Music-related Software
The following software was written to help you rip, tag and play classical music more effectively on Linux. There are also some utilities that will help you make sure your digital music files maintain their internal integrity and accuracy, and allow you to convert between different audio formats (for example, FLAC to MP3). In the table below, I list each piece of software, it’s function and it’s release history: check back here frequently to make sure you’re using the latest version of any of them. Not all old software versions are available for all software and so I only list the old versions I’ve managed to keep hold of: I’m better at keeping version history these days, but it’s a new thing for me! Rows in the table highlighted in red represent discontinued/abandoned software and you should no longer download or use them: they each have newer, maintained equivalents which should be used instead.
Click the ‘Links to Software Manuals’ in the below table to go to each product’s information page, where manuals, guides and/or FAQs can be found for each.
| Links to Software Manuals | Function | Latest Release | Release Date |
Previous Releases |
| Giocoso | A randomising FLAC classical music player | 1.06 | 7th November 2021 |
See archives |
| Niente |
A FLAC Integrity Tester |
2.00 |
1st November 2021 |
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| Classical CD Ripper (ccdr) | An accurate, command-line Audio CD ripper | 3.08 | 29 April 2021 |
See archives |
| Classical CD Tagger (ccdt) | A utility to tag audio files with metadata | 3.15 | 3rd September 2021 |
See archives |
| Composition – At – Once (cao) | A utility to merge per-track FLACs into ‘super-FLACs’ | 1.13 | 20th September 2021 |
See archives |
| Absolutely Baching Tag Cleaner (atc) | Cleans FLAC tags to leave behind only ‘core’ tags | 1.09 | 28 March 2021 |
See archives |
| Universal Audio Converter (auac) | Converts audio files from one codec to another | 2.09 | 30th April 2021 |
See archives |
| Volume Maximiser Utility (maxv) | Maximises the absolute volume level in a folder of FLACs | 1.08 | 4th June 2021 |
See archives |
| Set Performer Utility (set-performer) | One-off batch generation of PERFORMER tags | 1.02 | 13 March 2021 |
See archives |
| Auto-Ellipsis Script (aes) | Strips “..” or “…” from file names, replaced with “…” | 1.01 | 13 March 2021 |
See archives |
| MAXV Bulk Reporter |
Scans large numbers of files to see which are possible candidates for a MAXV volume boost (but doesn’t actually boost the volume) |
1.00 |
4th June 2021 |
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| Absolutely Baching FLAC Checker (afc) | No longer supported or maintained. Use Niente instead. | 2.06 | 28 March 2021 | See archives |
| Absolutely Baching Music Player (amp) | No longer supported or maintained. Use Giocoso instead. | 1.28 | 8 June 2021 | See archives |
All scripts have been tested to run on the latest versions of the following fully-updated distros (as at July 15th 2021):
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They may work on other distros, but are not guaranteed to do so. Please drop me a line to enquire about making the software work on other platforms, but don’t ask for support on platforms I don’t claim to run on!
INSTALLATION
To download and install of any of these scripts, you issue the following commands:
cd
wget https://absolutelybaching.com/abc_installer
bash abc_installer --program-name
So, to install AUAC, the third command there would be bash abc_installer ––auac. For the AMP music player, it would be bash abc_installer ––giocoso and so on. In each case, the ‘program-name’ bit is whatever appears in brackets in the first column of the table above. If you want all the software in one hit, just use bash abc_installer ––all: that will fetch and install all available scripts in one go. In all cases, the installer will prompt you for your sudo password: it needs root privileges to be able to install the programs into the /usr/bin folder. You can re-run the installer program at any time to fetch the latest version of any program and have it replace an earlier version.
UPGRADES/UPDATES
All recent versions of each software package can now be invoked with the ––checkver run-time parameter. This will trigger a check for newer versions of that specific software package. If a newer version is found, you will be given the opportunity to fetch and install it (though you can refuse, if you prefer). Upgrading, like installing in the first place, requires the provision of a root password at one point, in order to copy the files into /usr/bin correctly. Obviously, you need to have versions of the packages that know how to handle ‘checkver’ requests: getting to that point may first require re-installation of a package using the ‘Installation’ procedure described above. Once you have a version that has ‘checkver’ functionality, however, you can keep that specific package up-to-date by running it with the ––checkver parameter occasionally thereafter.
UNINSTALLING
Uninstalling any of the software packages is done simply by deleting the relevant script out of the /usr/bin folder, which requires root (or sudo) privileges. The script names are the program names in all lower-case, and there may be a number of extensions. Thus, to uninstall Giocoso (for example), you’d issue the command:
sudo rm /usr/bin/giocoso.*
The trailing asterisk in that command ensures the program script itself, together with any symbolic links to it, are removed from your system.
Running the Software on Windows
- Most of the above scripts work fine on Windows. This article explains what’s needed to make that happen. It also highlights when the scripts work slightly differently to the way they do under native Linux.
Some Techniques and Tips
- Making music previews
- Getting your PC to email you when running scheduled jobs
- Build a Virtual Machine running Arch+Gnome (or KDE)
- How to rip an SACD to high resolution FLACs
- Getting a decent screensaver running on Linux
- Cleaning PDFs of metadata