BBritten.com - softwares:semplice

linux

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-02-02T10:19:50+00:00

Installing and Running Semplice on Linux

General Observations

macos

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-02-03T14:35:26+00:00

Installing Semplice on macOS

1.0 Introduction

For several years, the best I could do by way of offering support for running Semplice on macOS was to say, “It probably works fine, but I can't really say for sure” because all my Apple hardware dated from 2012, 2014 or 2015. My various iMacs and Mac Minis thus all used Intel hardware and were severely restricted in what versions of macOS they could run without adding the complication of using the Open Core Legacy Patcher to the mix.

From the end of January 2026, however, that is no longer true. I still have all those Intel Macs, so I can test Giocoso on those and their assorted old versions of macOS… but I now own an M4 iMac and can therefore attest that Semplice installs and runs on Apple Silicon just fine and that the latest version of macOS (Tahoe, at the time of writing) works perfectly fine with the latest version of Giocoso (version 3.34 at the time of writing).

For this reason, running Semplice on Apple's hardware is now Tier 1 support territory: it is, in fact, my new daily driver and I can therefore state with confidence not merely that it ought to work but that it very much does work.

Having said that, I'll point out that ripping CDs with Apple SuperDrives will work but that the usual automatic detection of an appropriate read offset cannot be done: Apple intentionally obscures the manufacturer's ID information for such drives. That's a problem because they are made by different manufacturers and therefore will have different read offsets but, since it's impossible for macOS to identify which manufacturer made which specific device, the correct read offset cannot be determined. Your best bet in these cases is to (1) plug your SuperDrive into a Linux or Windows PC, determine the manufacturer's ID there, and then manually search the AccurateRip database to find a match: once you know the correct read offset, plug the drive back into your Apple PC and configure the appropriate read offset in Semplice's persistent configuration file; or (2) use a third-party optical drive with your Apple PC: standard auto-detection of the correct read offset works with such drives without an issue.

One other point of difference between Semplice running on macOS and on anything else: Semplice on macOS cannot verify your CD rips using the AccurateRip database. The software to do so is not readily installable on macOS, unfortunately. The rips will likely still be accurate, because the cdparanoia ripping engine works that way: you just won't be able to confirm they're accurate.

Another ripping 'issue': note that on Linux, optical drives are polled continuously until the insertion of a CD is detected, then automatic identification and offset determination takes place. That is not how it works on macOS! On macOS, there has to be an audio CD inserted into the drive before the operating system is even aware that a CD drive exists. As far as macOS is concerned, it cannot even enumerate optical drives until media is inserted into it, so there's nothing to poll to see if insertion has occurred! Practically, this means you have to insert the CD into your drive, wait a bit for its table of contents to be read… and only then can you take the Ripping menu, Option 1.

I should mention, too, that it is strongly recommended to have only one optical drive connected to your Mac before attempting to rip: Semplice's code does not handle multiple drives at all well and errors will result if more than one drive exists.

Finally, note that Option 2 on the Ripping menu just does nothing on macOS: the drive detection mechanism used by that option is completely different on Linux vis-a-vis macOS, so none of it works.

Those slight differences between Semplice-on-Linux and Semplice-on-macOS out of the way, however, the basic principle of getting Semplice to run on macOS is, essentially, to install a quasi-Linux 'userland' of tools and utilities, thus creating an environment Linux-y enough for Semplice to cope. There are two possible ways of doing that: by using Homebrew or MacPorts as a quasi-package manager.

Homebrew supports only newer macOS releases (basically, Sonoma, Sequoia and Tahoma). It will work on older releases, but with quirky glitches and errors that have to be worked around. On those older releases, too, Homebrew tends to compile things from scratch, which works eventually but takes ages to complete: one install on Catalina took over 6 hours to finish! I really wouldn't recommend Homebrew installs unless you're running newer macOS versions on decent hardware, therefore.

MacPorts supports older macOS releases very well (and the newer ones, too) and its installs are relatively quick in all cases. I would certainly recommend the MacPorts approach to running Semplice, therefore.

However, it's not a free choice: if you've ever used Homebrew before, you must not switch to using MacPorts, nor vice versa. It's one or the other, but software mayhem awaits anyone trying to use both.

So, if you've used neither package manager before, I'd recommend MacPorts, especially for older macOS releases. If you've used one or other before, you must continue to use that manager now. Anything older than Monterey is really a problem for Homebrew installations, however, so if you can avoid that, I'd strongly recommend you to do so.

Anyway, if macOS is detected, Semplice's installer will prompt you to tell it which package manager it should use.

This documentation will thus chart two paths forward: one, the Homebrew approach; the other, the MacPorts one. Pick one and only one! In both cases, however, you end up with a system that is capable of running Semplice, so the two paths merge thereafter for the purposes of running and using Semplice. My recommendation remains, however, that the MacPorts approach is simpler and faster (and better tested!)

2.0 Installing Homebrew

Before we can install Homebrew, we need to install all the command line utilities that allow software to be compiled. In a terminal window, type the command:

xcode-select --install

Once that install has completed, type:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

That will download the Homebrew software itself and install it: respond appropriately to any prompts put to you. At the end of the Homebrew installation, you'll see a message that tells you to type three convoluted commands that put Homebrew in your system's path. Mine were:

echo >> /Users/hjr/.zprofile
echo 'eval "$(/usr/local/bin/brew shellenv)"' >> /Users/hjr/.zprofile
eval "$(/usr/local/bin/brew shellenv)"

Obviously, yours won't say “hjr”! Type the personalised equivalents of those commands into your own terminal. This is especially true for macOS on Apple Silicon: the paths are quite different on that platform (using /opt/homebrew rather than /usr/local/bin/homebrew, for example), not because it's the Apple Silicon making a difference but because Homebrew changed its default locations in the later versions that Apple Silicon PCs will be using.

At this point, you will need to install a couple of pieces of critical software that are needed just to obtain the Semplice installer, let alone to run it. I also suggest that you manually install a few other packages, largely because (a) I've had errors when the Semplice installer tries to do the same; and (b) a couple of these packages can take literally 5 or 6 hours to compile (though I will note that Homebrew installs on more modern versions of macOS are much quicker than that. I think it better that you see that happening for that length of time, rather than sit staring at an apparently 'stuck' Semplice installer attempting to do the same things. Get the pain out of the way early, rather than experience it during the Semplice install, in other words. Type these commands one at a time, in the order shown, bearing in mind that the first one might take nearly six hours to complete on older hardware:

brew install wget bash wezterm fd flac ffmpeg xterm dialog freetype xquartz
brew postinstall openssl
brew postinstall llvm

Next, you must install ImageMagick. You can try to install that via Homebrew: my experience on Monterey and Sequoia was perfectly reasonable, but things failed miserably on Catalina (with the error “Failed to download resource libzip (1.11.4)” or similar). So by all means try a brew install imagemagick (all in lower case, with a 'k' on the end). On later macOS releases, that will probably work fine.

On much earlier macOS releases, however, it will probably fail miserably, in which case you should issue these commands instead:

cd
cd Downloads
wget https://imagemagick.org/archive/binaries/ImageMagick-x86_64-apple-darwin20.1.0.tar.gz
tar -xzf ImageMagick-x86_64-apple-darwin20.1.0.tar.gz
sudo mv ImageMagick-7.0.10 /usr/local/ImageMagick

sudo nano /etc/paths
At the top of the file, add a new line reading: /usr/local/ImageMagick/bin
sudo cp -R /usr/local/ImageMagick/lib/* /usr/local/lib
sudo cp -R /usr/local/ImageMagick/bin/* /usr/local/bin

Finish off with:

magick -version

…and if you get output that reads something like “ImageMagick 7.0.10.43 Q16 …” then you know that ImageMagick is working as intended. Having to faff around like this on older versions of macOS is why MacPorts is preferred for them: you probably won't have this sort of issue on newer or current versions.

A final step rounds things out: edit /etc/paths and put the path to the Homebrew bin folder at the top of the list. A simple way to determine what path that should be is to type this command in a terminal:

which magic

On Catalina, for example, that returned the result:

/usr/local/bin/magick

…which tells me that Homebrew has installed its software into “/usr/local/bin”.

On Monterey and Tahoe, however, I got this result instead:

/opt/homebrew/bin/magick

…which tells me that Homebrew has installed its software into /opt/homebrew/bin.

Either way, once you know the 'Homebrew binaries folder', you need to add it to the very top of the /etc/paths file:

sudo nano /etc/paths

It is quite likely that /usr/local/bin is already at the top of the default list of path folders. If that's the case and your homebrew binaries folder is /usr/local/bin then you can just close down the editor without altering anything. If your homebrew binaries folder is “/opt/homebrew bin”, however, then you'll need to type that as the very first line in the /etc/paths folder, pushing all the existing lines down one.

Failure to put the Homebrew bin folder first in your path means that the wrong version of Bash will get used to run Semplice… and that will break things horribly!

Once those installations are complete, you'll be free to download the Semplice installer and run it… for the which, see Section 4 below! For now, close the terminal you were using to install these packages and open a brand new one to do the Semplice install: that way, new paths and installations are fully picked up by the new terminal session.

3.0 Installing MacPorts

Before we can install MacPorts itself, we need to install the various command line utilities that MacPorts will expect to find on the system: these are programs that, for example, compile source code into executable binary packages. Fortunately, this is quite easy to do.

Simply open a terminal and type the command:

xcode-select --install

A graphical dialog will ask you if you really want to install the command line tools:

Click [Install] and agree to the ludicrously long licence agreement that appears. A lengthy download of the relevant software then takes place, ending with this:

Once those tools are installed, you need to obtain an appropriate version of MacPorts: different releases of macOS need different instances of the MacPorts software. At the time of writing (January 2026), these were the latest os-dependent releases available:

Check the Macports website for the actual versions current at the time you want to install. There are versions available for macOS releases earlier than Sierra, but installing Semplice on such ancient operating systems is definitely not supported at all, so be my guest but you're on your own for them!

