Giocoso Version 3.20 Released

Today, a few days earlier than planned, I'm releasing Version 3.20 of Giocoso. It's a very significant release and the version number has therefore jumped from 3.1x to 3.2x (specifically, from 3.12 to 3.20), as previously explained.

The two (relatively!) huge changes that have occurred are: 1) Ability to control a play (pause, resume, terminate, repeat etc) from within the playing Giocoso session's main play screen; and 2) Accurate timing information is now displayed (i.e., 'played X minutes of a piece that lasts Y minutes, therefore ending at Z clock time'). These were canvassed in some detail in an earlier blog piece[...] 

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Giocoso Changes Afoot...

Note: I've updated this post since originally written. The next release of Giocoso was due to be 3.13. I've subsequently decided to make it 3.20. I've therefore mentioned that version number in the update.

Giocoso Version 3.20 promises to be a really big version bump (so big, in fact, that I was thinking of calling it Version 4.0, but ultimately decided against it). It is currently scheduled for release in mid-December (after I've dog-fooded it for another few weeks). For anyone interested, the list of changes that are in the pipeline for the next release of Giocoso is visible in the program's changelog[...] 

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Giocoso Version 3.11 Released

As promised last time, a new version of Giocoso has just been released, bringing its version number up to 3.11.

It's a relatively significant update, especially as it introduces a new configuration parameter which may not be set to the value you'd prefer. Specifically, a parameter called 'Automatically launch Mgiocoso Control Panel' has been added and it defaults to a 'yes' value. It means that by launching Giocoso, you'll also trigger the automatic launch of the standalone mgiocoso controller window. If you'd prefer that not to happen, you need to use the Administration menu, Option 3 to edit your configuration file. Find the page for 'Parameters requiring yes/no answers' and look to the bottom of the page: [...] 

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A Problem of Dates in Giocoso - Fixed

As I discussed in the last post here, Giocoso can be affected by the problem of 'fake, duplicate play completions' being inserted into its PLAYS table one second later than the real completion of a play is recorded.

I promised a fix: today is therefore the release day for Giocoso Version 3.09. The new version adds a trigger to the PLAYS table that prevents such fake duplicate plays being created in the future. The fix does not go back and eliminate any existing fake duplicates, since that would involve automatically deleting data from PLAYS, and that sort of thing is very tricky to get 100% right and thus not endanger good data. [...] 

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Giocoso Version 3.06 Released

A new release of Giocoso has been made available, fixing a recently-discovered minor, but annoying, bug. This brings the current version of Giocoso up to 3.06.

The bug was that if you used any of the non-default methods of selecting music to play from the Play Music menu (such as Option 2, where you specify filters to control the selection, or Option 5, where a playlist is used to determine what to play and in what order), the number of 'selections' to be played would be remembered if you halted those non-default plays early and then switched to using Option 1's 'play music with defaults' menu option. For example: take Option 2 and say 'play only music that lasts less than 10 minutes': maybe that will generate a list of things to be played that numbers 1345. After playing 4 things from that list, you interrupt the play (by issuing an Autostop request, for example) but do not quit Giocoso. Then you take Play Music option 1: the default, randomised selection of music now takes place... but Giocoso will still declare that there are 1345 items to be played (the top right-hand corner will display something like 'Selection 1 of 1345'). That's because it's a bug of omission: the default play method didn't explicitly set the limit on plays, so if another play option did, the default play method was stuck using that number of selections. [...] 

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Giocoso Version 3.03 Released

Another tiny bug-fix in Giocoso has been released, bumping the program version to 3.03.

This time, it's a very minor correction to the way the program pauses and resumes music playback: if no music was being played when the pause request is made, then the program would output nasty-looking (but ultimately harmless) error messages from the operating system. Now, the pause/resume function tests that music is actually being played before trying to do something: net result, error messages are no longer produced and the program display remains 'pretty'! [...] 

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Software Updates

Before this website goes offline for nearly a fortnight, I thought I'd better release a couple of software updates that have been in my 'pending' tray for quite a while now.

First, Giocoso is bumped from version 2.03 to 2.04. The updates are mostly minor and inconsequential -except for one 'bugfix'. All versions of Giocoso have long contacted this website to obtain a new version of the program's error/messages file, whenever it detects that the program version number doesn't match the error/messages file version number. That all works fine, when this website is up! If, however, this site is not contactable (because, say, its host managed to blow up its Hungarian webserver!) then the program sits there, apparently locked up, trying to contact the uncontactable. Eventually it gives up and resumes working as normal -but now without the ability to display any error or progress message text at all. The new version now adds in a 'ping test' before trying to fetch the new message file: if the site's not accessible for some reason, Giocoso shouldn't hang for minutes trying to reach it, and the old error messages file is retained, not wiped. [...] 

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New Year Software Releases

A little late (but a birthday bash in Bruges will do that to a man!), but Happy New Year for 2023, and by way of making up for my tardiness, I give you two new software releases.

First is Semplice 1.01. The program has acquired the usual slew of bugfixes and minor tweaks and twiddles, but also a couple of nice enhancements and new features. The main new features are: the ability to extact and/or display embedded album art; the ability to create spectrum analysis graphs of the audio signal in a FLAC; and the ability to directly edit the contents of any cuesheet embedded within a FLAC. See the changelog for details[...] 

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