BBritten.com - softwares:giocoso:adminmenu

audio

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2025-12-03T12:37:10+00:00

Test Audio Device Configuration

Setting the correct audio device in the Persistent Configuration file can be tricky: the default setting(of 'default') should ordinarily produce sound without a problem, but if you want to direct music playback to a specific audio device, and your PC happens to have multiple HDMI outputs, analogue audio jacks and assorted other devices, it can be quite a task ensuring that Giocoso directs its output to the correct one.

The command aplay -l can help on Linux systems to determine which audio devices exist on a given system. You then fill that in as a 'plughw:x,y' entry in the configuration file (see the Administration menu Option 2, first item on the 'parameters requiring text values' page).

For example:

This tells me one of the HDMI ports is probably where I want a digital signal sent: the 3.5mm analogue audio jack is probably not right for high-end music reproduction!

Of course, the question then becomes which hdmi port is the right one to use: I think I can rule out the one mentioning '27EIN1900AE' in its details because that sounds like the 27“ monitor and its speakers are dreadful! So, it's one of the other ones… and without much further help, you'll likely have to try each one in turn and check if audio comes through correctly. This is what the 'Test Audio Device configuration' menu option is for: once you've set an audio device to use in the Administration menu, Option 2, this option will play a short piece of music through that device: if you hear it, you know you picked the right device! If not, it's back to Option 2 to specify the next device, then back to Option 6 to see if you chose wisely. And so on.

Taking the option will display this message:

It reminds you of your current audio device setting, and then lets you click OK (or press the [Enter] key) to initiate audio playback of the test audio file. The audio clip only lasts for 8 seconds. At the end of those 8 seconds, you'll see this:

If you heard eight seconds of beautiful plagal cadence (I think!), then just press [Enter] and you'll be returned to the Administration menu. If you didn't, you can select the 'no' option here and you'll be shown the following message:

It's not exactly a mine of useful information, I will confess… but it at least reminds you of the command you can use to list audio devices on your Linux-based PC, and what entry in the persistent configuration file is needed to be set correctly. Pressing [Enter] at this point, or clicking on [OK], will then also display the last audio playback log, which may contain some clues as to why audio is not playing properly (but probably won't!):

This is raw ffmpeg output, so it's pretty incomprehensible to anyone of mortal woman born, but you might see some plain text in that lot which gives a hint as to what's wrong. I have seen messages indicating that the Pulse Audio Server cannot contact the device, for example, which might indicate a need to reset the Audio Server itself. I've also seen text indicating 'no such device', which indicated on that occasion that I'd typed an extra character when entering the audio device in the Option 2 screen! So, sometimes this is useful: mostly, it's hieroglyphics, I will confess.

Press 'q' to quit the error log and return to the Administration menu when you're ready.

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excludes

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2025-12-03T12:06:41+00:00

Edit the Excludes File

The excludes file has been discussed at some length for the Play menu Option 2: Play music with defaults. It is a simple text file that contains one composer name per line. If a composer is mentioned in this file, it means Giocoso has a 'hard ban' on randomly selecting anything composed by that composer for play. Note that any other type of play (such as by selection filters or advanced SQL selection) does not read the excludes file and thus composers mentioned in it will be played in those playback modes. We are dealing, therefore, only with a way to modify the default, randomised selection of the next play

Entries in the excludes can be deleted (or commented out) at any time, and then that composer's music immediately becomes randomly-selectable once more.

The excludes file is stored as $HOME/.local/share/giocoso3/txt/excludes.txt. Since it is merely an ordinary text file, you can open and edit it in that folder using any text editor you like. The Administration menu Option 3 we're discussing here provides basic text editing capability from within Giocoso itself, merely as a convenience.

The menu option causes the file to be opened within whatever text editor happens to be configured as the default for your operating system: most Linux distros these days seem to use nano for that purpose, but you can configure any other text editor to be the default by the command export EDITOR=xxxx issued before launching Giocoso; a permanent change to the default editor can be effected by typing the same command into your $HOME/.bashrc file.

Whatever your default editor happens to be, when Administration menu Option 3 is taken, it will open the excludes.txt ready for you to make edits to it:

In this case, my default editor is nano, so everything looks green and textual! Had I set the GUI kate editor as my default, taking Option 3 would have produced this result:

Exactly the same data as before, just opened in a different text editing tool.