Once you've downloaded the correct package for your operating system, visit your Downloads folder in Finder and double-click the pkg file to launch the installation wizard:

Click your way through the wizard, agreeing to the inevitable licence, and choosing an appropriate hard drive to install onto:

You'll be prompted for your administrator password and then the software installation will begin. Once it's complete, you'll be asked whether to move the downloaded MacPorts package to the bin or keep it: either answer is fine, but you won't need to install MacPorts again, so you might as well bin the package!

Next you will need to add the MacPorts path to your system's PATH variable: you do that by typing the command:

sudo nano /etc/paths

At the very top of the file, before all other listed folder names, add the line:

/opt/local/bin

…and then save the modified file. It is important this new path appears first in the file, because that determines the order in which macOS searches for executables -and we want the MacPorts executables to be found before macOS's built-in ones. Only in this way can we be sure, for example, that the MacPorts version of Bash is used in preference to macOS's ancient version of Bash (which won't be able to run Giocoso properly).

You make this change of path variables take effect by closing your existing terminal window and opening a new one.

Once that's all done, you need to install a couple of software packages before you can attempt to install Giocoso. Just type the command:

sudo port install wget bash

You'll see MacPorts proposing to install a bunch of related software besides those two packages:

When prompted, say 'y' to continue. The software installation will be relatively swift, and will end with a wall of text that you can safely ignore:

Once you see that, your system is ready to install Semplice. Be sure to close your terminal again at this point and open a new one: if you don't, you'll be trying to launch the Semplice installer in a terminal that only knows about the existence of the ancient, built-in version of Bash, which won't work. Only a freshly-opened terminal will notice that you've just installed a Version 5+ copy of Bash and make use of it.

4.0 Installing Semplice

Now you're ready to install Semplice, you first need to obtain the installation script itself. That's easily done in a terminal, with the command:

wget software.bbritten.com/seminst

To launch the downloaded script, you then just type the command:

bash seminst

That should immediately trigger the following display:

This text just warns you that an assortment of software is about to be installed on your system and some configuration changes will be made. You can back out at this point, by tapping 'n', and nothing at all will have changed on your PC… but if you tap 'y', the installer will proceed. You'll first be asked to supply the sudo password, so that the installer script can obtain the root privileges it needs to do its work. Once you supply that, you'll see this bit of text:

This is quite a crucial prompt to get right. Semplice can use either Homebrew or MacPorts to install the software it depends on …but it's vital that it shouldn't use the package manager that's inappropriate for your system. If you've installed Homebrew, Semplice mustn't try to use MacPorts and, of course, the opposite also applies. Your job is therefore to tap 'h' or 'm' to tell the installer which package manager to use during the installation process. Make sure you pick the right one, or mayhem will ensue!

As soon as you've selected the correct package manager, the screen will change to this sort of thing:

This part of proceedings can take quite a while (potentially a very long time if you're using the Homebrew package manager): be patient and let it do its thing! Eventually, the screen will change to this:

With the software prerequisites dealt with, the installer will now download Semplice itself: just click OK (or press [Enter]) to move on to that next step:

Be warned that, depending on how long the earlier phases of the installation process have taken, your sudo privileges may have expired. You might therefore see this sort of thing:

That little key icon is the clue: it's a prompt for you to supply your sudo password afresh, though I'm afraid it's not terribly obvious! Keep an eye out for it, anyway. Once the dowanload of Semplice's own components begins, it will speed by pretty quickly: Semplice's bits and pieces are measured in kilobytes, not gigabytes! When they've all been downloaded, you'll be prompted once more to begin a verification process, where the installer computes a hash sum for the things it has downloaded and compares those hash values to ones this website thinks ought to be true:

If any mismatches are detected, the installer will try to download the various components again, hopefully with a better result. One way or another, however, you'll end up seeing this:

And that's it! Semplice is now successfully installed and can be immediately launched by typing the command semplice into a terminal:

Of course, that screenshot happens to look decent and usable because I've previously altered the default Terminal's default profile to be 'Homebrew', which is dark and green. If I'd been using the default Terminal in its default mode, the results might not have been quite so desirable, however:

That's barely legible, of course: but that's a function of your Terminal profile, really. I'll show you later how you can resolve this in a way that doesn't require you to change your Terminal profile if you don't want to. We'll sort this out shortly, but for now the point is that Semplice is installed and works!

5.0 WezTerm to the Rescue!

Appearing in all the wrong colours is easily fixed by altering Terminal's colour scheme (click Terminal → Preferences → Profiles and pick one such as 'Homebrew' or 'Pro'). However, my preferred environment in which to run Semplice is WezTerm, an alternative terminal emulator. In fact, as it turns out, if you ever want to edit an embedded cuesheet with Semplice on macOS, WezTerm has to be installed: there is currently a hard dependency on WezTerm to display the text editor, since macOS's version of xterm won't respect font size or font directives when launched and therefore you would end up with a ghastly, tiny text display that is functionally a disaster area. WezTerm is thus a hard dependency of Semplice on macOS.

If you are using MacPorts, therefore, I recommend you run the following command:

sudo port install wezterm

…which will install the WezTerm terminal emulator, which does know how to render sixel graphics. It should appear in the Launchpad display as a black square with a blue “$W” in it. There's no need to do this now if you're using Homebrew, because I included the command to install that way back in Section 2 anyway.

WezTerm will tend to want to open by default using a small window with small fonts: I suggest you would want to change that up a bit. The way you do that is to issue these commands:

cd
nano .wezterm.lua

Paste into the new file the following:

local wezterm = require 'wezterm'
local config = wezterm.config_builder()
config.initial_cols = 103
config.initial_rows = 28

config.colors = {
    -- The default text color (green is dark green, lime is bright green)
    foreground = 'lime',
    -- The default background color
    background = 'black', 
}

config.font = wezterm.font("Courier New", {weight="Regular", stretch="Normal", style="Normal"})
config.font_size = 16

wezterm.on('format-window-title', function(window, pane, tabs, panes, config)
    return "Semplice : The FLAC Manager"
end)

return config

Save the modified file. Hopefully, most of this is self-explanatory: it tells WezTerm to open at an initial 103 columns by 28 rows; to use the built-in Courier font (more on this below) at 16pt size, and to auto-launch Semplice when it itself launches. With these parameters configured, launch WezTerm by clicking its icon in the Launchpad:

That's a rather pleasing display, I think.

Be aware that Semplice supplies a font it thinks you might want to use instead of the 'Courier New' one I've mentioned in the above configuration file: Luxi Mono. It can be found in the /Users/hjr/.local/share/semplice2/art folder (the “hjr” bit is my username: substitute in your own, obviously!), as a file called luximr.ttf. Double-click that to launch the Apple Font Book utility which lets you install it:

Once the font has been installed, re-edit the .wezterm.lua file and replace the name “Courier New” with “Luxi Mono”, leaving all other text unchanged, and save the file. You should see the existing terminal update itself to display the new font:

The new font is slightly serif (the characters have little hooks at their tips and so on) and not quite as spidery as Courier New… but the choice of font is, ultimately, up to you.

6.0 Final Graphical Tweaks

The last thing you might want to consider is creating a proper program launcher for Semplice that looks like it belongs to Semplice and not Wezterm! Here, for example, is my dock:

You'll note that the second icon in from the left is, indeed, something that looks like it might want to launch Semplice. How do you achieve that?

Well, first open Finder and visit the Application section: there you'll find a MacPorts folder (assuming you've used MacPorts to install everything, of course):

Inside that folder, you'll find the icon used to launch WezTerm:

Right-click that icon and select 'Copy' from the context menu; then click back to the Applications section and right-click and select 'Paste': you'll now have a WezTerm icon in the 'root' of the Applications folder:

Right-click this new icon and select 'Rename' from the context menu and then change the text label for the icon to 'Semplice':

Now comes the slightly tricky bit to describe! Right-click the new 'Semplice' icon and select 'Get Info' from the context menu. That will open up an information panel about the executable associated with the icon. Keep that open whilst, back in Finder, you select 'Go → Go to Folder…' from the top menu: for the path to go to, type /Users/hjr/.local/share/semplice2/art (replacing 'hjr' with your own username, of course):

Your job now is to click-and-drag the sempliceico.png from the art folder in Finder on top of the tiny '$W' icon in the top left-hand corner of the Semplice Info panel. Drop the png on top of the existing icon and you should see both the little and big icon at the bottom of the Info panel change:

Now you can close the Info panel down. In the Finder window, you can now double-click the new Semplice icon to launch WezTerm. That will put the running application-with-Semplice-icon into your dock: right-click it to say 'Keep in Dock' and then drag it to where you want to see it in future. Bingo: you now have a proper-looking application launcher that will allow you to run Semplice easily within a terminal emulator. You'll still have to type the command semplice to launch the program, but at least it looks graphically plausible!

A couple of additional notes of caution and advice. First: earlier versions of macOS (think: Catalina, especially) do not allow you to drag .png files onto the Info panel as I've described here. On those versions, you first have to convert the .png supplied by Semplice to a .icns format and then drop that version of the artwork onto the Info panel's little icon placeholder. I use this free on-line converter to do that. Point the site to the .local/share/giocoso3/art/sempliceico.png file, click convert, then download the converted file. Drag that to the Info panel and you can delete the download afterwards.

Second: if you used Homebrew to install Giocoso, you won't find WezTerm inside a MacPorts folder: it will be directly in the Applications section of Finder. The same technique applies, however: copy it, paste it, rename it, re-icon it.

