This page describes the changes made in each point release of Semplice since its first release as version 2.00 on June 30th, 2024.
Changes are listed in reverse chronological order (i.e., the most recent releases appear first).
Semplice Version 2.07 - November 1st 2024
- A single but significant bug-fix: when embedding album art as part of the auto-tagging process, Semplice used the wrong variable name if ImageMagick 7 was in use, though used the correct variable name if ImageMagick 6 was in use. The fix is to make the variable name the same, regardless of the version of ImageMagick being used. Note that if manual embedding of album art was tried (using Tagging menu, Option 5), the correct variable names were always used, so embedding album art manually always worked. The new fix only applies to album art embedding that happens when taking the Tagging menu, Option 1.
Semplice Version 2.06 - 25th October 2024
This release brings a slew of new capabilities to Semplice, some of possibly less significance than others, but all intended to make working with your FLACs easier and simpler in the long-run. There is also one fairly significant bug-fix. The four new enhancements are as follows:
- Enhancement #1. On any main program menu, you can now tap the letter 'I' (or 'i') to make Semplice "inspect" the audio characteristics of the first FLAC it finds in the current working directory. This allows you to tell whether a FLAC is encoded with 16-bit, 44100Hz audio (standard CD) or 24-bit, 192000Hz (SACD, high-resolution audio), for example:
It's a minor enhancement that's useful if you can't remember whether you've converted your SACD rips down to standard CD Audio yet: in the above screenshot, I obviously have! It's also handy for checking that a purchased high-resolution FLAC download is actually in high resolution.
- Enhancement #2. When you select Tagging menu, Option 1 Auto-tagging and then select the 'Read existing metadata' option, the dialog screen where you supply track TITLE tags will be populated with whatever TITLE metadata already exists. Usually, this is complete rubbish and requires much knocking into shape before it can be considered really usable! Much tedious deletion of inappropriate data thus ensues before you can supply a TITLE that meets any definition of 'decent metadata'! For example:
Here, every existing track title includes the composition name (which should be in the ALBUM tag), spurious indications of Act number, and even hand-made track numbers (which belong in the TRACKNUMBER tag). Every piece of operatic dialogue is also encased in quotation marks, which I hate: we know it's speech, because they're words and it's an opera... there's no need to use quotation marks here!
Now, you could edit each of the 8 tracks listed by hand, as I've started to do here:
...but doing this means leaning on the [Delete] key heavily and it's a slow, tedious process! In some cases, you might prefer it if Semplice were to just forget the existing track-specific metadata entirely and let you type in everything from scratch, especially if you type reasonably fast. Now, in fact, it's in fact always been possible to do this: press Ctrl+U and the currently selected track's TITLE tag will be erased:
So to clear out every track's existing metadata, you simply arrow down to the next track, press Ctrl+U, rinse and repeat. That approach is probably entirely convenient if you're tagging up a 4-movement symphony. If you're tagging up an 83-track Handel oratorio, however, that approach is going to get very tedious very quickly! Thus the the new enhancement/feature: the bottom of this screen now has a [Clear All Track Data] button in addition to the traditional [Submit] and [Cancel] ones. Tab round to that so that it is highlighted and press [Enter] and this happens:
The entire set of track TITLE tags is wiped in one fell swoop: you can now type in good data without having to faff around with a lot of slow, manual editing/deleting or clearing things out track-by-track.
- Enhancement #3. If you select to tag using existing metadata and it turns out that your FLACs don't have any metadata in particular tags, Semplice has always been prepared to infer some tags from the working folder name it's currently running in. For example, if you are working in a folder called Symphony No. 5 (Karajan - 1985) and the FLACs within that folder contain no metadata for (say) ALBUM, then Semplice has always guessed that the entire folder name should be used as the ALBUM tag. It can also guess that if we go five characters back from the end of the folder name and extract the next four characters, those will be the recording year, so the YEAR tag should be set to them (in my case, that would be 1, 9, 8 and 5). Finally, Semplice has always guessed that if you take the folder name and split it on the first open bracket and stop before the first hyphen, you'll have the surname of the distinguishing artist, which goes into the PERFORMER tab (in this case, that would be "Karajan"). You can see this pre-existing functionality at work here:
The working folder name is displayed in the window's title bar and you can therefore see the Composition, Distinguishing Artist and Recording Year fields being filled in for me, simply by parsing different bits out of the working folder name.
The new, minor enhancement in Semplice Version 2.06 is that the GENRE tag will be auto-guessed for you, again by looking at the working folder's name: for example, if it contains the word 'Symph', then the GENRE field will be set to "Symphonic", but if it contains the word 'Piano', the GENRE might be auto-set to "Keyboard". The case of the words being searched for is irrelevant: SYMPHONY or sYmPhonY will both yield a guessed GENRE of 'Symphonic'.