Each composer who you definitely and absolutely do not want to be randomly selected for playback needs to be listed on a separate line, spelled exactly as you have tagged your music files. If you have, for example, tagged music with 'Beethoven', then it's pointless to mention 'Ludwig van Beethoven' here: there won't be an exact match and any music that happens to have been tagged as having been composed by “Beethoven” will remain valid for random selection accordingly. As another example of what not to do: you may notice the last line in my file mentions a composer called “Gustav holst”. That's unfortunate, because when I tag music that's by him, I do so with the name “Gustav Holst, with a capital H on the surname. That line of my excludes file is therefore completely pointless and won't stop anything being randomly selected!

Once this file is saved, any changes you've made to it will be applied as soon as the next random selection of something to play is made. You do not have to quit and restart Giocoso to have the changes picked up, for example.

To remove a composer from the 'banned list', you could of course simply delete the line on which that composer's name appears in the excludes.txt. You can also merely comment out the name by sticking a '#' in front of it. Here, for example:

…whilst Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's name is mentioned in the excludes.txt, his music is randomly-selectable by Giocoso, because the hash symbol at the start of his name means he's no longer considered an active member of the excludes club. Remove the hash and he's back on the excludes list for real, however.

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exempts

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2025-12-03T12:16:50+00:00

Edit the Exempts File

When Giocoso randomly selects music to play, it usually applies a 'time bar' (by default, 6 hours): if music by composer X was last played at 9AM, the time bar prevents any new music by composer X from being played until at least 3pm. The aim is to prevent large amounts of music by the same composer(s) being played in swift succession.

The exempts file mentions composers to whom the configured time bar does not apply. If I mention Benjamin Britten in it, for example, and I happen to finish playing Peter Grimes at 9AM, then Giocoso will be free to start playing Albert Herring at, say, 10am or 11.30am. It doesn't mean Giocoso will pick another piece of Britten's to play: mention in the exempts file simply means that Giocoso is allowed to pick another piece of his to play… but whether it actually does so or not will depend on Giocoso's normal process of randomisation.

Taking the Administration menu Option 2 opens the exempts file ($HOME/.local/share/giocoso3/txt/exempts.txt) within Giocoso -but it's just a text file, so you could go and edit it with a standard text editor outside of Giocoso just as well. Giocoso will open the file using whatever text editor has been declared to be the system default: that's usually nano these days, but an export EDITOR=xxxx issued before you launch Giocoso will set the session's default editor to any text editor you like.

Here's Giocoso opening my exempts.txt file inside nano:

Various things can be said about this file and its contents:

One composer's name should appear on each line.
Lines can be added or removed at will.
Lines that are present can be rendered 'inoperative' by commenting them out (that is, by typing the # character at the start of the line).
The order in which composers are listed is irrelevant.
The names on each line should ideally match how you've tagged your music files: if you tag your music as being by 'Wolfgang Mozart', then you should type 'Wolfgang Mozart' in this file, too. However, unlike the very similar excludes.txt, entries in the exempts.txt are wildcarded. If your exempts file had an entry of Bri for example, then that would free both Benjamin Britten and Frank Bridge from time bar restrictions. An entry of Mozart would similarly exempt both Wolfgang and his father Leopold equally well.

When you've edited the file to your heart's content, use the standard file save tools to write the modified file back to disk. In nano, that means typing Ctrl+X and then tapping 'y' to confirm the save when prompted. Control is then passed back to the Administration menu. The next 'play' performed by Giocoso will automatically pick up any changes to the exempts file: you don't need to re-start Giocoso for that to happen.

If you happen to list the same composer in both the exempts.txt and the excludes.txt, the excludes takes precedence: mention Brian Ferneyhough in both the excludes and the exempts and Ferneyhough's music will nevertheless be completely and always prohibited from playback, which some might consider a blessing… though I couldn't possibly comment.

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licence

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2025-12-03T12:18:43+00:00

Display the Giocoso Software Licence

Giocoso is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2. One of the terms of that licence is that a copy of the licence must be made available to any user that requests one. The Administration menu Option 5 simply displays the text of the licence in the less utility, thereby ensuring compliance with that licence requirement.

Tap the letter 'q' to quit the document when you're done with it: control will be returned to the Administration menu.

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pulse

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2025-12-03T12:46:10+00:00

Reset PulseAudio Server

This is a seriously obscure menu option that you should almost never take -and I've agonised over whether to include it in the program at all. It may well disappear in a future release! It also is (hopefully obviously) irrelevant to any PC not actually using Pulse as its audio server technology (such as a machine from Apple running macOS).