7.0 Some Security Considerations

From about Monterey onwards, Apple really locked security down on macOS. By default, this breaks quite a lot of Semplice functionality! Some of the security issues get resolved by you attempting to do things in Semplice and pop-ups asking for permissions appear. Click to grant those permissions when requested and you're good to go.

Not all required permissions are gained so easily, however. My general advice is to grant both Terminal and WezTerm full disk access and the ability for both those programs to control your computer. On Sequoia, for example, this latter privilege is found in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility → Allow assistive applications to control the computer. SACD rips (for one) won't work without this step, though if you never intend to rip SACDs, I suppose you could live without granting that specific permission.

You also may need to allow sacd_extract (whether of Intel or Apple Silicon variety) to be a trusted application. By default it won't be:

You'll only see this after your first, failed attempt to rip an SACD triggers the “This software can't be trusted” dialog. Once that has happened, however, go to System Settings → Privacy & Security and click to 'Allow Anyway' the sacd_extract- executable. Your second attempt to rip an SACD will still then generate this dialog:

Click 'Open Anyway' there and you should at last be good to go. Again, the specifics of this complex web of security prohibitions depends on the version of macOS you're using. Just be assured that SACD ripping can work on something as modern as Tahoe, on Apple Silicon, as you can see here:

8.0 Conclusion

I've personally installed Semplice 2.12 on (a) Catalina; (b) Monterey; (c) Sonoma and (d) Sequoia. Unfortunately, that's where my Semplice-on-macOS adventures have to end, because my ancient pieces of Apple hardware can't run much beyond Sequoia… and they only do Sequoia because the OpenCore Legacy Patcher lets them do so at the rate of frozen molasses on an Antarctic winter morning! It is possible that I will win the National Lottery in 2026, in which case I shall be buying brand new Apple Silicon kit and will be able to report back more definitively as to what works and what doesn't on that CPU architecture: I wouldn't hold your breath, however!

In the meantime, I will sign off with a recommendation to use MacPorts if you run machines whose official support ended around the time of Ventura and Homebrew if you're running anything more modern and, as a final flourish, give you parting screenshots of my assorted real-world Semplice-on-Mac installations:

Catalina, 2.7GHz, 8GB RAM (via MacPorts)

Monterey, 3.1GHz, 16GB RAM (via MacPorts)

Ventura, 2.7GHz, 8GB RAM (via Homebrew and Macports, using Legacy Core Patcher)

Sonoma, 2.7GHz, 8GB RAM (via MacPorts, using Legacy Core Patcher)

Sequoia, 2.7GHz, 8GB RAM (via Homebrew, using Legacy Core Patcher)

| Back to Semplice Home Page |

semaudio

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-01-21T14:39:08+00:00

The Audio Processing Menu

As a digital classical music purist and enthusiast, your general approach to your digital music collection will likely be: leave it alone, don't mess with it, don't muck it about, get it pure and leave it that way! Something along those lines, anyway. Sadly, real life has a nasty habit of intervening: your CD rip sounds a bit quiet for your tastes, perhaps? Maybe you want to take a small sample of your collection on a car or plane trip, so huge, hunking FLAC files might not be entirely appropriate? Having just ripped a 4 hour opera, how can you spot if there are any rip errors without having to physically listen to it all? And so on: these and similar considerations mean that, sometimes, you will need to rely on Semplice's ability to 'tweak' or 'fiddle' with your audio files and its related abilities to analyse your files for obvious flaws.

Thus, Semplice has three basic audio processing functions:

The ability to apply a non-distorting volume boost to an audio signal
The ability to convert between different audio codecs (e.g., FLAC to MP3)
The ability to analyse a collection of FLACs and display the results as a spectrum analysis graph, for visual checking of the characteristics of the music signal they contain

I'll cover each of these functions in turn, as separate articles, with links at the bottom of this page. Before we get to that point, however, I think it wise to set out some preliminary information that underpins everything discussed in these sections of the Semplice user manual.

Firstly, let's just get some 'audio basics' terminology under our belts, as follows:

Sound volumes are measured in “decibels”, abbreviated to dB
Decibels are measured on a logarithmic scale, so that a sound that is 10dB louder than another has 10 times more 'sound pressure' than it; but an increase of 20dB implies an increase of sound pressure of 100 times
Boosting volume by “a mere 10dB” is a big deal, basically
In audio circles, sound is sort-of measured 'backwards', so that a 0dB signal is considered to be the loudest non-distorting volume an audio signal can be and something that's -5dB from that would be considered relatively more quiet. Something -15dB might be practically inaudible unless you crank your amplifier's volume knob all the way to 11

Next, we need to be clear about some digital music format terminology:

A “codec” is an algorithm that encodes and decodes a digital audio signal into something the human ear can understand
Good audio codecs aim to represent the source audio signal with high fidelity and the least data
Lossless codecs preserve all the data in the source audio signal with perfect fidelity
Lossy codecs chuck some of the audio signal away in order to achieve significantly smaller file sizes. They hope and intend that the data they dispose of is practically inaudible to most ears: for example, most humans have difficulty hearing frequencies higher than 16,000 waves per second (Hertz, or Hz), so if the audio signal contains a violin screeching at 18,000Hz, you could dispose of the top 2,000Hz of that signal and no-one is likely to notice, at least in theory. Another example is that if a harp string is plucked at the same time as a bass drum goes 'boom', it's unlikely the harp pluck would be audible to most listeners: so it could be disposed of and no-one would be the wiser. Different codecs develop different 'psychoacoustic models' in order to work out what can and can't be thrown away: some are better than others -and even the best can't be guaranteed to work the way your ears and brain do. What they toss away thinking you won't notice… you might notice!
It is always possible to convert a lossless codec into another lossless codec without damaging the audio signal: the entire signal was there at the start and will be there at the end
Converting a lossy codec to another lossy codec is possible, in the sense that most software permits it to happen; but turning a signal in which some data has been lost already into another signal in which more data is disposed of merely results in a final audio signal in which a lot of audio data has been lost. The results are likely to be ghastly, therefore.

And finally, let's get some acoustical physics sorted (though this is usually the point at which the people who paid $10,000 for a speaker cable walk out in a huff!):

The perfect human ear physically cannot hear audio frequencies above around 20,000Hz (or 20kHz, i.e., 20 kilohertz). It depends on the individual, obviously, but for the vast majority of humans, 20kHz is a literal upper limit on hearing.
Human hearing deteriorates as you age: so a teenager might be able to hear 20kHz, but a retiree is unlikely to be hearing much above 14kHz. Classical music listeners being, on the average, a bit older than listeners to non-classical music, this age-related hearing attentuation means hardly any classical music listeners will be able to hear audio signals higher than 16kHz.
A fundamental theory of audio processing is the Nyquist-Shannon Sampling Theorem which states that you can perfectly reproduce an analog input signal by digitally sampling it at twice its highest possible frequency.
Back in the 1970s, Philips and Sony engineers combined these various points: they applied a filter to cut off frequencies above 20kHz in the recorded music signal, because no-one would be able to hear anything higher than that anyway; that meant it could be represented perfectly by a digital signal sampled at 40kHz. Filter technology not being perfect, however, requesting a cut-off of frequencies at 20kHz sometimes allowed frequencies a little bit above that into the signal, so the engineers compensated and digitally sampled their audio signal at a bit above 40kHz, so that the occasional signal a little above 20kHz could occasionally appear in the audio stream without screwing everything up. Digital Audio CD was therefore invented with a sampling rate of 44.1kHz: this allows a completely perfect analog reconstruction of a digital signal containing frequencies higher than practically any human can hear.
Volume levels are represented in digital music as numbers. Digital numbers have to be represented by 'bits': sequences of binary 1s and 0s. If I allow you 4 bits to work with, you can represent the numbers 0000 to 1111, which is decimal 0 to 15. If I let you use 8 bits, than can store values from 00000000 to 11111111 (decimal 0 to 255). If you store your numbers with 16 bits, you can have up to 65,536 unique numbers: thus, a 16-bit digital audio signal can have 65 thousand-odd different volume levels. This allows a digital audio signal to have a “dynamic range” (the difference between the quietest and the loudest part of the signal) of 96dB. The difference between the human ear hearing the quietest pin drop and the pain associated with standing next to a jet engine in full throttle is around 140dB, so 16 bits would not completely cover the entire dynamic range of which the human ear is capable. But vinyl LPs have a dynamic range of around 70dB -and remember the difference between 70dB and 96db is over 100, because decibels are measured on a logarithmic scale. So a 16-bit signal has more than 100 times the dynamic range of an LP record: that's why, again, the Philips and Sony engineers of the 1970s decided that the new-fangled CD should use a 16-bit audio signal: it's more than good enough to capture the quietest and loudest music signals likely to arise for anyone who is not a jet engine afficionado.
In practical terms, therefore, there is never a need to listen to digital music which is not a 44.1kHz signal or with anything other than each sample stored as a 16-bit value. Your ears literally cannot tell the difference if higher sampling rates are used, or a greater number of bits is used to store the resulting samples. Audiophiles will wax lyrical about 192,000Hz signals stored in 24 bits, but their ears cannot actually hear the difference between the identical signal encoded at 44.1kHz/16-bit and 192kHz/24-bit: it is simply physically impossible. (With the caveat that the jump from 16-bit to 24-bit samples might be perceptible as a greater dynamic range …but it would be a close-run thing).
For technical reasons, however, the recording industry has a legitimate reason for mastering recordings at high frequencies and bit-depths: they are not so interested in what an ear can hear as what their recording hardware is doing with the audio signal when they're working on it, which is a technological issue, not a biological one -and hardware can use as much headroom as you can give it. It is therefore common for recording studios to record audio at 88.2kHz and higher, whilst sampling at 24-bits. That they do so, however, does not mean their signal is audibly better than when they sell you a 44.1kHz, 16-bit version of it on a CD: their hardware can tell the difference; your ears cannot.
Semplice indulges the audiophile fraternity by allowing output of 88.2kHz and 176.4kHz, 24-bit FLACs. Sensible people will not use these options, however!

