Giocoso Version 3.05 Now Released
Another week, another minor Giocoso update!
This time, it's a new countdown timer. [...]
Tag: Giocoso updates
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'! [...]
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. [...]
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. [...]
Giocoso - Version 2.02 now available
A minor update to Giocoso has just been released, pushing it to version number 2.02.
It's minor because it only includes a single bug-fix and one enhancement, details of which are described at the top of the Giocoso changelog. On the other hand, the bug being fixed is quite a significant one, so I wouldn't dismiss it as an unimportant bug-fix! [...]
Giocoso Version 2 - Out Now!
At last, Giocoso version 2 is now available for download. And it's only taken me four months to write and test it 🙂 My apologies for the delay.
The program has undergone significant revision and bug-fixing and has acquired a bunch of new features. The really big ticket items are, probably: [...]
More Pi(e)!
Giocoso has had its version number bumped again, this time to Version 1.13. The new version is not needed for anyone with an existing functioning version, but includes new software detection code allowing Giocoso to be successfully installed on the Raspberry Pi when it's running Manjaro. Giocoso was previously tested as working correctly on Raspbian (basically, Debian on Raspberry Pi and sometimes called Raspberry Pi OS), but not on the many other distros and operating systems that can be run on the Pi. I don't have the time (nor the inclination!) to test all those OS/Distro/Pi combinations, but I do run Manjaro as my main desktop (on an Intel processor), so I was naturally curious about how it would run on the Pi (OK, as it turns out!) and thus discovered by accident that Giocoso's detection of ImageMagick on that platform was faulty.
Anyway, it's fixed now. [...]
Tiny, but useful...
I mentioned last time that the new Giocoso version 1.12 also contained a very small new enhancement that had been intended to be released as version 1.11. That feature is... (drum roll, please)... early termination of playback.
Yeah. Wow. 🙂 [...]
Foreign Character Woes...
As I mentioned a couple of posts back, I recently re-installed Manjaro on a new small form factor Lenovo PC. All has been running well, except that in the last couple of days I noticed that Giocoso had developed a strange habit of not displaying "accented characters" properly: that is, Giocoso suddenly didn't seem able to display letters with their correct diacritic marks, such as é, ê, ß, ö, ç and so on.
For example, this is what Giocoso displayed this morning: [...]
Giocoso 1.10 Released ... And Ukraine Invaded
Well, it seems a bit superfluous to release a slightly-modified version of Giocoso on the day Russia decided to invade Ukraine, on zero rational, reasonable pretext.
But I'm going to do it anyway, albeit briefly: version 1.10 is out, with a new --autocolor (or --autocolour) option. This simply applies the Monopoly™ colour combinations mentioned in the post announcing version 1.09 in a sequential manner, depending on what day of the week it is. If it's a Monday, you'll get Old Kent Road colours; if it's a Tuesday, it'll be the light blues of the Angel Islington; Wednesdays will be Pall Mall purple; Thursdays will be Vine Street Orange; Fridays the scarlet of the Strand; and Saturdays will be the bright yellows of Piccadilly. Finally, on Sundays, you'll get the rich green of Bond Street. All the colours occur in sequence, as though you were traveling around the Monopoly™ board progressively. Unfortunately, because Monopoly™ has 8 colour sets and there are only 7 days in a week, the Park Lane/Mayfair colours would never ordinarily be used by the autocolor option, but I've added an extra bit of calculation: if it's the first day of a month, regardless of what day of the week it is, those Mayfair colours will be used anyway. [...]
A Touch of Monopoly®
Another month, another little update to Giocoso.
This time, the version number is bumped to 1.09 because I've found that picking appropriate colours for the album art caption bar is harder than it should be! That is to say, when Giocoso starts playing a new piece of music, if album art is being displayed, it will try to display the composer and composition name in a coloured bar underneath the actual album art embedded in the FLAC file being played. [...]
Giocoso Update - 1.08
A small announcement that I've just released a new version of Giocoso: the current version number is accordingly bumped to 1.08.
The changes made in this version are really quite minor and inconsequential. Principally, they consist of a better tidying up of temporary files when the Giocoso player is interrupted (by a Ctrl+C) or has finished playing something. In earlier versions, if a 'cuesheet' had been produced for a play, that cuesheet would be left lying in the $HOME/.local/share/giocoso folder when the play had finished (or been terminated early). Now, the program deletes such cuesheets as soon as the play terminates for whatever reason. [...]