Giocoso Version 3.34 Released (Early!!)

I've just released a new version of Giocoso, Version 3.34: that's about 20 days earlier than planned, as a result of testing and dog-fooding having gone so well.

The big new feature is, I think, support for ReplayGain: if you enable the feature using the Administration menu, Option 2 you'll see the following new option:

It is set to 'no' by default, but if you set it to 'yes' and then play some music for which ReplayGain metadata tags have been computed and written, Giocoso will apply the necessary volume boost in real time, dynamically. It's a feature that music players like Foobar2000 have had for years: it was about time Giocoso caught up!

The program interface has had a bit of a makeover, too:

You'll note the ReplayGain information is now displayed (it says 'None' if you haven't switched on the new feature, or if your music files don't contain ReplayGain information tags) and that techy details have been 'ruled off' from the composer-composition-performer details. A minor 'touch up' to the look and feel, but I think it looks a bit tidier.

There are several other key new features, some of them quite important: read the Changelog for details, as usual.

Buried amongst references to bug fixes and enhancements is the over-riding truth that quite a lot of work has gone into refining the running of Giocoso on macOS, especially new, Apple Silicon macOS using Homebrew. Previously, much of my Apple work was done on older, Intel-based Macs that installed software dependencies via MacPorts. The two package managers work rather differently and pull down rather different software for the same package name, unfortunately! Anyway: that's going to be an on-going process, now that I've switched to macOS full-time, but things already work smoothly for me now.

Upgrading to the new release is accomplished in the usual way: take the Administration menu, Option 1 and follow the prompt to supply your sudo password. Once the update has completed, quit Giocoso completely (ignoring any error messages you might see on the way out) and then re-launch the program from scratch.

Have fun!