The reason for its existence is simply that when I was developing Giocoso Version 3, I was using a Raspberry Pi 4 as my main music playback device. My Topping E30 USB DAC was plugged into the Pi, and everything played just fine… until it would mysteriously stop working! This would fairly consistently happen if I ever paused playback for quite a while: resuming playback from the point previously reached would result in mere silence. I found by trial and error that if I restarted the Pi's PulseAudio server before attempting a resume, I could resume with audio sounding as normal. So, to make restarting the PulseAudio server as convenient as possible, I added in Administration menu Option 8.

I later switched to running my music via an ancient HP 'thin client' PC, however: despite that machine's age and feeble CPU, it nevertheless manages to pause and resume music perfectly and I've accordingly never needed to reset the PulseAudio server on it.

Now, it's known that the Pi 4 has fairly flakey USB 3 support, and I accordingly suspect that pausing the Giocoso music playing process for a long time on that specific device somehow caused the Topping E30 DAC to lose its connection with the Pi. Restarting the PulseAudio server made the Pi re-discover the DAC device and thus music playback could work once more. For any non-Pi device with non-flakey USB support, therefore, I strongly suspect that this menu option will never be required and accordingly should never be taken… but I've left it available, just in case, for any Pi 4 users out there.

I hear good things about the Raspberry Pi 5's much more robust and standard support for USB 3 standards, so I'm hoping that Pi 5 and later users won't have the need to restart PulseAudio periodically anyway. I do not have a Pi 5 to test that on, however, so it remains conjecture on my part.

Anyway, this option is not just for users of flakey hardware and Raspberry Pi 4s: any PC can sometimes get a bit confused and if your audio suddenly stops working, this option might help to fix it.

As the menu text itself mentions, resetting the PulseAudio Server requires issuing commands with root privileges, so you'll be prompted to supply your own password to acquire sudo rights. If audio still doesn't work after you've tried this option, it's time to start listing your audio devices (with aplay -l and ensuring that your required output hasn't acquired a new hardware identifier, which can happen). If that doesn't provide any clues, it's possibly time to check your audio hardware and/or wiring!

Note that if you're running Giocoso on a system that doesn't use PulseAudio at all (think of macOS, for example), this option might produce assorted error messages before deciding to do precisely nothing. It's only effective on machines running Linux that do use PulseAudio as their sound architecture. Any errors you see displayed are of no consequence, however, and won't be detrimental.

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settings

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-03-24T13:44:06+00:00

Create/Edit the Configuration File

1.0 Introduction

Giocoso's Persistent Configuration file is a simple text file that contains a number of parameters that tell the program how to behave. As it's merely a text file, you could open it using any text editor of your choice (the relevant file to edit is found at $HOME/.local/share/giocoso3/txt/giocoso.conf). The Administration menu Option 2 is there simply as a convenience to allow you to edit the file within Giocoso itself -and to present the file as a simple set of prompts and responses which it will turn into a syntactically-valid configuration file, rather than you having to worry about whether you've typed things correctly if you were editing the file directly.

If you manually edit the file, you'll need to quit and re-launch Giocoso to have the new values applied. If you use the Administration menu Option 2 to edit it, the new values are applied immediately and automatically, without need for a program restart to have new parameter values picked up. It is accordingly recommended that you only use the Administration menu Option 2 to make changes to your configuration file.

This option basically presents you with a 4-page wizard that steps you through various types of configuration option: some require numeric values, some yes/no answers and some bespoke text entries. You can quit the wizard at any time by pressing the [Cancel] button. If you do so, you'll lose everything you may have modified up to that point: the entire configuration file reverts to having the settings and parameter values that were there before you started editing anything. To save altered values, therefore, you need to complete the entire configuration wizard, not quit half-way through!

I'll now take you through each of the configuration option screens (there are four of them in total) in the order you'll meet them.

2.0 Default Database

Giocoso only plays music that has been discovered on your file system -and details of what, precisely, has been discovered have to be stored inside a database. You create that database using the Database Management menu, but here you need to tell Giocoso which one of potentially many different databases should be opened by default whenever the program is run:

All possible databases are listed (these will be files with .db extensions that are housed in the $HOME/.local/share/giocoso3/db folder). You get to pick just one of them: arrow up and down the list until the right database name is highlighted, then press the Space Bar to select it. An asterisk will appear in the brackets shown before the selected database's name. If you select incorrectly, just arrow to a new database and press the Space Bar once more: the asterisk will jump to the newly-selected database. When you're sure you've selected the correct database, press [Enter] to move on.