Guessing is, of course, prone to, er... 'issues'! For example, in my earlier case the working folder name contains both the word 'Piano' and the word 'Concerto'... so is this going to be guessed to be "Keyboard" or "Concerto" genre?! Well, there's an order of precedence, as follows:
1. Symph -> Symphonic
2. Sinfoni -> Symphonic
3. Concerto -> Concerto
4. Quartet -> Quartet
5. Sonata -> Chamber
6. Piano -> Keyboard
7. Organ -> Keyboard
8. Harpsichord -> Keyboard
9. Incidental -> Film - Theatre - Radio
10. Requiem -> Choral
11. Missa -> Choral
Only the first match wins the prize, so something called a 'piano concerto' will match rule number 3 first and thus be auto-tagged a Concerto:
Of course, the guesses will not be perfect: for starters, if you've got an opera, ballet, oratorio or most choral works, nothing at all will be guessed: it's hard to guess "Opera" from a folder name of "Don Giovanni", unless you had a comprehensive encyclopedia of all the operas ever written by anyone, after all! Similarly, if you've got a harpsichord concerto called "Pastoral Studies on Elizabethan Themes" then no genre is going to be guessed for it, since it contains none of the magic 'keywords'. Worse, if you had a ballet called "Mr Planchet Plays The Piano", then it's going to be guessed to be a Keyboard work, because the magic word 'piano' is in it and Semplice can't guess context!
So yes: the auto-guessing will be less than accurate on many occasions. From personal experience, however, it's going to get the guess right about 70% of the time, which means one hell of a lot of typing is saved. Of course, if it does guess wrong, you just manually edit the genre by hand: that's true for all the other guessed fields as well, of course.
Enhancement #4. It is the complete absence of metadata in the first FLAC of the working folder that triggers the "tag guessing" just described above. Given the ghastly state of much vendor-supplied tag metadata, however, you may well want to get Semplice to pretend there's no metadata in that FLAC even when there is... and thus get Semplice to fill in the various tag fields for you automatically, deriving the required data from the working folder name as described before. A new option called [Auto-guess tags] on the lower part of the recording-wide tag form now lets you manually trigger a replacement of already-present metadata by auto-guessed data derived from the working folder name.
For example:
Here I have freshly started tagging inside the 'Piano Concerto (Britten - 1967)' folder and have taken the same 'Read existing metadata' option as normal: unfortunately, on this occasion, the FLACs do have some pre-existing metadata, so Semplice has read it and put it into the various data entry fields on the form. The trouble is, the metadata is just complete nonsense and I don't want to have to step through every field in turn, hit Ctrl+U and wipe it before being able to type in something more sensible. So, instead, I tab around to the new [Auto-guess Tags] button and press [Enter] when it's highlighted:
As you can see, the pre-existing metadata has been wiped from the form (even though it's currently still stored within the FLACs) and the form's fields have been replaced with data guessed from the current working folder name. You'll still have to type the composer's name in yourself -and the Distinguishing Artist's first name would be nice to have, too. But if you get the name of your physical working folder correct before invoking Semplice, a lot of the tedium of filling in appropriate tag entries has now been eradicated. Once you press the [Submit] button, your new auto-guessed (and possibly manually tweaked) tags will be written back to the FLACs found within the working folder.
This feature also allows you to step back from significant data input errors: if you accidentally lean on your keyboard when typing into one of the tag fields, filling it with hundreds of garbage characters that would be a pain to delete one-by-one, for example, you can now just 'Auto-guess' and revert back to a set of data that makes more sense!
Bug-fix #1. In prior Semplice versions, when creating SuperFLACs, if the path in which the containing folder is found contained a hash character (#), that would cause the program to error in an ugly way:
You will note that the path in which this SuperFLAC creation attempt is taking place contains a '#' character: that's actually bad form in any case, because you really ought to work with NTFS-compliant folder and file names, even if you can't stand the sight of Windows and NTFS (it's the lowest common denominator, basically: a file or folder name that works on NTFS is pretty much guaranteed to work anywhere, on any file system) -and the hash character is illegal on NTFS. But that's besides the point: if you happen to want to use hash characters in your folder names, it's not for Semplice to say you're doing it wrong!
The bug-fix implemented in Semplice Version 2.06 is therefore that the presence of hash characters anywhere within the working folder path hierarchy no longer prevents SuperFLAC creation. The only slight catch is that you are now no longer permitted to have folder names that contain the string +^+^+ (plus-caret-plus-caret-plus) in them, anywhere. Frankly, if this new restriction affects you, you're doing extremely strange things and should probably stop... and you'll also still experience the sort of error shown above. The workaround is simple: use more sensible folder names!!
Semplice Version 2.05 - September 14th 2024
- Minor bug-fix when converting from one audio format to another. After file format conversion, if the output format was FLAC, the code sought to 'clean' the tags of the output FLAC files. It did so by calling an inappropriate procedure name, however. The bug-fix means the correct code is now invoked and thus tag cleaning works as intended following conversion to FLAC.