By the way, don't confuse the effects of re-mastering with the use of “high resolution digital audio” (i.e., digital signals recorded at frequencies higher than 44.1kHz and more than 16-bits per sample). It is common for record companies to re-master their old recordings, to re-balance things, to filter noise out and so on: the resulting audio will very likely be easily discernible as a better (i.e., nicer to listen to) audio signal than the 1960 or 1970 original, because of the various tweaks being made to the balance, sound stage and so on. Unfortunately, the record companies then market that new mastering in 88.2kHz/24-bit hi-res audio SACDs and the like (because they charge more for such formats than 'standard audio CD'): that makes people think the nicer audio is a result of the high resolution signal. It's not. It's nicer because the remastering engineer has worked a miracle modifying and improving the original audio recording. The extra bits and sampling frequencies you are being sold on an SACD remain physically indiscernible compared to a 44.1kHz, 16-bit standard CD versions of the same mastering.

An analogy might be if you gave me an old family black-and-white photo to preserve: I scan it, run that scan through Photoshop, touching up the scratches, blemishes, rips and tears, improving the contrast, doing a bit of dodging and burning, etc, etc: naturally my re-worked version of the original is going to be visibly different from the original, because I'm altering the original. But if I now print the retouched photo using expensive HP ink, and once more using Amazon Choices generic brand ink… well, it's possible that a good eye might spot the difference between the two prints, but most people are unlikely to be able to. In the world of audio, there's not even a doubt about it: the human ear being what it is, you simply cannot hear the extra data in an 88.2kHz/24-bit signal as compared to the el-cheapo 44.1kHz/16-bit one.

If you've got that terminology and concepts firmly in your head, we can move on to describing Semplice audio processing functionality in three separate parts, as follows:

| Back to Semplice Home Page |

semchange

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-03-30T19:23:56+00:00

Semplice Version 2 - Changelog (since version 2.00)

This page describes the changes made in each point release of Semplice since its first release as version 2.00 on June 30th, 2024. Changes are listed in reverse chronological order (i.e., the most recent releases appear first).

Semplice Version 2.13 - March 30th 2026

Bug Fix: The code dealing with converting one audio format to another assumed that if you were using macOS, you would be using Intel CPUs. Specifically, this meant only the Intel version of the sacd utility would be invoked to make sense of ISO files. Now corrected: Semplice checks whether you are using an Intel CPU or Apple Silicon and invokes the correct version of the sacd utility accordingly. In simple terms, Apple Silicon can now do ISO conversions.

Enhancement: The program window title bar should now show the current working folder.

Enhancement: You might regard this as a bug fix of sorts, too! If configured to do so in the persistent configuration file, Semplice will delete a source Album Art jpg or png after embedding it into a set of FLACs as part of a tagging process. The trouble is, it didn't check whether the embedding process had actually worked before deleting the source artwork file! If, for example, the FLACs were read-only, the embed would silently fail… but the source artwork would get deleted anyway: less than convenient! Now Semplice performs a fresh check of the FLACs before deleting the standalone artwork: if it hasn't been embedded successfully, then no delete of the original takes place.

Enhancement / Bug-fix: Related to the above, Semplice now checks for the writeability of the first FLAC in a folder before allowing you to proceed to enter album-wide or track-specific tags, including custom ones and/or track renumbering. If the first file isn't read-writeable, no tagging or renumbering is allowed to start. Of course, this doesn't guarantee success: you could conceivably have mixed-mode files in the one file, such that file 1 is read-write and file 53 is read-only. Tagging is still going to fail for file 53 in that case, but it would be unusual (I think) to have multiple read-write modes in the one folder. The check of file 1 is a reasonable balance between safety and efficiency, therefore.

Enhancement: Updates are now handled by the same sort of code that had governed Giocoso updates for a couple of versions. This avoids the need to laboriously compute MD5 checksums for every installed file and compare them to checksums stored on the supplying server. It's now much faster, more efficient and, as an added bonus, a lot simpler to code and to maintain. The Semplice installer has been similarly updated/improved.

Enhancement / New Feature: The look of the program has undergone significant change, to bring it into line with the look and feel of my other software (particularly the latest version of Giocoso). Specifically, this means:

Menus are now simply listed, without spaces between items trying to indicate some meaning to the apparent grouping (with lettered options still being distinct from numbered ones, because they perform system functions, rather than data processing ones)
The right-hand pane of the main program interface will display the embedded album art of the first FLAC in the current working folder, if there is any. If there isn't, a text-based program logo will be displayed instead
The “I” option has been removed from all menus: it triggered the inspection the audio stream of the first FLAC in the current working folder and then displayed whether it was 16-bit or 24-bit audio and its sample rate. That now just happens automatically, so there is no need for a separate menu item to trigger it. The data (along with information about whether there is one or more FLACs present in the working folder) is now always displayed in the upper-right corner of the screen, assuming any FLACs at all exist in the working folder currently selected.
The “B” option has been removed from all menus: it triggered a volume boost of all FLACs in the current working folder. There was always a separate menu option for doing that (Audio Processing → Boost Volume) so it was always a bit redundant: it has now therefore been removed.
The option to Quit the program is now visible on all menus in exactly the same place

Practically, it means the program on launch might look like this:

Once you've tagged up your music files and thus embedded some album art into them, the program will change to look like this:

The visual cue of album art reminds you of what FLACs you're dealing with and confirms that embedding the artwork has been successful: it might also highlight those occasions when you've applied the wrong album art to a folder of music, as in this case!

New Feature: To accommodate this graphical new way of presenting the program, the persistent configuration file (and thus the Miscellaneous menu, Option 1) acquires two new parameters to set: Use Kitty Graphics (defaults to no, meaning 'use sixel graphics instead'); and Album Art display size (defaults to 380, meaning 'display at 380×380 pixels'):

Here, I'm saying to use Sixel Graphics (because I've explicitly said “no, don't use Kitty graphics”) and to resize all embedded album art to 560×560 pixels. Note that the resizing does not respect aspect ratio: Semplice wants square album art, so if you don't present it with square art, it will force it to be square by picking one of the dimensions and forcing the other to match, no matter what that does to the stretched-ness of the result.

Bug-fix: On macOS, using the Audio menu, Option 3 to generate a spectrum analysis of a folder of FLACs would fail. You wouldn't see the error message (because Semplice suppresses it!) but under the hood, the error “display: delegate library support not built-in '' (X11) @ error/display.c/DisplayImageCommand/1907” was being generated, resulting in you seeing… nothing at all after the lengthy audio analysis process had taken place. That's an indication that the tool used to display the spectrum analysis graph was unable to find an X11 server (not exactly unusual in a macOS environment that doesn't natively use X11 at all!) The bug is now fixed: the code now tests for whether it's running on macOS or not and, if so, uses the Preview app to display the spectrum graph. Linux environments continue to use the ImageMagick display tool:

Bug-fix: For similar reasons to the last bug-fix above, if you took the Tagging menu, Option 8 to extract album art and you had previously configured the persistent configuration file to say “Display album art when extracting = yes”, then on macOS, the album art would get extracted just fine but it wouldn't also be displayed, despite the configuration file saying it should be. That was again because of a dependency on X11 which means things will be fine on Linux, but not on macOS. Now fixed: the art extraction tool now knows how to use the native macOS Preview app to display the results of the extraction.

Assorted Code Improvements: There have been various changes to code to make it more reliable and robust. Some bits of syntax that were technically OK could break on edge cases; their refactoring or re-writing should make them reliable in far more situations. Consistent use of 'modern' Bashism (such as the use of double square brackets (...) instead of single ones ([ … ]) is another example of the sort of code 'refreshing' that has taken place.

Bug-fix: MacOS represents accented Unicode characters (for example, ä or é) as two distinct 'glyphs' (i.e., as a + “ or e + '). Linux represents the same characters as single, non-decomposed glyphs (i.e., literally as the single character ä or é). The difference is not exactly apparent to most users: the text representation of either representation looks identical. File systems can treat the two differently, however; and programs like ImageMagick will get completely confused by the decomposed version (see this blog post for examples and for the manual fix). This release of Semplice therefore addresses the problem by running all tag submissions through the uconv utility to force glyphs to be of the single-character, non-decomposed sort. Note that a fresh install of Semplice gets this utility installed for you; an upgrade to this version does not …and you should therefore follow that aforementioned blog post's instructions on how to manually install it. If the utility is not present on a macOS system, accented characters will continue to be stored in their decomposed, multi-glyph forms.

Bug-fix: This one's a really stupid one on my part! The Semplice installation code for Debian and Ubuntu (and only those distros) forgot to install the dialog utility. This meant the entire installation looked awful (though it would go to successful completion despite itself). If you happened to have installed Giocoso first, you'd not have noticed the problem (as Giocoso successfully installed dialog for you): guess how come I didn't notice this before now! Problem is now fixed, anyway.

Enhancement: The new program logo (see above) triggers the addition of two new configuration parameters to control its size and position:

Size of the Program Logo takes a numeric number of pixels, that is replicated for height and width (so an entry of '180' turns into a dimension setting of 180×180 pixels). Program Logo position takes a positive or negative number of characters by which to nudge the logo to the right or left respectively. Thus a setting of ”-13“ means 'move the logo 13 characters to the left' and setting of “9” means 'move it 9 characters to the right'. For example, here's 220 and -11:

…and here's 90 and 16:

The defaults are 220 and 0: the parameters allow you to tweak the logo display to suit your own monitor settings.

