Updates – Absolutely Baching

Hi-Res Audio - Part 56

Posted on 3rd April 20217th April 2021 by hjr

I hate to keep banging on about hi-res audio formats (especially when I am not keen on them myself), but now that AUAC can do DSF as well as ISO conversions (see my last post), some interesting things have come out of the woodwork that needed tackling. It's also the case that as lockdown finally eases, this will likely draw to a close a period of time in which I obsess about software and not a lot else... so, it's probably best to get these things out of the way whilst there's not a lot else to be doing!

First off is the question of why AUAC treats SACD ISOs differently from SACD DSFs. In other words, when you say auac -i=iso, you have to specify -o=hires if you want high resolution FLAC files extracted from the source SACD ISO (otherwise you get standard resolution ones)... but, if you say auac -i=dsf, you don't (you'll get hi-res ones by default). [...]

Hi-Res Audio Software - Part 2

Posted on 28th March 202128th March 2021 by hjr

To re-cap: I'm not a fan of hi-res audio (i.e., anything with sampling rates and bit-depth greater than standard CD audio) myself, but I recognise that other people are, and for them my music management/playing software tools could usefully be modified to work with hi-res FLAC files. Accordingly, I have added the ability to play hi-res FLACs to AMP (version 1.19 and above). Additionally, I adjusted AUAC (version 2.05 and above) so that it could convert an SACD ISO to a hi-res FLAC, or convert a hi-res FLAC to a standard-res one.

Today, I bring the equivalent hi-res functionality to all my other tools. [...]

Colour Perception and Sorting

Posted on 13th March 202112th March 2021 by hjr

This is yet another story about AMP (my ever-evolving music player) being updated. This one, however, has a subtle twist that most of you probably won't care about, let alone make use of.

It's all to do with colour. In all my software, I try to use just four colours in a consistent way: (1) Terminal Default Foreground; (2) Bright Red; (3) Bright Yellow; and (4) Bright Blue. The terminal default will depend on what colour scheme you've configured your terminal to use. Commonly, as in the screenshot on the left, it's bright green for me and my desktops. It's used to display fairly 'static informational' text: things like the program name, the data labels and so on. Bright Red is used to display error or out-of-condition messages or alerts to program behaviours. Bright yellow is used to display user-input or fairly static information derived from user input (such as the folder path/name from which you're currently playing music). Finally, Bright Blue is used to display fairly dynamic text derived from user input (the name of the database you're using, for example, or any override switches you've specified that affects what music will be selected for play). I may not always be entirely consistent with the way I use my colours, but that's the general scheme I try to use and stick to, anyway! [...]

CAO - Updated Already

Posted on 16th January 202123rd February 2021 by hjr

Well, that didn't take long!

First, I discovered rather late in the day that a cue sheet describing a large 'super-FLAC' audio file cannot, by technical design, list more than 99 files. So, if you've got more than 99 FLAC-tracks that you want to combine into a single super-FLAC then, you can't, because the cue sheet cannot contain enough entries to describe it all. [...]

AUAC Bug Fixes

Posted on 12th January 202131st August 2021 by hjr

I have bumped the Absolutely Baching Universal Audio Converter script up to version 2.0 (from 1.13). The changes are minor and mostly cosmetic, but there are some bug fixes applied too, so the upgrade is recommended. Upgrade by downloading the script by clicking this link. Then, assuming you downloaded it to your $HOME/Downloads folder, just issue this command:

sudo mv $HOME/Downloads/auac.sh /usr/bin/auac.sh

The full documentation has been corrected slightly, too. [...]