Semplice Version 2.04 - August 17th 2024
- Minor bug-fix to track tagging: sometimes, the grep statement that determines bit-depth and sample rate would occasionally produce a 'binary file matches' error, which would then prevent the renaming of FLACs to include those two pieces of information (if that option was enabled in the configuration file). This release merely adds the -a switch so that the grep program treats binary files as if they were text files, which resolves the error. I am unable to determine what specific circumstances would trigger the 'binary files' error in the first place: I only encountered it on one FLAC recently purchased. So I don't think it's a widespread issue, but the 2.04 release should mean it's never an issue again, anyway!
Semplice Version 2.03 - August 14th 2024
There are two small enhancements to functionality in this release, as follows:
1. When creating a SuperFLAC (SuperFLAC menu, Option 2), the program now auto-cleans the SuperFLAC as soon as it's been created. Previously, no cleaning took place unless the manual option to clean was taken (press 'K') or the quit program with post-processing option was specified (Quit menu, Option 1); now the freshly-created SuperFLAC is cleaned without you having to do the job manually. The process of 'cleaning' tags firstly removes non-canonical tags (such as 'Copyright' or 'Record Label' and adds one non-canonical tag, namely TAGDATE, which is then assigned the current system date/time in Unix Epoch format, so that a value of 1723631422 can later be converted to a human-readable date of Wednesday, 14 August 2024 10:30:22, thereby letting you know precisely when you created and/or tagged a FLAC into your collection. Thus, SuperFLACs created in earlier Semplice versions lacked a TAGDATE tag, but was otherwise in possession of all the canonical tags. This new release therefore simply ensures that freshly-created SuperFLACs do indeed get created with a TAGDATE tag.
2. When you perform a volume boost with AUTOBOOST enabled in earlier Semplice versions, if a volume boost can be applied to your FLACs, one will be automatically -but you will have no idea how big that volume boost is. New in Version 2.03, therefore, is a very small addition to the status line when an auto-boost is underway that simply tells you how big the volume boost is, like this:
The message at the bottom of the screen used to read 'Performing a volume boost...'. It now adds the words 'of +xdB' to that message, so you know precisely what the automatically applied volume boost is.
Semplice Version 2.02 - August 7th 2024
When tagging FLAC files with album artwork, you are given the opportunity to 'point' to a piece of artwork. Semplice has always checked the file you point to, to ensure that it's a genuine JPG or PNG file, rather than (say) 'word.exe' renamed to be 'word.png' for giggles. Unfortunately, I didn't realise that not all genuine JPGs or PNGs are built the same: most will use what is termed the 'sRGB colourspace', and this is the colourspace that Semplice was originally written to check for as a sign of 'genuine image-ness'. This makes sense: colourspaces affect how devices handle the colour information within an image file and for anything involving computers, the sRGB colourspace is the 'right' one to use.
Unfortunately, not all record companies are entirely consistent on the point, and one recent download I purchased came with album artwork that declared itself to be a JPG but used the CMYK colourspace internally. This also makes sense: the record company has to physically print this artwork when manufacturing its CDs, and the CMYK colourspace is best suited to printing. Trouble thus starts when you point Semplice at a JPG which is internally using the CMYK colourspace (which is not something you'd particularly know was happening, unless you knew how to check!): Semplice simply won't use such images and your FLACs will remain untagged with that particular bit of artwork. You might think you could force the issue using some other tagging program -and, indeed, you probably would be successful in doing that... but if you were to play such a force-fed FLAC in Giocoso (which uses the img2sixel program to allow graphics to display within a terminal, you'd see this sort of output:
You might notice that the image on the right is in a sort-of 'negative' state. This is an sRGB environment trying to make sense of an embedded CMYK image.
I hadn't realised this sort of thing could actually happen... until it happened to me! Version 2.02 of Semplice thus fixes this issue by doing a silent conversion of any CMYK images it finds into sRGB ones, over-writing the originals whilst doing so. The conversion process doesn't change what the standalone image looks like on your computer screen, but merely alters the internal way in which the image handles colours. Embedded art then displays correctly in Giocoso, like so:
Semplice Version 2.01 - July 15th 2024
This release was necessitated by the realisation that ImageMagick (the program Semplice uses to display and manipulate album art when music files are being tagged with album or cover art) comes in two versions. Version 6 uses a program called "convert", for which a command such as "convert -resize 450x450 image.jpg" would be valid. Version 7 puts up a warning message if the 'convert' command is used, saying that its use is deprecated. It also changes the syntax requirements so that the replacement program, "magick", now requires that the commands come in "image - task" order. Issue a command such as "magick -resize 450x450 image.jpg" therefore, and you'll get an error message saying that no image file called "450x450" could be found. Instead, you have to say, "magick image.jpg -resize 450x450": get the image mentioned first, then say what tasks you want applied to it.
The syntax variation means that you can't just alias convert => magick. You literally have to issue different commands, depending on which version of ImageMagick you're working with. Up until very recently, Version 6 was the one used by default in all the distros that Semplice was tested on, so the issue never arose in my testing. The recent release of KDE Version 6, however, means that I noticed some distros are now shipping ImageMagick Version 7 by default.
This release therefore adds code to (1) identify which version of ImageMagick is installed; and (2) issues an appropriate convert or magick command (using different syntax ordering as needed) depending on what version is detected.