Minor Enhancement: The software licence is now viewable within a dialog form, rather than with the less utility.

Significant Enhancement: The Miscellaneous menu now has a new Option 4: Change the program colour scheme:

The top part of the dialog form tells you what colours you can set: 12 is bright blue, for example, whilst 1 is normal red. The main part of the dialog then describes various 'components' of the Semplice interface. You are told what the 'canonical defaults' are for each one (i.e., what colour scheme I had in mind when designing Semplice!), but for any one of them, you can type in a new colour number, press OK and the program interface will change to match. Suppose I wanted Semplice to draw its box characters in blue: I would type in 12 (or 4) in the second component window:

If I press OK at this point, I see this:

If I wanted all that cyan-coloured text to look blood-red, I'd fill in the fourth colour field with the number 9:

And so on. Basically, the feature is there to allow Semplice to be tweaked and configured to run decently on light-coloured terminals, but you can use it just to experiment and have fun too! If it all gets too much for you, just click the “Reset to Defaults” button and the 'normal' colour scheme will be restored, once you also press [Enter]. Bear in mind that whatever colours you pick for Semplice to use, they work in the context of the colour profile in use by your terminal emulator, so the results might not be quite what you expect. For example, without changing any of the colour defaults at all, the program logo text is meant to be displayed in cyan (or pale blue), but:

…in this sea of green, you'd be hard-pressed to know that the 'Semplice' big logo on the right was in blue-anything: it looks much more pale green or even vaguely yellow! You'll need to experiment, therefore!

Semplice Version 2.12 - February 2nd 2026

Major Enhancement: Support for installing onto macOS has been added. All Tagging, Audio Processing and SuperFLAC functionality is entirely present and correct. Ripping of standard audio CDs also works, but there is no ability to verify the rips with the AccurateRip database after they complete. If an Apple SuperDrive is in use, it is impossible to determine it's read offset (see for an explanation as to why this is). Non-Apple drives will be detected correctly and read offsets obtained from the AccurateRip database, if available, as they would on non-macOS platforms. Drive offsets for SuperDrives can be determined on a Linux or Windows PC and then that number can be manually applied to Semplice running on macOS, however.

Bug Fix: Threading on audio conversions was not parallelising correctly. It is now. Compared to before, conversion of a bunch of Hi-Res FLACs (for example) to Standard CD-Audio FLACs can take around ⅓ less time than before.

Enhancement: Screen redrawing has always been fairly slow, such that on less powerful computers (such as Raspberry Pi, or old Intel hardware) the screen could seem to 'flash' annoyingly when, for example, you tapped along the top menu options (from Tagging to Audio Processing to SuperFLAC, for example). Sometimes, screen refreshes were so slow to occur that you'd be able to see escape sequences (such as “^[[C”) displayed on the screen as menu navigation took place, making things very ugly indeed. Accordingly, the screen redrawing code has been completely overhauled and now the program responds much more cleanly and swiftly to events that trigger screen redraws. The result is that even on low spec hardware, Semplice now 'flashes' very infrequently and the random appearance of escape sequences on screen should almost never occur. This is achieved basically by replacing calls to the external “tput” utility with a pure Bash approach that keeps everything within the one Bash session, resulting in much less context switching on the CPU, and hence a swifter-feeling interface.

Bugfix/Functionality Change: When converting between audio formats, it turns out that converting direct from ISO or DSF to a lossy codec such as OGG or WMA would produce an error: the input sample rate was too high for those output codecs to deal with. In this version of Semplice, therefore, it's now hard-coded that ISOs and DSFs can only be converted to lossless formats (FLAC in its various forms or AIFF). If you wanted to go direct from ISO to OGG, for example, then you can do so (however daft it might be!) only by converting first to FLAC, then to OGG.

Bugfix: When ripping a CD, Semplice was supposed to use the persistent configuration parameter 'Default FLAC audio resolution' to determine what kind of FLAC to output: valid values for that parameter are 'standard', 'high' and 'extreme'. Standard FLACs are 44.1KHz, 16-bit (i.e., CD-Audio Red Book standard); FLACs output to the 'high' setting are 88.2KHz, 24-bit; and ones output at the 'extreme' setting are 176.4KHz, 24-bit (roughly equivalent to Scarlet Book SACDs). Unfortunately, the wrong variable name was used in the piece of code that worked this out, meaning that all FLACs output from a CD rip were always of the 'standard' type. This is now fixed: if you specify high or extreme outputs, you'll now get them, correctly.

Significant New Feature: Semplice has always allowed you to boost the absolute volume of a recording by an amount which is guaranteed to not introduce audio signal distortion or clipping. However, boosting volume alters the data stored inside a FLAC in a non-reversible manner. That's never been a problem for me, but audiophiles tend not to like their audio data being messed with! Accordingly, this version of Semplice introduces a new configuration file parameter, called Apply real or metadata audio boost? The new parameter takes two possible values: real or metadata. Real is the default and means that Semplice, by default, does volume boosts in exactly the same way as it always has. If you set the parameter to metadata, however, then performing a volume boost does not physically alter the audio signal at all. Instead, a series of “ReplayGain” tags are added to the FLAC files' metadata. These tags are standard ones that conform to the ReplayGain standard and are an instruction to a music player to adjust its playback volume by an appropriate amount, dynamically and in real time. The tags look something like this:

This tells a compatible player (and not all players are compatible!) to increase the volume of the complete set of FLACs analysed by 10.73dB, for example.

In this way, Semplice sets you up to have the benefits of volume boosting without the drawbacks of modifying your physical audio data. Be warned, however: Semplice's 'real' adjustment of volumes works for all players at all times, because the audio data has been modified. Only if you've configured your music player to respect per-album ReplayGain will the 'metadata' volume boost take effect. Giocoso version 3.34 (due to be released at the end of February) will be able to use the ReplayGain metadata tags.

The analysis of FLACs that is done for the real boost is quite different from that done for the metadata-only boost, though, so the results should not be expected to be identical, nor should they be compared. In fact, files which have previously been physically volume-boosted will, if subject to a metadata volume assessment, be marked as requiring a negative ReplayGain: the psychoacoustic model that ReplayGain uses has a quieter 'baseline' to aim for than the merely 'boost to as loud as you can get without distorting' approach of the physical volume adjustment, so it will tend to think physically-boosted volumes are too high (even though they're not distorting the music at all). As I say, it's just two different models in use and you shouldn't be surprised they come to different conclusions about the ideal volume level!

The 'metadata' volume boost is also much faster to perform than the application of the 'real', physical volume boost: there is no re-encoding of audio to do and writing it out to disk.

If you go on to create SuperFLACs after you have metadata-volume-boosted your per-track FLACs, the SuperFLAC will inherit the album-wide replay gain setting that was applied to the first FLAC in the folder by the volume boosting analysis process. Files created by splitting a SuperFLAC will not have replay gain information added back to them, however: they will need a fresh metadata volume-boost to re-compute appropriate per-track values.

Anyway: the short version is that there is now a way to achieve a volume boost with Semplice (assuming only that you have a ReplayGain-compatible music player) without having to alter your physical audio data. The new metadata volume boost is optional and not the default and so, by default, Semplice volume boosts work in exactly the same way as they always used to.

New Feature: The Audio Processing menu gets a new option: Remove ReplayGain tags from FLACs. This is essentially the ability to reverse a metadata-only volume boost by removing all the REPLAYGAIN_* tags the new metadata volume boost mechanism will have added to your FLACs. Volume boosts are now thus, functionally, reversible (but note that, because real, physical volume boosts modify FLAC audio data, that type of volume boost still cannot be reversed).

Semplice Version 2.11 - July 4th 2025

Bug-Fix: Earlier versions of Semplice used a utility called odio-sacd to extract SACD ISO files into their component tracks and convert them to (say) FLACs or MP3s. In early July 2025, it was pointed out to me that the developer of that software had pulled his website from the Internet along with all the software repositories he used to publish his software. This meant that Semplice would no longer install cleanly (it would prompt for a github password and then fail to download anything anyway), and thus fresh Semplice installs would work fine except for being able to process SACD ISOs. Semplice Version 2.11 now uses the near-equivalent sacd utility to perform the SACD ISO conversions instead. This now means fresh installs of Semplice work out-of-the-box, as originally intended. Upgrades to Version 2.11 will not install the sacd utility automatically, so following the Semplice upgrade, you should follow the instructions in the revised User Manual at Section 4.0 to install it manually.

Enhancement: When converting an SACD ISO to one of the three possible FLAC output formats (standard, hi-res or super hi-res), Semplice in earlier versions would apply a hard frequency filter, preventing audio signals with a frequency of 24KHz or higher from being passed to the output file. The new release now applies a subtler frequency filtering mechanism. Standard FLAC output will be filtered at 21KHz; Hi-Res FLACs at 43KHz; and Super Hi-Res FLACs at 87KHz. In each case, the filter cuts off frequencies higher than (about) half the intended output sample rate. In other words, if you're outputting to standard FLAC, with a 44.1KHz sampling rate, you would theoretically need to cut off at 22.05KHz: Semplice cuts off a little earlier than that (at 21KHz) to provide a little head-room, in case of imperfect filtering. Similarly, an output of 88.2KHz would imply a need for a 44.1KHz filter: Semplice Version 2.11's use of a 43KHz filter is close to that theoretical ideal, but with a bit of fudge-factor headroom. Super Hi-Res output at 176.4KHz would imply a need for an 88.2KHz filter: Semplice gets close at 87Khz. The point in each case is to provide a guarantee that no audio signal higher than half the resulting sampling rate is passed to the converter: failure to do that would break the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theory and cause ultrasonic high frequencies to be reflected down into the audible part of the audio signal, where it would appear as obvious distortion. The short version is that Semplice now discards as little of the original SACD audio signal as possible, where before it was a bit more cavalier about things. It also means that the ISO conversion, even to standard FLAC sampling rates, will be guaranteed not to introduce distortion.

