Semplice Version 2.12 Released

I have today released the next version of Semplice, Version 2.12. The details are, as ever, in the Changelog but there are two big changes that deserve special mention.

First and most significantly: Semplice now installs on and is fully supported in Tier 1 fashion on macOS. It's been tested on everything from a 2012 Mac Mini running Catalina to a 2026 M4 iMac running Sequoia and Tahoe, so whether you're using Intel CPUs or Apple Silicon, it should all work as intended. There are two known issues regarding ripping CDs. First, macOS cannot detect a CD/DVD drive unless there's a disk inserted into it. Semplice on macOS cannot therefore 'poll' the CD drive to see when a disk is inserted because that drive doesn't even exist until after the disk is inserted! It's a minor issue, really, and simply means that you insert your CD before invoking Semplice's ripping options. The second issue is a little more awkward: if your CD/DVD drive happens to be an Apple SuperDrive, Semplice cannot automatically determine the correct read offset to use when ripping to ensure accurate rips. That's down to Apple: multiple manufacturers made the internals of the SuperDrive, each with their own read offsets… but Apple deliberately obscures that manufacturer information when interrogating the drive. Accordingly, it's physically impossible to know what the correct offset to use for any particular SuperDrive should be. I worked around this for my own SuperDrive by plugging it into a Linux machine and getting Linux to reveal that it was made by LG: knowing that, I was able to check the AccurateRip database of known offsets manually and thus determine my offset should be '+6'. An alternative workaround would have been to use a non-SuperDrive device: Apple doesn't obscure the hardware identifiers for such third-party drives and thus Semplice can still accurately determine the correct read offset for them.

Anyway: I use Semplice everyday on my iMac to rip new CDs and tag-up previously ripped-but-not-yet-catalogued ones. It works perfectly well.

The second big new feature is support for ReplayGain. Semplice has always previously performed volume boosts by physically altering the data in the audio signal part of a FLAC. That sort of physical volume boost is based on peak loudness: find the loudest part of a FLAC (or a folder of FLACs) and find out how far away that peak loudness is from 'ideal, perfect, non-distorting maximum possible volume'. Then boost the volume of all FLACs in a folder by that amount: everything gets boosted by the same amount and everything ends up as loud as it possibly can be. All of that functionality remains untouched in the new version of Semplice: it is also still the default volume boosting mechanism. The trouble with it is that it alters the digital data contained inside a FLAC in an irreversible manner… and rather a lot of audiophiles don't like doing that sort of thing! It also requires, at least temporarily, at least twice the disk space and a lot of CPU, because the original FLACs need to be transcoded into new, volume-boosted files before the originals can be deleted. To deal with those sorts of issues, therefore, Semplice Version 2.12 now can be asked to do a 'metadata-only' volume boost. The FLACs are analysed as before… but instead of then altering the volume of the digital audio signal, a set of five metadata tags are written to the non-audio part of the FLACs. These tags contain data about the peak loudness of the FLACs and the amount by which they can be safely boosted. It's then up to your music player to read these tags and to apply that pre-computed volume boost in real time, during playback. Remove those tags and the playback will be back at the original, non-boosted volume: this sort of volume boost is thus completely reversible, is quick to compute (because no transcoding is required) and doesn't consume lots of CPU or disk space (because no transcoding is required!). This 'metadata volume boost' is actually something of an industry standard way of doing things and is called “ReplayGain”. Semplice, therefore, now supports computing ReplayGain and writing the tags necessary for players to apply it.

Whether your player can apply ReplayGain is a matter for you to sort out: Foobar2000 can apply it, but it needs to be told to do so. Other players behave similarly. My own Giocoso is being re-written to be able to do it when appropriately configured and should be released fairly soon.

There are all sorts of other, more minor, enhancements and bug fixes, of course. As I say, read the changelog for those details.

Updating to the latest version should be just a matter of taking the usual Miscellaneous menu, Option 3 and following the prompts. For obscure reasons, that may however end in a message that 'something went wrong with the downloads, try again later'. If that happens to you, then just quit Semplice completely and issue the following commands in a terminal session:

cd
rm -f seminst
wget software.bbritten.com/seminst
bash seminst

…and then follow the prompts. This is in fact a complete re-install of Semplice, which will always proceed without a problem.