music to be presented (on CDs, the radio and so on) as a series of 'tracks', rather than as a 'whole composition'. I pointed out back then that 78s didn't come with 'tracks' (though they were short-playing enough probably not to need any!), and that quite a lot of 33⅓ LPs also didn't. Tracks didn't really become a 'thing' until the invention of the CD -and they are (in my view) totally inappropriate for classical music, anyway. By this I mean: Beethoven didn't write four separate 'things' he threw together to make a symphony. He wrote a single symphony that happens to be comprised of four distinct, but related, movements. Accordingly, I would want my music collection to have a single 'item' for 'Symphony No. 5'. I might well be cognizant of the fact that it has 'sections' within it with names such as 'Allegro con brio' or 'Andante con moto', whose existence might be acknowledged by some piece of logical metadata; but I certainly wouldn't want to organise my physical music structures around the existence of movements. It's a bit like quarks in physics: they have no separate existence and cannot (should not, in the case of classical music!) be accessible individually. Those are highly personal opinions, of course: you're welcome to disagree and to listen to your music however you deem best for you!

Apart from such 'metaphysical' opinions about the non-tracky nature of classical music, there are practical matters to deal with, too. Computers store digital music on some sort of disk storage; disks require a file system; most file systems perform better when you present them with a few large files, rather than with lots of small ones. Therefore, turning a 4-track symphony into a single file called 'Symphony No. 5' is better for your file system than making it store 4 separate files, one per movement, on it. In the case of a Handel oratorio, you might even have over 80 or 90 separate 'tracks' on a double CD set, so there the advantage into storing the work as a single 'work' and not 90 separate sub-works is even more pronounced. [...] 

1.0 Introduction

SACDs use a digital format called 'Direct Stream Digital' (or DSD). This uses 'pulse-density modulation' (PDM) to convey musical or sound information; traditional CDs use 'pulse-code modulation' (PCM). The difference between the two encoding technologies is substantial and, obviously, very tricky to describe in simple terms (but I had a go here: if PCM is like a wave going up and down on a pond, PDM is like a longitudinal wave travelling along a spring or slinky). Those fundamental differences in nature make it very difficult, too, to convert something in PDM to PCM accurately and precisely. It's like trying to translate Italian to English: you'll mostly do OK, but some subtleties will be lost in the translation. In particular, absolute peak volumes are difficult to match between the two technologies, such that what PCM thinks is a non-distorting volume of 0dB, PDM will translate as something like +3dB, well into the distorting and clipping region of screwing things up badly! The engineers compensate for this by backing off the value of PDM signals by a modest amount, so that there's no danger of a PDM peak ever being converted into an above-zero PCM/analog peak volume. Typically, SACDs are therefore mastered at around -6dB, compared to what you'd expect from a standard CD, in this attempt to suppress distorting peak volumes. It's not true for every SACD, it has to be said: the technology has improved over the years and more accurate peak management of PDM signals provide less risky volume issues these days. Nevertheless, a -6dB mastering level has become something of an unofficial standard by now.

This, of course, poses practical issues. You listen to a rip of a standard CD at a good level and everything sounds fine; you then start playing a rip from an SACD and wonder why everyone seems to be whispering! So you crank up your amplifier's volume knob to make things acceptable once more... only to have the next piece of ripped-from-an-ordinary-CD music blast your eardrums as being waaay to loud! Rather than constantly having to adjust the volume knob, how about we just adjust the volume of the audio signal in the digital file itself? That, of course, is exactly what Semplice's Audio Processing menu, Option 1 allows us to do. It's also entirely safe to do, because at this point, we're just dealing with FLACs that have been created from the SACD data: the conversion from PDM to PCM has already happened, so we can adjust PCM absolute volume levels without the risk of re-introducing inappropriate PDM peak volume spikes. [...] 

1.0 Introduction

As a digital classical music purist and enthusiast, your general approach to your digital music collection will likely be: leave it alone, don't mess with it, don't muck it about, get it pure and leave it that way! Something along those lines, anyway. Sadly, real life has a nasty habit of intervening: your CD rip sounds a bit quiet for your tastes, perhaps? Maybe you want to take a small sample of your collection on a car or plane trip, so huge, hunking FLAC files might not be entirely appropriate? Having just ripped a 4 hour opera, how can you spot if there are any rip errors without having to physically listen to it all? And so on: these and similar considerations mean that, sometimes, you will need to rely on Semplice's ability to 'tweak' or 'fiddle' with your audio files and its related abilities to analyse your files for obvious flaws.

Thus, Semplice Version 2 has three basic audio processing functions: [...] 

1.0 Introduction

Semplice's main tagging options have been previously described (here and here), but options 7 to 9 add further tagging management capabilities to the program:

• • • • • • • The ability to view the current state of tags embedded in all FLACs in the current working folder
            • The ability to extract or view album art from the first FLAC in the current working folder
            • The ability to edit the contents of an embedded cuesheet

            On the whole, they provide fairly unusual functionality and are not therefore likely to be options that you make extensive use of: but it's important that you know what each of them does in turn. [...] 