Note that you're only setting the default database here. You can always switch dynamically to use a non-default database at any time (just use Option 4 on the Database Management menu), so whatever you set here doesn't preclude the future use of any other database.

3.0 Parameters requiring Text Values

The next set of configuration parameters that are displayed are ones that require text (or numbers that are treated like text) to complete properly:

The audio device is an important parameter that tells Giocoso where to direct its audio output. By default, the parameter is set to 'default', which on most Linux distros these days will mean Giocoso outputs to a PulseAudio server, though PipeWire is becomeing more common, too (see this blog piece for a bit of an explanation as to how the different Linux audio software layers interact). This may be perfectly acceptable for your purposes. For my own media player, however, I prefer to bypass PulseAudio and instead pass the audio signal direct to the ALSA sound server. To do that, I need to know the hardware device identifier for the Douk ST01 Pro DAC that my music playing PC is connected -and the easiest way of identifying that is to issue the command aplay -l (that's a 'minus ell' at the end there):

This output requires some interpretation! I can start by dismissing anything mentioning HDMI: I don't connect my PC to the Douk DAC by HDMI, so those must just be audio capabilities of the monitor that's attached to the PC. That therefore leaves me outputting to a device “CS4208” in either analogue or digital mode. I happen to know that I connect my PC to the DAC via an optical TosLink cable, I know I must be dealing with the digital device, not the analogue one. From this output, therefore, I know my audio device should be identified to Giocoso as 0,1 (because the output lists the device as being 'Card 0, device 1'. I stick the string plughw: in front of that and thus replace the default value of my audio device with this:

If I'd typed plughw:1,3 instead, Giocoso's music plays would be pumped out through an HDMI connection (which might be handy if your audio player was a well-provisioned TV set, for example).

If in doubt about what hardware device ID to use, by all means stick with 'default': I personally don't like routing audio via PulseAudio, because PulseAudio introduces latency and other processing artefacts into the audio signal and, for classical music reproduction, I prefer things to be as 'clean' as possible. When you can't work out your audio hardware, however, then at least PulseAudio produces sound you can enjoy, most of the time!

Report durations is a minor parameter that controls how numbers are displayed in the various reports you can produce using the Reporting menu options. By default, the parameter is set to minutes, but if your music collection is large enough, you may well want to report in hours instead. The difference would show up in a report such as this one, for example, which is the 'Top Composers' (by play durations) report, Option 2:

You can see I've played Benjamin Britten 641 times, amounting to a cumulative play time of 13,858.02 minutes. That's the sort of display you get, then, with the Report durations parameter set to 'minutes'. Change it to 'hours' instead, and re-run the report and you'll see this instead:

It's the same basic play data, but this time the cumulative play totals are expressed in hours (and yes, 13,858.02 minutes is actually 230.967 hours -but Giocoso rounds things up and down, which is why the report shows 230.97 hours!)

This parameter is therefore really more cosmetic than anything else.

The Backup folder parameter determines where music database backups (produced by taking the Database Management menu Option 6) are written. The default value for this parameter is /tmp, but you can set it to any folder to which you have write permissions. An invalid folder name, or a valid folder name you can't write to, will be silently reverted to a $HOME default.

The Remote MySQL Server IP Address and Remote MySQL Server Port parameters basically enable Giocoso's “Pro” features: those are documented at length here, but the short version is that if Giocoso is told where to find a MySQL or MariaDB database on the network, it will begin using that database instead of its own local one, both to store details about what music has been played and also as the 'source' of data about what recordings are available to be played in the first place. Identifying where that MySQL/MariaDB database can be found is done by specifying its IP address and port number. If the IP Address field is left blank (as is the default), then no Pro features are switched on, even if the port number is filled in with something.