Enhancement: When ripping SACDs (Ripping menu, Option 4), Semplice will now work out your local PC's current IP address and pre-fill the 'Enter the IP address of your SACD reader' dialog with the first three octets of that, leaving you only to have to fill in the fourth octet. For example, you're running Semplice on a PC with an IP address of 192.168.0.88; in Version 2.11, Semplice's 'Enter the IP address' dialog will be pre-filled in with “192.168.0.”. All you have to do is supply the last set of digits that uniquely identify how to contact your SACD ripper device. If the proposal is completely wrong, just erase it (with the backspace key) and type in something more appropriate. The point is that your SACD device is almost certainly on the same network as your PC, so most of the PC's IP address should be relevant to the location of the SACD device.

Enhancement: When ripping SACDs, once you type in a valid IP address for the SACD ripping device, Semplice Version 2.11 now stores that and subsequent rips will pre-fill the 'Enter the IP address of your SACD reader' dialog with that same, complete IP address. This means you can just press [Enter] to accept the proposed IP address, if it's still correct. In conjunction with the previously-mentioned enhancement, this now means that Semplice says, 'Is there a previous address for an SACD ripper: if so, use it; if not, pre-fill the dialog with most of an IP address that will probably be relevant'.

Enhancement: When ripping SACDs, Semplice now remembers the last location to which you ripped an SACD. Second and subsequent rips will therefore pre-fill the 'Please choose where to save your rips' dialog with the last-known folder destination used. If it's wrong, you can simply use the backspace key to remove or edit the proposed folder name. Otherwise, you can just press [Enter] to accept the proposed folder name.

Enhancement/Bug Fix: When producing a spectrum analysis graph (Audio Processing menu, Option 3), Semplice creates a temporary copy of all the FLACs in the $HOME/.local/share/semplice2/tmp folder and performs the analysis against that copy. The program did not, however, check that there was sufficient disk space and appropriate file permissions to create this copy: the enhancement in this new version is that those checks are now performed, and if you fail either of them an appropriate warning message is displayed. The bug fix is related: Semplice did not take account of the fact that the file names of all the FLACs being analysed might contain single quotes: the presence of one in a file name would trigger a 'file not found' error in the analysing tool and thus no spectrograph would be produced. The bug fix in this version is that Semplice now correctly handles single quotes within FLAC file names and can perform an analysis successfully whether they are present or not.

Enhancement: Added “CachyOS” (an Arch derivative) to the list of supported distros.

Semplice Version 2.10 - April 20th 2025

Bug-Fix: When checking for the presence of .M4A files (Apple Lossless Audio Codec) files, the program used a variable called 'ALACOUNT'. It then checked a variable called 'ALACCOUNT'. You might notice the variation in the number of 'Cs' in those variable names! The error in spelling the variable name meant Semplice could not change working folder to a location containing M4As Now fixed, with variable names spelled consistently.

Enhancement: When merging FLACs into SuperFLACs, Semplice previously assumed that you'd been a good FLAC citizen and tagged your FLACs in the manner prescribed by this website's Axioms of Classical Tagging article. It didn't actually check that you had tagged things correctly, though! Failure to have followed the Axioms' strictures would then result in assorted ugly errors or outright failures to create the required SuperFLACs. In this new version of Semplice, a “pre-flight check” is now performed of compliance to the standards of Axioms 1, 2, 7 and 9 before the SuperFLAC creation process can proceed.

Axiom 1, for example, says there are eight tags you ought to have: if you're missing any of them, you'll now be told:

Similarly, Axiom 9 says every folder of FLACs should contain a Track Number 1. So, if you've tagged your files with exotic track numbers such as “1/9”, you'll now be told that this won't work:

You'll note that the error messages pinpoint which files, precisely, fall foul of the Axiom requirements, though it will only tell you the first file that fails a particular check. The new check does not, however, verify everything it could conceivably do: if you've got different YEAR tags for different tracks within a folder, for example, the SuperFLAC is simply going to be created with a YEAR that matches the one used by track 1: you won't be told of discrepancies in your metadata like that. Any axiom that mentions spelling things properly, using correct diacritical marks, being grammatical and not using InitCaps when you're typing… those sorts of “feelings” axioms won't be checked-for either. The check is really there to ensure that the SuperFLAC process can run to completion without being tripped up. It's not there to validate the accuracy or precision of your tagging practices generally.

Note that if you use Semplice's own Tagging menu to tag your FLACs, you will end up with Axiom-correct tagging and therefore this new feature will never kick in for you: you'll notice absolutely nothing different about the SuperFLAC creation process at all.

Enhancement: Semplice's SuperFLAC creation process now respects the possible existence of Custom Tags. If you'd applied custom tags to individual, per-track FLACs and then created a SuperFLAC from those FLACs, the custom tag data would have been lost in earlier Semplice versions. Now it won't be: the custom tag values found in the first FLAC stored in the working folder are now applied to the freshly-created SuperFLAC:

The presence of a 'Cuesheet' element in this display of a FLAC's metadata tells you that this is metadata associated with a SuperFLAC. The presence of tags such as TEA_LADY, RECORDING_ENG. and RECORD_LABEL also tells you that these are custom tags stored for a SuperFLAC… and that's the new feature in action.

Enhancement: In similar vein, if a single-file SuperFLAC has been tagged with Custom Tags and then you take the option to split it back out into separate per-track FLACs, the new per-track FLACs will now all have their Custom Tags set. In previous Semplice versions, the split-out files would only have been tagged up with the 'standard' tags: all custom tag values would thus have been lost, but this is now no longer the case.

Bug Fix: When configuring the CD read offset in the Semplice persistent configuration file, you were encouraged to leave it blank to allow auto-detection of the correct read-offset to occur (see the Ripping part of the User Manual, Section 2.2). Unfortunately, there was a bug, whereby leaving the parameter field blank would result in it being saved as an explicit zero value. The presence of an explicit 0 value for the parameter then prevented automatic detection of the correct read offset. Now fixed. You can, as intended, now leave that parameter blank and auto-detection of the correct read offset will be attempted: no forced zero value will be saved.

Visual Enhancement: A tiny issue, but during CD rips the cursor would appear in the top-left of the screen, very visible and quite annoying. That particular cursor has now been made invisible and the screen doesn't look quite as annoying as it once did!

Bug Fix: When ripping CDs, the rip results are usually checked for accuracy by looking them up in the AccurateRip database. The tool needed to perform this lookup is called trackverify and it's installed by Semplice's own installer via the audiotools package. On rather a lot of distros, however, that audiotools installation fails for one reason or another, rendering it impossible to do an accuracy check of your rip. That didn't stop Semplice from claiming that it had performed such a check, however, and directing you to read the results of the check in a text file that didn't actually exist (because Semplice got the folder name wrong on top of everything else it was screwing up!). These issues have all now been cleared up: if audiotools didn't install at all, or if it installed but is broken, Semplice now knows not to attempt the AccurateRip check at all -and if, for any reason, it needs to direct you to a textfile of the results, it does so by pointing at the correct folder name.

Semplice Version 2.09 - April 5th 2025

Enhancement: Aligning with the way Giocoso has worked for a while, pressing [Enter] on a menu option now automatically causes the first item on that menu to be executed. If you're on the Tagging menu, for example, then pressing Enter instantly launches the Option 1: Auto-Tagging option; if on the Audio Processing menu, pressing [Enter] launches the Option 1: Boost volume functionality. And so on. You can still tap the specific menu option number, of course; but a simple press of the [Enter] key now achieves something, too.

Minor Enhancement: When tagging FLAC files, album art may be embedded within them and the messages displayed by the program are now consistent about what is happening.

Enhancement: When performing audio conversions, the 'pick the source audio format' dialog box will now only display audio formats that are detected as being present in the current working folder. For example, if a folder doesn't contain any audio files using appropriate codecs, you'll see this:

…but if the folder contains WMAs, FLACs and MP3s, you'll see this instead:

Previously, the form just listed all possible source audio formats, meaning that it would be possible to select to convert from something that doesn't actually exist in the current working folder. Now, you can only select to convert that which is known for a fact to exist in that folder.

Enhancement: Auto-tagging of FLACs has always been a two-stage affair: tagging things with recording-wide relevance, then tagging track-specific things. The program flow didn't always make this clear, however -and the situation was confused by the fact that the single recording-wide tagging process used two distinct and different input forms (for technical reasons, it has to do so), so that three forms ended up being used to complete a two-stage process! It wasn't clear that the first two forms were part of the same process, so that (for example) cancelling on the second of them would also mean cancelling any work done on the first. To try to make this clearer, the wording on the forms and their buttons has therefore changed:

The title of the form (at the very top of the page) now clearly indicates that this is page 1 of 2 dealing with entering recording-wide data. Additionally, the first button on this first page no longer says 'Submit', because clicking it never meant 'do something with what I just typed in'. Instead, it says 'take me to the next page of this recording-wide tagging form', which it will do:

Again, the top line of text makes it clear we're on the second page of a recording-wide tagging form. This time, the first button still says 'Submit', because if you click it, your data entered on both these forms will physically be stored in your FLACs. Once you submit the recording-wide stuff, the auto-tagging process moves on to:

The title on the top line now changes and makes it clear you're doing something altogether new: writing track-specific tags (and that there's only one form involved in doing this). Again, the first button is labelled 'Submit', because clicking it will physically write data entered on this form back to your FLACs. If you instead were to hit [Cancel] at this point, you would lose any tag data typed in on the form… but your recording-wide data submitted earlier would still be saved to the FLAC files.

