Niente and Giocoso Updates

As previously promised, a new version of Niente has just been released: Version 4.03. It contains some minor bug fixes and a couple of enhancements (mostly due to the suggestions of regular user Scott: thank you, Scott!!)

In particular, a new column is added to the database table that stores details of all your recordings: TRACKTITLE. Though upgrading to Niente Version 4.03 adds this new column, it doesn't populate it: you'll need to do a new full integrity check for that to happen. A new 'Advanced SQL Reports' option has also been added to the Reports menu, allowing you to construct full-blown SQL queries of your own devising, if you're up to it! The other big(ish) new feature is that Niente menus now work the same way as Giocoso's or Semplice's do: pressing [Enter] on any top-level menu automatically means you're invoking the first named option within that menu, without you having to literally tap the number '1' each time. The aggregate statistics report can now be produced by tapping 'R' and then pressing [Enter] twice, for example. [...] 

Continue Reading

Niente Version 4.0 Released

Today, at last, I'm finally releasing Version 4.0 of the Niente FLAC checking program. I've been using it daily for around 2 months now, so I reckon most of its quirks and foibles (and bugs!) have been ironed out by now!

Niente performs physical and logical integrity checks on your FLAC collection, without ever modifying the FLACs themselves. Physically, it makes sure that the music contents of your FLACs hasn't changed over time (due to silent corruption or 'bit rot'). Logically, it takes this website's axioms on how classical music ought to be tagged and checks whether your FLAC tags match the axiomatic requirements. For example, it will check that, if you've said 'Karajan' is the distinguishing artist on a recording, that the name 'Karajan' also appears in the COMMENT tag for the FLACs associated with that recording. It can also do checks to ensure you've embedded nicely-sized album art in each of your FLACs, or whether all your FLACs are at their maximum-possible non-distorting volume. [...] 

Continue Reading