The Local music folder prefix parameter is also related to Giocoso Pro functionality. The idea of having a remote database is that it can be shared amongst different PCs: my garden shed computer can play music sourced via the one, central database just as effectively as the PC in my main listening room. However: my garden shed computer may access its music at (say) /home/hjr/Music/classical whereas my listening room PC finds its music at “/music/classical”. What we need to specify for this parameter, therefore, is the bit of the path to music files that is unique to each PC. In my case, that would be “/home/hjr/Music” for the garden shed and “/music” for the listening room. The Pro database can therefore tell either PC to play music from “A/Aaron Copland/Ballet/Rodeo” and each PC will prepend the 'local prefix' to that, to arrive at '/home/hjr/Music/classical/A/Aaron Copland/Ballet/Rodeo' and '/music/classical/A/Aaron Copland/Ballet/Rodeo' paths respectively. One shared database can thus tell multiple differently-configured PCs how to find the same music files with this parameter.

The Is this a Primary Device parameter takes yes/no values (so really ought to be on the last page of configuration variables!). It's another parameter which relates to Giocoso Pro functionality. If set to 'yes', you're saying that if this PC were ever to do a scan for new recordings, it ought to then upload its discoveries to the global, shared database. There's no point in each PC running Giocoso Pro uploading the same set of 'discovered recordings' to the same shared database: the second PC's results will just over-write the first PC's identical results, for example. So, you set the parameter to 'yes' for one of your PCs, and to 'no' for the others. If you happen to set it to 'yes' for all of them, no harm is done: you'll just be wasting CPU and network resources, uploading and over-writing the same dataset multiple times as each PC searches for new recordings to play.

Finally, the Preferred browser parameter takes the name of the executable that launches a web browser (that must already be installed on your system: Giocoso won't check that the name you supply actually exists). If you supply a wrong name or the name of a browser that hasn't been installed on your system, Giocoso reports will open in whatever your system's default browser happens to be. Be aware that on macOS, executable names are not always what they seem: check the Applications folder in Finder to see the actual names to use. It's not “brave” to launch the Brave web browser, for example, but “Brave Browser”, with two capital letters and a space; it's not “chromium” but “Chromium”… and so on. On Linux, executable names will usually be less complicated and invariably all lower-case. It is, however, actually recommended that you leave this parameter set to its default value of nothing at all: Giocoso reports will then open in your system's default browser, which is pretty much guaranteed to work without drama.

4.0 Parameters requiring Numeric Values

The third set of parameters you are prompted for all take numeric values:

Since there are quite a few of these sorts of parameters, I'll go through them in table form:

Parameter Name	Parameter Meaning	Description
Number of plays per cycle	How many random selections of music does Giocoso make in one 'session', before terminating all playback?	Default value is 1: each play effectively stops Giocoso in its tracks. I like a decent number of plays in succession, so I've set mine in the screenshot to 10, meaning I listen to 10 different recordings, one after the other, before having to interact with Giocoso again.
Hours before composer eligible	How many hours must elapse between plays of music by the same composer?	This is the 'time bar'. By default, it's 6 hours, meaning that if Wagner is played at 9AM, he can't be played again until at least 3PM. Setting this parameter to 0 means switching the time bar off completely: a piece of Mozart could be followed immediately by another piece by Mozart. At non-zero values, the parameter is designed to stop Giocoso randomly selecting work by the same composer over and over again.
Minimum length of play	How many minutes must a recording (in total) last for, before it can be selected for playback?	The default value is 0, meaning 'any recording of whatever length is a candidate for random selection'. Note that it's the folder that's evaluated for duration when working out if it meets the minimum duration threshold. That is, if you have 4 tracks of a symphony each lasting 3 minutes, and you set this parameter to (say) 10, then the symphony is allowed to be played: its total duration of 12 minutes exceeds the threshold.
Maximum length of play	How many minutes must a recording (in total) last less than, for it to be a valid candidate for playback?	The default value is 525960, which is the number of minutes in a year if 365.25 days! That's longer than any recording in existence of course, so effectively the default means 'all recordings, whatever their length, are valid candidates to be randomly selected'. Set it to (say) 120, however, and you're saying that anything that lasts, in total, for more than 120 minutes (2 hours) cannot be selected for playback. This is a way to stop Wagner operas being randomly selected for playback, for example. As with the minimum length of play parameter, a folder's total duration is assessed when determining if it's an acceptable candidate for selection. Lots of short tracks are added together to work out that the recording as a whole exceeds the threshold, for example.
Screen width	How many pixels does your screen or monitor use to display in the horizontal direction?	Defaults to 1920. The parameter helps controls where on the screen an independent album art window will display, should you configure to use one. By making the parameter value bigger than your actual screen width, you cause the album art window to be pushed over to the right. By making it smaller, the window gets pushed over to the left. When both the screen width and height parameters are set to their correct, actual physical values, the album art window is meant to appear in the lower-centre of the screen.
Screen height	How many pixels does your screen or monitor use to display in the vertical direction?	Defaults to 1080. The parameter helps controls where on the screen an independent album art window will display, should you configure to use one. By making the parameter value bigger than your actual screen height, you cause the album art window to be pushed downwards. By making it smaller, the window gets pushed upwards. When both the screen width and height parameters are set to their correct, actual physical values, the album art window is meant to appear in the lower-centre of the screen.
Size of Album Art	How many pixels wide and high should album art imagery be displayed at?	Defaults to 340. The parameter only takes one value, and then duplicates it for the other dimension. In other words, a value of 340 is converted into an image size of 340×340 pixels: Giocoso always expects to work with square album art imagery! You may need to play around with this parameter as you start working with Giocoso: the album art is usually displayed on the right-side of the main program window when something is playing and it may or may not fit that display area, depending on your terminal, its choice of font and font size and so on. The default of 340 has been set so that if you use the Xterm terminal and the fonts installed by Giocoso for the purpose, in-terminal album art should appear correctly. A 50-pixel high 'caption bar' is automatically added to the bottom of the actual album art: it displays text indicating the composer name and the composition/recording name being played. By default, therefore, you'd end up with a 340×390 piece of album art (that is, 340 pixels wide and 390 high).
Seconds to wait before playback starts	Time to wait after selecting something to play before actually starting to play it.	Defaults to 0. If set to (say) 120, then Giocoso will select something new to play immediately, but a countdown timer will mean it waits for 2 minutes before beginning to play it. The point is to be able to see what's about to be played and to give you a chance (for example) to get the score for that work in hand before the music actually starts playing.
Size of the Program Logo	Size of the program logo graphic displayed on the main program display, in pixels.	Defaults to 220. Determines how big the program logo (the little picture of Beethoven) appears on the right-hand of the screen. The supplied value is used to determine both height and width, so a value of 180 would turn into a square image of 180 x 180 pixels.
Program Logo position (- or +)	Left or right position of the program logo graphic, in characters.	Defaults to 0. Shifts the program logo to the left (with negative numbers) or right (with positive ones), by as many characters as the number supplied. A value of -5 means 'move it five characters to the left'; a value of 8 means 'move it eight characters to the right'. Positive numbers should not use the '+' sign, but negative numbers will need to specify the '-' one.

5.0 Parameters requiring Yes/No Values

The final page of the in-program Configuration file editing menu option now appears:

All these parameters take binary, yes or no entries. The code is written so that if your entry contains a 'y' in it, that's counted as a 'yes' response. So, y, Y, or yes would all count as 'yes'. Type anything else at all, however, and it's taken as being a 'no' entry. So, x, Q or nooooo would all get assessed as meaning 'no'.

I'll again discuss each parameter in tabular format:

Parameter Name	Parameter Meaning	Description
Prevent accented character conversion	Should the use of accented characters (in terms such as Concert champêtre) be forced or not?	Some operating systems may take accented characters and auto-convert them to non-accented equivalents (so you end up with Concert champetre, for example, missing its caret accent in the second word). A setting of yes is not normally required for properly-configured operating systems, though it is the default, but if Giocoso on your operating system seems to be forgetting accents you know ought to be present, then set this to 'yes' to prevent their mysterious disappearance.
Under-played Composers	Should composers who have been played proportionately less than others be the only candidates for the next random selection for playback?	The default is 'no', but switching this to 'yes' enables the 'under played composer' feature that is discussed at length here. The short version is that if your collection contains music by 100 composers, a 'fair distribution' of plays would result in each composer's cumulative play time being 1% of total cumulative play time. Composers whose play time falls below that threshold would be the only ones allowed to be candidates for the next randomised selection.
Unplayed Recordings	Should Giocoso only select previously un-played recordings as candidates for the next random selection for playback?	The default is 'no', but turning this on means that only recordings mentioned in the RECORDINGS table that do not have matching entries in the PLAYS table are candidates for the next randomised selection. The determinant is the full folder name: if that appears in PLAYS, then it's a previously-played recording and would be excluded from candidate status. Setting this to 'yes' is a good way to ensure Giocoso plays through your entire music collection without just overlooking some of the more obscure parts of it!
Display Album Art in own window	Should album art be displayed in its own, separate and movable window?	Defaults to 'no'. Album art is then displayed 'in-terminal' -that is, within the main Giocoso program area. Setting it to 'yes' means album art gets displayed in its own program window, independent of and external to the Giocoso program window. Some operating systems do not know how to display graphics in-terminal very well (or at all!), in which case displaying it in an external window is a good workaround.
Force the use of PulseAudio	Should audio output be forcibly directed to a PulseAudio server?	Defaults to no. Usually, the audio device setting (see above, under parameters requiring text values) will control where Giocoso's audio output is directed. When in doubt, a setting of 'default' there is usually sufficient to get sound output working. However, in specialised situations, you may wish to forcibly direct Giocoso to output to a PulseAudio server by setting this parameter to 'yes'. One such scenario is: sending audio over a home network. If your living room PC is running Windows, for example, and you are running Giocoso on a Raspberry Pi in the loft, you can get the Pi to send its audio signal to a PulseAudio server running on your Windows PC over the network. PulseAudio is very handy for this cross-network audio capability (rather as x11 is great for cross-network graphics capabilities).
Attempt to fix album art display	Should Giocoso attempt to display a dithered version of album art in-terminal or not?	Defaults to no. By default, Giocoso will want to display album art in-terminal in high-resolution using full colour. Some operating systems do not like this, however, and completely garble the album art display as a consequence (see, for example, Fedora). One possible workaround is to set this parameter to 'yes': the result is a dithered, 8-bit representation of the album art which usually displays adequately. A better 'fix' if it's needed at all is to run Giocoso in a terminal emulator that knows how to display in-terminal graphics properly (such as Konsole), but this parameter at least provides a workaround that needs no additional software added to your system.
Automatically launch Mgiocoso Control Panel	Should a separate program, called Mgiocoso, be launched that allows you to control a Giocoso session that is busy playing music. Allows for control of a remote Giocoso session via, for example, a mobile phone.	Defaults to no (from version 3.20 upwards).
Use Kitty Graphics	Should Giocoso use Kitty to display album art, rather than Sixel graphics?

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updates

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2025-11-28T12:18:31+00:00

Check for program updates

This is an important menu option. It will generate a series of hash values for all the Giocoso components installed locally on your own PC. It will then check this website's servers and determine the hash values for those same components stored there. If the hash values do not agree, it means one of more of the files' contents have changed, compared to what's available from my website… and that's an indication that I've patched or fixed something. You should therefore apply the update when prompted. Should all the hash values agree, however, then your installation is as up-to-date as it can be and no further action is taken.

When you first take this menu option, you'll immediately see this sort of output:

That is Giocoso immediately computing hash values for the local program files and comparing them to those held on my own servers: you can see that any discrepancies are noted. In the example shown above, you can tell that the local copies of the 'ablibgioadvrep.sh' and 'ablibgioadvsql.sh' files do not match the versions currently made available from this website. This is an indication that the local installation is out-of-date. This is confirmed by the dialog that appears when the file comparisons have been completed:

You can choose to back out at this point: just tab around until the 'no' option is highlighted and press [Enter]. If you press [Enter] whilst the 'yes' option is highlighted, however, you'll see this happen:

You will be prompted for the sudo password (because some of Giocoso's files need to be copied to /usr/bin which generally requires root-equivalent privileges). Type that in and press [Enter] again and the display will change once more to this:

Each dot represents a component file of the Giocoso program, being transferred over the Internet from my servers to your PC. If an 'X' appears, that means a network failure has interrupted the file transfer: that will mean the upgrade has failed. In that event, you'd be prompted to try one more time, but if the problem persists, you can simply re-run the entire update process again as many times as it takes for the file transfer to succeed.

Once all the new files are transferred across, Giocoso will again check them for validity and for being current versions:

The checksum comparison process can take a while to complete on slower hardware: you might be staring at this sort of thing for 30 seconds or so until the process is complete. Assuming that everything came down from the Internet correctly, your local files will inevitably end up matching my servers' copies of the same things exactly: if that's true, you'll then see this final prompt:

Press [Enter] to dismiss this screen and you'll be returned back to the Administration menu.

It is important to ensure your Giocoso installation remains as up-to-date as possible: I would suggest a weekly use of the Administration menu Option 4 to keep on top of things, especially soon after Version 3's initial release (November 2023): bug fixes usually come in droves immediately after a new Giocoso version release, I'm afraid!

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