Reaching the limits

The graph at the left tells a tale! The context for that tale is that since June 3rd 2021, I've been using Giocoso to play (almost exclusively) only those recordings which have not previously been recorded as having been played, in an attempt to ensure that by the time I come to kick the bucket, I can say, hand-on-heart, that I've listened to every recording I ever bought. On the one hand, the tale is of good news: the graph shows that only 7.1% of my entire collection has not yet been played by Giocoso. So, I've played around 93% of it, which is pretty good going.

It's even better going when you consider that for much of the time since June 2021, I've had time restrictions on my plays: in other words, I've told Giocoso 'play unplayed recordings that last less than 20 minutes' or something similar. As a result, I haven't listened to Wagner's Ring cycle with Giocoso, but I know for certain I've played those recordings multiple, multiple times in the years before 2021. Which is to say: even the 7.1% I haven't 'officially' played contains substantial chunks of recorded music which I know I've played using different tools... so the amount of my collection which is truly unplayed is significantly less than 7%. [...] 

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Giocoso Tips

I just thought I'd show you how I run Giocoso on my main desktop these days: see the screenshot at the left.

That's just a picture of KDE's default terminal, Konsole, running in 'split view' mode. Open Konsole, click the Split View button at the top of the program area to obtain the drop-down menu and from that select Split View Left/Right[...] 

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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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Bug-hunt!

I've reached the persnickety bug-hunting phase of Giocoso Version 3 development! This is good, because it means a release of Version 3 is not too far away. It's bad, though, because as you uncover new, obviously stupid bugs, you spend your days thinking, 'How could I be so stupid!'

A case in point was just triggered by what I thought was going to be a trivial little addition to this website: adding a 'play count' column to my music play history listing. Adding the column itself and getting it populated from my Giocoso database was indeed quite simple. What wasn't expected was this: [...] 

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A minor detail...

I am old-school. I remember doing X server stuff in 1987. I like X Server. The ability to pipe a desktop across the ends of the Earth, courtesy of X and a bit of Ethernet never ceases to amaze me.

But X is old-hat, not just old-school and Wayland is the new kid on the block, stealing its milk money and cigarettes. [...] 

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The Giocoso Hardware Player

At the left, in the thumbnail, you see my brand new media player. It's totally silent. It's a complete mess of cables and chaos. And it's smaller than a coke can.

I am, of course, using Giocoso as my software to play music. I've been doing that for a long time, using assorted standard PCs, small form factor PCs, tiny PCs, laptops and Lord knows what else. The trouble with all of those modes of playback: every single computing device has involved a fan somewhere. If not on the CPU itself, at least in its power supply. Now, fans make noise... and the one thing you definitely do not want in your music room is a source of noise. So for absolutely ages, I've been after a way to run Giocoso that's completely silent: what you see in the thumbnail to the left (which you can click on to get a full-sized version) is the first tentative steps on that road. [...] 

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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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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: [...] 

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When will you make an end?

I just wanted to offer a further update on the progress of Giocoso Version 2, as I'd originally hoped (and possibly promised!) that it would be out by the end of June... and I can tell you now that that's a target date that isn't going to happen!

The short version is, that it's coming along nicely and though release dates have slipped, I think we're looking only a couple more weeks before final release. Unfortunately, I keep finding something new to tweak and fiddle with: I've had to implement a development freeze to stop that sort of mission creep becoming a habit! [...] 

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Developments...

The thumbnail to this post, when clicked on, will show you a fairly significant development in the Giocoso story: it now runs on Windows!

The screenshot is of Windows 10 (fully updated, so it's running version 22H1) on my fairly ancient 2016-vintage Dell laptop, successfully playing some Benjamin Britten -complete with album art display- in Version 2 of Giocoso. [...] 

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