Semplice Version 2.09 Released

Somewhat delayed from the original plans, but I've just released Semplice Version 2.09 to production. You can upgrade to it in the usual manner: the Miscellaneous menu, Option 3 will walk you through the process. Fresh installations can also be performed in the standard way: wget doco.absolutelybaching.com/seminst and then bash seminst.

The new release contains a number of visual and work-flow enhancements, all very helpfully suggested by reader/user Scott, which were much appreciated. The changelog has the full details, as usual: perhaps the key one is that when converting between audio formats, Semplice now only shows you 'from' formats that physically exist within your current working folder, so you can't accidentally select to convert from a format that you don't possess. Another little enhancement makes the auto-tagging process clearer as to what it's doing at various points and what modified data gets saved or lost when you click 'Cancel' half-way through the process. [...] 

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Volume Boosting in Bulk

My attention has recently been turning to Niente, which hasn't had a new release in something like 5 months. I'm planning a new release for it at the start of April, though there are a few new floors being fitted throughout the house in the meantime, so that schedule might slip!

Anyway: I couldn't but help notice the more than 3000 folders of music in my collection that Niente thought could do with a volume boost. Since I've only got about 17,000 recordings in total, that's quite a sizeable chunk that is, in some way, less than ideal. It arises from the fact that I was ripping CDs in 1999 and only got round to writing volume-boosting technology into Semplice in around 2019! Short of going to each sub-volume-boosted folder, one by one, and running Semplice there to apply a retroactive volume boost, this wasn't going to be fixed any time soon: thirty or forty would have been fine; three thousand or more, less so! [...] 

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New PC, New Semplice Bug, New Semplice Version!

Three days ago, I treated myself to a new PC (a Beelink SER 5, using an AMD Ryzen CPU that's a lot more modern than the 2017-vintage i7 I was using before). I took the opportunity to install a fresh copy of EndeavourOS, an Arch derivative that I've used before and which tends to ship with a lot more up-to-date software than my previous distro, Debian 12. It's all working extremely well and is pretty much silent, which is essential given its location within my music listening room (though I do need to get a quieter keyboard: a previous choice for a mechanical keyboard with Cherry Blue switches means mine currently sounds like a thousand typists are at work!)

Anyway, the point is that everything I need to work worked well ...until I tried to tag up a new CD rip using my own Semplice program. The tagging bit itself was fine, but trying to embed album art within the FLACs produced this weird error: [...] 

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Semplice Version 2.06 Released

I've just released Semplice Version 2.06 into the wild, a few days earlier than planned, due to social commitments at the beginning of November. I've been using it in earnest for about 10 days, however, and therefore think it's ready for a production release! It is a relatively significant release.

The details are available in the Changelog, but the short version is that Semplice can (a) now guess far more tags for you, if it's launched within a folder that is named according to this site's "axioms of classical tagging". In fact, the only things that can't now be guessed are the composer's name and the distinguishing artist's first name; and (2) obliterate all track-specific tags in one hit, which is useful when they're all full of garbage and the one-track-at-a-time Ctrl+U trick isn't looking terribly efficient. [...] 

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Semplice Version 2.03 Released

It's only been a week since version 2.02 of Semplice was released, but today I've released yet-another-new version: 2.03.

The new version contains two small enhancements, which I describe in the Changelog, but which can be summarised as 'SuperFLACs get automatically cleaned when first created' and 'More information is provided when performing volume boosts on FLACs'. [...] 

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Semplice Version 2.02 Released

I wasn't particularly aware that this was a thing, but JPGs, PNGs and other image files are constructed using particular 'colourspaces'. A colourspace is simply a way of internally representing colours. There are basically two principal means of doing this with digital artwork: use an additive colour model (where red+green gives yellow), or a subtractive colour model, where red is what you get when taking the difference between magenta and yellow. The additive model we call the RGB model (because you add red, to green, to blue to get the full gamut of possible colours). The subtractive model is called the CMYK model, because you use cyan, magenta and yellow, plus black (the 'K'!) to construct the gamut.

Generally speaking, computers and their monitors should use the RGB model, because LCDs monitors are generally natively black or dark and have individual 'lights' (LEDs) projecting shades of red, green or blue to construct complex colours on top of a dark background -so adding colours to a dark background is right up their street. Printers, on the other hand, tend to use the CMYK model, because they work with inks which are manufactured in cyan, magenta, yellow and black hues and which are laid on top of a usually pure-white background (i.e., a sheet of paper!), so printers need to start bright white and remove colours from that to construct a colour image. [...] 

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Semplice Version 2.01 Released

As previously promised, an upgrade release of Semplice Version 2 has now been made available. It fixes the issue whereby several distros now appear to be shipping Version 7 of ImageMagick (the image manipulation program) rather than the Version 6 that was being shipped on all distros when Semplice Version 2 first shipped. If you try issuing Version 6 commands when you have Version 7 of ImageMagick installed, you get ugly warnings about 'convert is deprecated in IM7'.

Since it's not entirely clear to me which distros have decided to run with ImageMagick 7 and which have chosen to stick with ImageMagick 6, I've had to add code to Semplice which works out what version is installed and then use the appropriate image editing commands accordingly. [...] 

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Semplice Version 2 Released!

Finally!

Today, I'm releasing Semplice Version 2, and simultaneously retiring Version 1 (it's still downloadable, installable and documented, but I wouldn't recommend anyone use it now and I'm certainly doing no further development work on it to fix bugs or add new features or offer support on it: it's dead, Jim, and Version 2 is where it's at now!!) [...] 

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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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Work in Progress: Semplice Version 2

It's finally time to mention what I've been up to for the past couple of months: re-writing Semplice, my digital music file manager. It's the tool that lets you tag your FLACs, volume boost them, merge them into 'SuperFLACs' (and split them back out into per-track FLACs if you prefer), convert them into MP3s or most other audio formats, analyse them to make sure they're really high resolution FLACs, and much more besides.

To be honest, I didn't think there was a lot wrong with the original version of Semplice (currently sitting at version 1.02). There wasn't a huge amount of functionality that was missing, in other words: it was more that the user interface was a bit klunky and old-fashioned, particularly in light of the user interface advances I'd implemented when developing Giocoso Version 3. So, Semplice Version 2 was going to be more of a user interface refresh than anything else... but, as I suspected it would, mission creep has resulted in a few additions to Semplice functionality that it turns out I'm rather fond of! [...] 

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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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