This all hopefully makes it visually more obvious that auto-tagging does two things, not three; and that cancelling during any part of the first phase (recording-wide metadata) completely loses any data typed during that first phase; and that cancelling during the second phase (track-specific metadata) causes data typed during that second phase to be lost, but data previously submitted during the first phase will be preserved, because it was entered independently of this second phase. I trust that's as clear as clean mud!

Bug-fix: A related change to the auto-tagging feature is that clicking [Cancel] on either of the recording-wide pages terminates the entire auto-tagging process, and returns you to the main menu. Previously, it would simply trigger the display of the track-specific tagging page, which was an error.

Semplice Version 2.08 - March 5th 2025

A small bug fix and enhancement: When using the 'W' key to change working folder, Semplice would check that the proposed new folder contained FLACs. This made sense for the Tagging menu (because Semplice only tags FLAC files!) but it made zero sense on the Audio Processing menu: you might well want to switch to a folder full of WAVs in order to convert them to FLACs, for example, but the initial lack of FLACs there would prevent you doing this. This is now all fixed and the 'W' key changes its behaviour depending on context: for the Tagging and SuperFLAC menus, the proposed new working folder must contain FLACs; for the Audio Processing, it doesn't -though it must contain at least one file that Semplice can convert to and from.

Enhancement: the Audio Interchange File Format (AIFF) has been added to the list of audio formats Semplice can convert from and to. Conversion to AIFF from (say) FLAC should preserve tags in the original file. Note that AIFF files can have file extensions .aif as well as .aiff and, for giggles, aifc: Semplice works for all of them. Converting from WMA to AIFF does not work, for reasons I'm not going to worry about (because no-one should be doing that sort of conversion anyway!) WMA → FLAC → AIFF is the workaround.

Minor enhancement: When embedding album art, the program now displays a 'spinner' to indicate that it's doing something. Previously, the program just sat there and you had no idea whether it was working or not.

Bug fix: When tagging FLACs, Semplice has offered an 'auto-guess' feature since Version 2.06, whereby it assumes the last part of the working folder name contains the recording's extended composition name (e.g., /hjr/music/Aida (Karajan - 1958) containing Aida (Karajan - 1958)). Since the Axioms of classical tagging tell you to construct the extended composition name by sticking the distinguishing artist name and recording year in the brackets after the actual composition name, Auto-Guess could reasonably assume that the bracketed data was 1) the distinguishing artist and 2) the recording year… Simple!! Which all worked, provided your folder name wasn't something more like Simple Symphony (live recording) (Britten - 1966) …because now the presence of multiple bracketed items caused Semplice to assume “live” was the distinguishing artist name and “recording” was the recording year! Personally, I wouldn't personally want to stick multiple sets of brackets in an extended composition name …but some people do, and the presence of more than one open/close bracket pair in a composition name made Auto-Guess guess all sorts of silly things. Version 2.08 now fixes this by making Auto-Guess now only looking on the last open bracket in the folder name, and deriving the distinguishing artist and recording year from that point forward.

Semplice Version 2.07 - November 1st 2024

A single but significant bug-fix: when embedding album art as part of the auto-tagging process, Semplice used the wrong variable name if ImageMagick 7 was in use, though used the correct variable name if ImageMagick 6 was in use. The fix is to make the variable name the same, regardless of the version of ImageMagick being used. Note that if manual embedding of album art was tried (using Tagging menu, Option 5), the correct variable names were always used, so embedding album art manually always worked. The new fix only applies to album art embedding that happens when taking the Tagging menu, Option 1.

Semplice Version 2.06 - 25th October 2024

This release brings a slew of new capabilities to Semplice, some of possibly less significance than others, but all intended to make working with your FLACs easier and simpler in the long-run. There is also one fairly significant bug-fix. The four new enhancements are as follows:

Enhancement #1: On any main program menu, you can now tap the letter 'I' (or 'i') to make Semplice ”inspect“ the audio characteristics of the first FLAC it finds in the current working directory. This allows you to tell whether a FLAC is encoded with 16-bit, 44100Hz audio (standard CD) or 24-bit, 192000Hz (SACD, high-resolution audio), for example:

It's a minor enhancement that's useful if you can't remember whether you've converted your SACD rips down to standard CD Audio yet: in the above screenshot, I obviously have! It's also handy for checking that a purchased high-resolution FLAC download is actually in high resolution.

Enhancement #2: When you select Tagging menu, Option 1 Auto-tagging and then select the 'Read existing metadata' option, the dialog screen where you supply track TITLE tags will be populated with whatever TITLE metadata already exists. Usually, this is complete rubbish and requires much knocking into shape before it can be considered really usable! Much tedious deletion of inappropriate data thus ensues before you can supply a TITLE that meets any definition of 'decent metadata'! For example:

Here, every existing track title includes the composition name (which should be in the ALBUM tag), spurious indications of Act number, and even hand-made track numbers (which belong in the TRACKNUMBER tag). Every piece of operatic dialogue is also encased in quotation marks, which I hate: we know it's speech, because they're words and it's an opera… there's no need to use quotation marks here!

Now, you could edit each of the 8 tracks listed by hand, as I've started to do here:

…but doing this means leaning on the [Delete] key heavily and it's a slow, tedious process! In some cases, you might prefer it if Semplice were to just forget the existing track-specific metadata entirely and let you type in everything from scratch, especially if you type reasonably fast. Now, in fact, it's in fact always been possible to do this: press Ctrl+U and the currently selected track's TITLE tag will be erased:

So to clear out every track's existing metadata, you simply arrow down to the next track, press Ctrl+U, rinse and repeat. That approach is probably entirely convenient if you're tagging up a 4-movement symphony. If you're tagging up an 83-track Handel oratorio, however, that approach is going to get very tedious very quickly! Thus the the new enhancement/feature: the bottom of this screen now has a [Clear All Track Data] button in addition to the traditional [Submit] and [Cancel] ones. Tab round to that so that it is highlighted and press [Enter] and this happens:

The entire set of track TITLE tags is wiped in one fell swoop: you can now type in good data without having to faff around with a lot of slow, manual editing/deleting or clearing things out track-by-track.

Enhancement #3: If you select to tag using existing metadata and it turns out that your FLACs don't have any metadata in particular tags, Semplice has always been prepared to infer some tags from the working folder name it's currently running in. For example, if you are working in a folder called Symphony No. 5 (Karajan - 1985) and the FLACs within that folder contain no metadata for (say) ALBUM, then Semplice has always guessed that the entire folder name should be used as the ALBUM tag. It can also guess that if we go five characters back from the end of the folder name and extract the next four characters, those will be the recording year, so the YEAR tag should be set to them (in my case, that would be 1, 9, 8 and 5). Finally, Semplice has always guessed that if you take the folder name and split it on the first open bracket and stop before the first hyphen, you'll have the surname of the distinguishing artist, which goes into the PERFORMER tab (in this case, that would be “Karajan”). You can see this pre-existing functionality at work here:

The working folder name is displayed in the window's title bar and you can therefore see the Composition, Distinguishing Artist and Recording Year fields being filled in for me, simply by parsing different bits out of the working folder name.

The new, minor enhancement in Semplice Version 2.06 is that the GENRE tag will be auto-guessed for you, again by looking at the working folder's name: for example, if it contains the word 'Symph', then the GENRE field will be set to “Symphonic”, but if it contains the word 'Piano', the GENRE might be auto-set to “Keyboard”. The case of the words being searched for is irrelevant: SYMPHONY or sYmPhonY will both yield a guessed GENRE of 'Symphonic'.

Guessing is, of course, prone to, er… 'issues'! For example, in my earlier case the working folder name contains both the word 'Piano' and the word 'Concerto'… so is this going to be guessed to be “Keyboard” or “Concerto” genre?! Well, there's an order of precedence, as follows:

Symph → Symphonic
Sinfoni → Symphonic
Concerto → Concerto
Quartet → Quartet
Sonata → Chamber
Piano → Keyboard
Organ → Keyboard
Harpsichord → Keyboard
Incidental → Film - Theatre - Radio
Requiem → Choral
Missa → Choral

Only the first match wins the prize, so something called a 'piano concerto' will match rule number 3 first and thus be auto-tagged a Concerto:

Of course, the guesses will not be perfect: for starters, if you've got an opera, ballet, oratorio or most choral works, nothing at all will be guessed: it's hard to guess “Opera” from a folder name of “Don Giovanni”, unless you had a comprehensive encyclopedia of all the operas ever written by anyone, after all! Similarly, if you've got a harpsichord concerto called “Pastoral Studies on Elizabethan Themes” then no genre is going to be guessed for it, since it contains none of the magic 'keywords'. Worse, if you had a ballet called “Mr Planchet Plays The Piano”, then it's going to be guessed to be a Keyboard work, because the magic word 'piano' is in it and Semplice can't guess context!

So yes: the auto-guessing will be less than accurate on many occasions. From personal experience, however, it's going to get the guess right about 70% of the time, which means one hell of a lot of typing is saved. Of course, if it does guess wrong, you just manually edit the genre by hand: that's true for all the other guessed fields as well, of course.