1.0 Introduction

Manual tagging with Semplice Version 2 means using five distinct menu options to achieve in five separate actions what the auto-tagging option performs in a single walk-through of five sequential wizard screens. You would choose to do things this way, rather than step through the auto-tagging wizard, when you know precisely what specific adjustment to tags you want to make, or when the auto-tagging wizard would make (or has made) an incorrect automated choice for you. For example: if you wanted to edit the contents of the Recording Year tag because you'd got it wrong earlier, it would be a bit daft to go through five pages of a wizard to make the one, very specific, correction: instead, you'd take Tagging menu, Option 2 and adjust the one tag directly, job done. Or consider the case where the auto-tagging wizard has just numbered all the tracks on the second CD of an opera set from 1 onwards: you really want CD 2's tracks to be numbered from 18 onwards, so they follow on seamlessly from the first 17 ripped from CD 1. The auto-tuning wizard always numbers from 1 onwards, but starting from 18 (or any other number) is precisely what taking the Tagging menu, Option 4 will let you do. Similarly, whilst auto-tagging will automatically embed album art if it's present in the same folder as the FLACs being tagged, Tagging menu Option 5 will let you point to a piece of cover art found anywhere on your hard disk: the manual tagging equivalent has just a bit more optionality and customisability than its auto-equivalent.

The main organising principle to grasp when dealing with the multitude of manual tagging options is: does the tag you're about to set apply to all tracks at once, or are they track-specific. Things like the name of the recording ("Symphony No. 7 (Bernstein - 1967)" for example) would obviously apply equally to all four tracks that are part of that symphony. But "Allegro con brio" or "Adagio" would be track-specific titles. Likewise, track numbers affect each FLAC in a folder differently, whereas embedding album art means all FLACs in a folder get 'hit' with the same artwork at the same time! [...] 

1.0 Introduction

Auto-tagging is a wizard-driven tagging process. You are prompted to supply in turn metadata about:

1. Recording-wide data, such as: Composer, Composition, Distinguishing Artist, Genre, Recording Year and Performing Artists
2. Recording-wide custom tags, if they've been turned on and configured
3. Per-track titles, unique to each FLAC

Once that metadata has been supplied, the wizard will then automatically and without prompting: [...] 

1.0 Introduction

SACDs were invented around the turn of the Millenium: they were meant to be the next big thing in home audio, with multichannel support and 'high resolution' audio data, far surpassing the 44,100Hz sampling rate and 16-bit depth of the original ('standard') audio CD. Unfortunately, the Internet came along, everyone started streaming their music and SACDs promptly stopped being made in quantity around 2009. They clung on in classical music circles, however, and today new classical releases on SACD are not rare. Without getting into audiophile arguments, I'm just going to state that no human ear is actually capable of telling the difference between a standard audio CD and the exact same recording in SACD high resolution: if you are very young or very exceptional, you might be able to hear signals with frequencies higher than the maximum 20,000Hz of standard CDs, but it's vanishingly unlikely... especially given the median age of classical music listeners, whose high frequencies will have left them in their thirties at least. However, when record companies were producing classical music SACDs, they would often re-master their old recordings -and if you compare an old standard CD recording to its re-mastered SACD equivalent, then you very likely will hear a big improvement. It's not the extra bits of samples of the SACD audio signal you are hearing, but the efforts of the recording engineers who are re-working their old recordings. Obviously, if you are into multi-channel audio (I'm not: I've only got two ears!) then that aspect of SACDs will make them attractive to you, in their own right, too.

What I'm trying to say, briefly, is: there is no reason for an audiophile to choose SACD over CD if the masterings are identical. But if you want multi-channel or if you want to obtain the latest re-mastering of an old recording, then SACD may well be something you are interested in. [...] 

1.0 Introduction

Semplice Version 2 is an all-in-one digital music file management application for classical music (and it's pronounced Sém-pl-chay, with emphasis on the first syllable and the middle syllable more or less thrown away, or swallowed!): it lets you rip CDs and SACDs; tag digital music files; merge them; split them; give them a volume boost; or convert them to and from different audio formats.

What makes Semplice a specifically "classical music" management application? Well, in truth it will rip, tag, merge, split, volume boost or convert a file containing Polo G "music" equally as well as one containing some Beethoven or Mozart: it doesn't make moral judgments about the music files it's asked to work on (though this author might!). But Semplice talks of composers, compositions and performers, rather than 'albums', 'tracks' or 'songs' and 'artists'. Rather more fundamentally, it adheres to this site's view on how classical music files should best be tagged and what metadata belongs in which specific tags. Likewise, it only tags and manages FLAC files, not OGGs or MP3s because it believes classical music deserves to be heard in the best quality -and that mandates a lossless audio codec. Its author also believes in patent-free, open source, non-proprietary and platform-independent software wherever possible, so FLACs are in and ALACs are not. So no, it's not functionally restricted to managing classical music files -but it's definitely aimed at people who 'do' classical music above any other form of music. [...] 

