Niente Version 4.04 Released (On Time!!)
Completely on schedule, despite a migration of my website to a Proxmox-hosted LXC container and a whole new iMac purchased at the end of January (I trust I am impressing you!), I have today just released a new version of the Niente FLAC-checking program. It is the first new version since 10th April 2025, brings the version number up to 4.04 and is a fairly significant release for a number of reasons.
Principle amongst these is the significant amount of code re-writing needed to make Niente a full first-class citizen on macOS, AlmaLinux 9 and AlmaLinux 10. This website's own page of Niente statistics has been produced by macOS since about the 10th February; between December 2025 and the end of January 2026, they were coming out of AlmaLinux 9; and between February 1st and February 9th, they were the product of AlmaLinux 10. All three new operating systems have been tested pretty comprehensively, therefore.
The other huge new feature is a complete overhaul of Niente's reporting mechanism. Niente is, fundamentally, a metadata collector and a report generator, so to have half its core functionality pretty much re-written from the ground up is fairly significant! All Niente reports have had their logic tweaked and refined… and every one now outputs to your system's default web browser. A new configuration option allows you to specify a specific browser if you prefer, but if you leave it blank (which it is by default) whatever your default browser is will be used to display all reports.
One final key new feature I should mention, too, is that Niente is now ReplayGain aware: its database table acquires a new column to store any ReplayGain_Album_Gain metadata tag values detected within a FLAC: if there is none, that results in a new item on the Aggregate Statistics report, counting the number of FLACs that don't have ReplayGain data. You might have no interest in ReplayGain, of course, in which case you can ignore the statistic: it's listed as an “other” statistic and therefore not actually indicative of a physical or logical metadata problem.
Full details, as ever, are in the Niente changelog.
Upgrading is a bit of an issue, this time round. The last version of Niente was released back in the day when the source of software updates was absolutelybaching.com. It is therefore unfortunately the case that attempting to use the usual Administration menu, Option 5 to update will not work, as the program will be attempting to obtain fresh software from the wrong source. To obtain the latest Version 4.04 software, therefore, the upgrade procedure is simply:
wget software.bbritten.com/neninst bash neninst
…and follow the prompts. It's basically a fresh installation from scratch and is likely to mean that you'll need to perform a full database re-load (Database menu, Option 2) followed by a full integrity check (Integrity Checks menu, Option 1). Apologies for this break in the usual upgrade process: the change of website between absolutelybaching and bbritten.com is the sort of one-off upheaval that has unintended consequences! It shouldn't happen again.