Happy St. Britten Day!
Tomorrow being St. Britten's Day (well, OK: it's actually St. Cecilia's Day, patron saint of music, but it also happens to be the birthday of the chief of her sons, the blessed Benjamin Britten, who you might have noticed is a sort-of patron saint around here!), I shall wish you all a happy Benjamin Britten Day and encourage you to play nothing but the great BB for the day.
I shall be telling Giocoso to do precisely that (and, in truth, have already started, for a couple of days now, as my play history might tell you!) and I think you'd find it rewarding too.
But, seriously: listen to any good music you care about. As Wystan Auden once put it: Blessed Cecilia, appear in visions to all musicians: appear and inspire!
Fedora 43 is out
The thumbnail at the left shows a brand new installation of Fedora 43 Workstation running Giocoso in perfect fashion (and with no weird lack-of-graphics problems!).
I dislike the Fedora installation process: it assumes answers to questions it never prompts you for and it's harder than it should be to over-ride those assumptions. For example, no power on Earth would ever persuade me to use the btrfs file system as my main file system but it's Fedora's default option for the root partition. Finding how to change things to use ext4 instead is much harder than it should be, requiring you to click on various unidentified sets of three dots (I believe the yoof call them 'hamburger menus') and then do an awful lot of manual finagling. Not my recommended operating system, then… but at least my software runs on it without drama!
Giocoso Broken!
Click on the thumbnail to this post and see if you can see a bit of a problem!
In one window, on the left, you see Giocoso running as it's supposed to: displaying album art within its terminal session. In the window on the right, however, you see Giocoso playing music just fine… but there's no album art on display.
Giocoso has always displayed its album art by using a technology called “sixel graphics”. Terminals that support sixel graphics can display an image within the terminal by using a command such as: img2sixel albumart.jpg. Konsole, the KDE terminal I'm using on the right of that thumbnail has always supported doing this, which is just as well as it's the terminal I use daily to develop Giocoso in the first place! Unfortunately, as that screenshot tells you, Konsole has stopped doing this for mysterious reasons that I can't fathom. It now means that Giocoso run on any version of KDE within a Konsole window is at risk of not being able to display album art graphics sometime in the near future. The specific version of Konsole that appears to have developed this problem is version 25.08.2.
Since my desktop PC runs on EndeavourOS (a bleeding-edge distro based on Arch Linux), it's software stack is forever being updated: it's picked up the new version of Konsole and has lost the ability it once had to display in-terminal album art. My music playing PC (the one that's plugged into the amplifier and speakers) is running Debian 13, a much more sedate (some would call it old-fashioned!) distro that is running version 24ish of Konsole. Clearly, the Konsole developers nixed sixel graphics sometime in the last year: I'm not holding my breath for them to un-nix any time soon, sadly.
There are alternative terminal emulators, of course: xterm, for one. Unfortunately, they need to be compiled with sixel graphics support and none of the many terminals I've tried on EndeavourOS display sixel graphics properly:
That's xterm not displaying a JPG file. It's true for uxterm, too; for ghosty; for mintty; darktile, gnome-terminal and any other terminal emulator you might suggest, at least on EndeavourOS (and Arch or Arch-derived distros in general: I found Manjaro to be similarly affected).
The only exception is a terminal emulator called kitty, which doesn't use sixel graphics at all, but its own unique way of doing in-terminal graphics which continues to work in every environment I tested:
Unfortunately, you can see that kitty displaying anything requires some quite new syntax… and positioning the graphics display is nowhere near as easy to do as with sixel graphics. I'm also reluctant to make Giocoso dependent on a specific terminal emulator. So, this is not a road I'm keen to journey down.
Of course, Giocoso already has a workaround:
You've always been able to configure Giocoso to display the album art in its own separate pop-out window, which is nowhere near as elegant but continues to work fine, even on Arch-based distros:
For now, my understanding is that this is the only way to get album art displayed correctly on a fully-updated Arch-based distro. More worryingly, as other distros upgrade their KDE environments, I suspect they will lose the ability to do in-terminal graphics display, too. There's nothing much I can do about that, I'm afraid, though I am on a kitty learning curve as we speak.
Edited to add: I have swiftly realised that the kitty terminal emulator is just a special example of a terminal that understands the kitty graphics protocol. Other browsers can understand that protocol too, so it's easy (even on an Arch-based distro!) to get Konsole or other browsers to display images using it:
The title bar tells you this is Konsole… but it's still displaying a piece of albumart anyway! So this is definitely a route I will have to travel in the near future, I think!
With apologies...
I started this morning with an innocent desire to learn how to host two domain names from the one server (I know how to do it with Apache and Wordpress, but I'm not using that technology stack any more). One thing lead to another and by lunchtime, I had literally re-directed absolutelybaching.com to bbritten.com, even though bbritten.com is running on spare hardware that's as powerful as an asthmatic ant. Basically, I hadn't meant to switch the domains around, but ended up doing so anyway: my enthusiasm got the better of me!
There will be quite a few weeks before I finally bring over all the content I intend to transfer to the new site. I'm afraid things will look rather unfinished and rough-and-ready until that process is complete.
Got there, at last!
The screenshot at the left tells you that, after about 5 or 6 years of working towards it, I've finally achieved my goal of having listened to every recording in my collection, with Giocoso, at least once.
The last few recordings were dealt with much faster than I'd anticipated, in fact.
So what's next? Well, basically… to immediately screw up the statistics by adding a bunch of new recordings to which to listen! There's 758GB of ripped music sitting on my hard disk that needs classifying, cataloguing and adding to the collection. That's approximately 1,895 new CDs-worth of music. It will be added in small increments, though, with listening to the new additions being worked into randomised re-listening of existing music, so the 'percentage unplayed' should never rise significantly. (Famous last words!)
Progress on switching things over to bbritten.com continues, if not exactly at pace then at least with slow determination!
I also have to apologise to visitors again, today, for a network outage that made the site unavailable for around a couple of hours. Not my fault, this time, but my ISP's (though we don't yet know the details). That's the third outage since the end of August, one due to the network infrastructure, one due to a widespread network outage and now one due to an ISP's apparent inability to configure itself properly. Very annoying… but they each gave me more time to listen to music, so it's all good in the end, I guess!