Semplice Version 2 is a FLAC manager for large digital collections of classical music. It helps you control the various 'lifecycle stages' of digital music files: from ripping them off a CD or SACD, to tagging them with appropriate metadata and album art. Semplice Version 2 can also boost the volume of your ripped tracks, if they've been mastered too quietly for some reason. Finally, if you want to, Semplice Version 2 will merge your per-track FLACs into a single 'SuperFLAC', where one file contains all the music for a particular recorded work. It can also split the tracks back out, should you ever need to do so.

Semplice Version 2 is a replacement for the original Semplice, not an upgrade to it. You install Semplice Version 2 fresh: the original Semplice will remain on your hard disk and can continue to be used, if you really want to. You can, however, manually remove the original Semplice whenever it suits: meanwhile, the two Semplice versions will co-exist on the same PC perfectly happily. The principle changes between the two versions are, in brief, that Semplice Version 2 now handles CD and SACD ripping; the user interface works with a proper menuing system and one-key presses; data input is handled by proper user-input forms; and a lot of general and minor bug-fixes and enhancements to its internal working have been applied. [...] 

This page describes the changes made in each point release of Semplice since its first release as version 1.00 in November 2022.

Release 1.02 - April 23rd 2023

• Bugfix: Added xterm as an explicit dependency
• Bugfix: NAMEBITS was not set on by default as it should have been. Now fixed.
• Bugfix: When replacing album art, the prior art removal code was not quite right. Now fixed.
• Enhancement: GPLv2 License can be displayed by taking a menu option
• Enhancement: When tagging with non-square art smaller than 500x500, Semplice now just squares-up the album art to its largest dimension but doesn't try to enlarge it to a fixed 300x300.
• Enhancement: PERFORMER tag was always COMMENT, cut off at first comma. Now it also strips out anything in brackets. So "Fred (piano), Bill (tenor)" now becomes "Fred", not "Fred (piano)" as before. The same is also true for colons. "Amadeus Quartet: Frank Smith" becomes "Amadeus Quartet".
• Enhancement: Code to set the PERFORMER tag now finds the correct name, no matter what order it's listed in the COMMENT tag, using the surname in ALBUM to determine which name to pick.
• Enhancement: AUTOBOOST can be set to 1, and this means taking Main Menu Option 14 will result in the automatic application of any detected possible volume boost, plus the automatic deletion of the original, unboosted source file.
• Enhancement: Operations which themselves clean tags now prevent an extra, unnecessary tag cleaning task on program exit. That is, the 'q' option now cleans tags when it has to, not every time it's invoked.

There are some minor bugfixes in this version. There are also a number of enhancements related to the way Semplice automatically works out a PERFORMER tag without explicitly asking for it: it always chopped off the COMMENT tag at the first comma-delimited item. Now it can chop off at colons and strips out bracketed terms, so the PERFORMER tag should be 'cleaner' than before. The PERFORMER can now not be just the first item in the COMMENT tag, too, no matter how it's delimited. If ALBUM is set to (Bliss - 2020), then Semplice will now search for a delimited item containining the word 'Bliss' anywhere within the COMMENT tag. Thus, if COMMENT is set to "Vladimir Ashkenazy, Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, Martin Bliss (clarinet)", then PERFORMER will be set to "Martin Bliss", even though he's the last-named individual. [...] 

1.0 Introduction

The Raspberry Pi single board computer is a remarkable piece of computing technology: about the size of a 2.5" solid state hard disk, the Pi 4B I'm using manages to pack in an ARM processor, 4GB RAM, gigabit Ethernet, twin USB 3 ports, twin USB 2 ports and twin HDMI outputs. It has, in short, everything required to be a capable (if slightly slow) home PC... for about £55. (That's the usual list price when the midget computers are actually in stock: they are currently in short supply worldwide right now, so prices have sky-rocketed to £150+, which makes them much less desirable as daily driver PCs). I think that's a good deal (when you can get it!) and what the Pi perhaps lacks in raw speed and CPU power, it greatly makes up for by running entirely silently: whilst you can certainly fit fans to keep things cool, a good case can keep the temperatures down entirely passively. In a music room, silence is definitely golden!

By design and default, a modern Raspberry Pi is generally kitted out with 'Raspbian' or 'Raspberry Pi OS', which is an ARM-specific port of Debian, packaged with an allegedly user-friendly front-end that makes Fisher-Price look advanced. I am not a fan of it, put it that way! On the other hand, it is lightweight enough to make the Pi feel quite 'snappy'. That maybe because it uses the LXDE desktop environment by default, rather than a heavyweight, 'conventional' desktop such as KDE. [...] 

Here are the instructions on getting Semplice running on Windows 10, distilled into their most concise form. All you get are the instructions on what to type and what to do: no screenshots, no explanations -and if there's a sequence of actions that happen as a result of typing in something, you're supposed to know how to work through those by yourself!

If you want or need the long-form version that does take the time to describe things carefully, step-by-step and with pictures and explanations, click here. [...]