Enhancement #4: It is the complete absence of metadata in the first FLAC of the working folder that triggers the “tag guessing” just described above. Given the ghastly state of much vendor-supplied tag metadata, however, you may well want to get Semplice to pretend there's no metadata in that FLAC even when there is… and thus get Semplice to fill in the various tag fields for you automatically, deriving the required data from the working folder name as described before. A new option called [Auto-guess tags] on the lower part of the recording-wide tag form now lets you manually trigger a replacement of already-present metadata by auto-guessed data derived from the working folder name. For example:

Here I have freshly started tagging inside the 'Piano Concerto (Britten - 1967)' folder and have taken the same 'Read existing metadata' option as normal: unfortunately, on this occasion, the FLACs do have some pre-existing metadata, so Semplice has read it and put it into the various data entry fields on the form. The trouble is, the metadata is just complete nonsense and I don't want to have to step through every field in turn, hit Ctrl+U and wipe it before being able to type in something more sensible. So, instead, I tab around to the new [Auto-guess Tags] button and press [Enter] when it's highlighted:

As you can see, the pre-existing metadata has been wiped from the form (even though it's currently still stored within the FLACs) and the form's fields have been replaced with data guessed from the current working folder name. You'll still have to type the composer's name in yourself -and the Distinguishing Artist's first name would be nice to have, too. But if you get the name of your physical working folder correct before invoking Semplice, a lot of the tedium of filling in appropriate tag entries has now been eradicated. Once you press the [Submit] button, your new auto-guessed (and possibly manually tweaked) tags will be written back to the FLACs found within the working folder.

This feature also allows you to step back from significant data input errors: if you accidentally lean on your keyboard when typing into one of the tag fields, filling it with hundreds of garbage characters that would be a pain to delete one-by-one, for example, you can now just 'Auto-guess' and revert back to a set of data that makes more sense!

Bug-fix #1: In prior Semplice versions, when creating SuperFLACs, if the path in which the containing folder is found contained a hash character (#), that would cause the program to error in an ugly way:

You will note that the path in which this SuperFLAC creation attempt is taking place contains a '#' character (look at the top of the file manager window lurking behind the Semplice terminal, showing that somewhere in the path the abbreviation 'Sym. #2' has been used): that's actually bad form in any case, because you really ought to work with NTFS-compliant folder and file names, even if you can't stand the sight of Windows and NTFS (it's the lowest common denominator, basically: a file or folder name that works on NTFS is pretty much guaranteed to work anywhere, on any file system) -and the hash character is illegal on NTFS. But that's besides the point: if you happen to want to use hash characters in your folder names, it's not for Semplice to say you're doing it wrong!

The bug-fix implemented in Semplice Version 2.06 is therefore that the presence of hash characters anywhere within the working folder path hierarchy no longer prevents SuperFLAC creation. The only slight catch is that you are now no longer permitted to have folder names that contain the string +^+^+ (plus-caret-plus-caret-plus) in them, anywhere. Frankly, if this new restriction affects you, you're doing extremely strange things and should probably stop… and you'll also still experience the sort of error shown above. The workaround is simple: use more sensible folder names!!

Semplice Version 2.05 - September 14th 2024

Minor bug-fix: When converting from one audio format to another. After file format conversion, if the output format was FLAC, the code sought to 'clean' the tags of the output FLAC files. It did so by calling an inappropriate procedure name, however. The bug-fix means the correct code is now invoked and thus tag cleaning works as intended following conversion to FLAC.

Semplice Version 2.04 - August 17th 2024

Minor bug-fix: Sometimes, the grep statement that determines bit-depth and sample rate would occasionally produce a 'binary file matches' error, which would then prevent the renaming of FLACs to include those two pieces of information (if that option was enabled in the configuration file). This release merely adds the -a switch so that the grep program treats binary files as if they were text files, which resolves the error. I am unable to determine what specific circumstances would trigger the 'binary files' error in the first place: I only encountered it on one FLAC recently purchased. So I don't think it's a widespread issue, but the 2.04 release should mean it's never an issue again, anyway!

Semplice Version 2.03 - August 14th 2024

There are two small enhancements to functionality in this release, as follows:

Minor Enhancement: When creating a SuperFLAC (SuperFLAC menu, Option 2), the program now auto-cleans the SuperFLAC as soon as it's been created. Previously, no cleaning took place unless the manual option to clean was taken (press 'K') or the quit program with post-processing option was specified (Quit menu, Option 1); now the freshly-created SuperFLAC is cleaned without you having to do the job manually. The process of 'cleaning' tags firstly removes non-canonical tags (such as 'Copyright' or 'Record Label' and adds one non-canonical tag, namely TAGDATE, which is then assigned the current system date/time in Unix Epoch format, so that a value of 1723631422 can later be converted to a human-readable date of Wednesday, 14 August 2024 10:30:22, thereby letting you know precisely when you created and/or tagged a FLAC into your collection. Thus, SuperFLACs created in earlier Semplice versions lacked a TAGDATE tag, but was otherwise in possession of all the canonical tags. This new release therefore simply ensures that freshly-created SuperFLACs do indeed get created with a TAGDATE tag.

Minor Enhancement: When you perform a volume boost with AUTOBOOST enabled in earlier Semplice versions, if a volume boost can be applied to your FLACs, one will be automatically -but you will have no idea how bigthat volume boost is. New in Version 2.03, therefore, is a very small addition to the status line when an auto-boost is underway that simply tells you how big the volume boost is, like this:

The message at the bottom of the screen used to read 'Performing a volume boost…'. It now adds the words 'of +xdB' to that message, so you know precisely what the automatically applied volume boost is.

Semplice Version 2.02 - August 7th 2024

When tagging FLAC files with album artwork, you are given the opportunity to 'point' to a piece of artwork. Semplice has always checked the file you point to, to ensure that it's a genuine JPG or PNG file, rather than (say) 'word.exe' renamed to be 'word.png' for giggles. Unfortunately, I didn't realise that not all genuine JPGs or PNGs are built the same: most will use what is termed the 'sRGB colourspace', and this is the colourspace that Semplice was originally written to check for as a sign of 'genuine image-ness'. This makes sense: colourspaces affect how devices handle the colour information within an image file and for anything involving computers, the sRGB colourspace is the 'right' one to use.

Unfortunately, not all record companies are entirely consistent on the point, and one recent download I purchased came with album artwork that declared itself to be a JPG but used the CMYK colourspace internally. This also makes sense: the record company has to physically print this artwork when manufacturing its CDs, and the CMYK colourspace is best suited to printing. Trouble thus starts when you point Semplice at a JPG which is internally using the CMYK colourspace (which is not something you'd particularly know was happening, unless you knew how to check!): Semplice simply won't use such images and your FLACs will remain untagged with that particular bit of artwork. You might think you could force the issue using some other tagging program -and, indeed, you probably would be successful in doing that… but if you were to play such a force-fed FLAC in Giocoso (which uses the img2sixel program to allow graphics to display within a terminal, you'd see this sort of output:

You might notice that the image on the right is in a sort-of 'negative' state. This is an sRGB environment trying to make sense of an embedded CMYK image.

I hadn't realised this sort of thing could actually happen… until it happened to me! Version 2.02 of Semplice thus fixes this issue by doing a silent conversion of any CMYK images it finds into sRGB ones, over-writing the originals whilst doing so. The conversion process doesn't change what the standalone image looks like on your computer screen, but merely alters the internal way in which the image handles colours. Embedded art then displays correctly in Giocoso, like so:

Semplice Version 2.01 - July 15th 2024

This release was necessitated by the realisation that ImageMagick (the program Semplice uses to display and manipulate album art when music files are being tagged with album or cover art) comes in two versions. Version 6 uses a program called “convert”, for which a command such as “convert -resize 450×450 image.jpg” would be valid. Version 7 puts up a warning message if the 'convert' command is used, saying that its use is deprecated. It also changes the syntax requirements so that the replacement program, “magick”, now requires that the commands come in “image - task” order. Issue a command such as “magick -resize 450×450 image.jpg” therefore, and you'll get an error message saying that no image file called “450×450” could be found. Instead, you have to say, “magick image.jpg -resize 450×450”: get the image mentioned first, then say what tasks you want applied to it.

The syntax variation means that you can't just alias convert → magick. You literally have to issue different commands, depending on which version of ImageMagick you're working with. Up until very recently, Version 6 was the one used by default in all the distros that Semplice was tested on, so the issue never arose in my testing. The recent release of KDE Version 6, however, means that I noticed some distros are now shipping ImageMagick Version 7 by default.

This release therefore adds code to (1) identify which version of ImageMagick is installed; and (2) issues an appropriate convert or magick command (using different syntax ordering as needed) depending on what version is detected.

| Back to Semplice Home Page |

semconfig

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-03-24T13:10:01+00:00

The Persistent Configuration File

1.0 Introduction

Semplice's behaviour is controlled by the various settings found in its persistent configuration file, which is a text file called $HOME/.local/share/semplice2/txt/semplice.conf. Since it is a text file, it can be edited directly in any text editor you happen to favour. However, it consists of a set of keyword=value parameters whose meaning and legal values may not be obvious to you, so whenever you want to alter its contents, it's much better to use Semplice's own specific menu option to do so: the Miscellaneous menu, Option 1 : Edit Configuration File. Taking that option will bring up screens like this one:

…in which textual prompts are paired with data entry fields. The text prompts use natural language wherever possible and the values you assign to them are also in natural language (for example, yes or no answers, rather than binary 1 or 0 values).

There are four such screens to work with, each one relating to a specific aspect of Semplice's behaviour. The one you see above controls everything about how Semplice rips music from audio CDs: what is the CD drive designator, where should ripped files be stored on hard disk, should CDs be ripped to standard or high-resolution FLACs, and so on. The specific consequence of setting or unsetting any of these parameters should be determined by reading the relevant section of the User Manual: for CD ripping, for example, you'd want to consult this page of the manual.

The second page of the configuration file wizard deals with all the ways in which Semplice embeds metadata tags within FLAC files (so see this user manual page and its child pages for the details of what those options mean). The other two pages of configuration options deal with SuperFLAC and Audio Processing options.

Note that once you start editing the configuration file this way, you must complete the entire wizard. If you quit half-way through by selecting the 'Cancel' option, the parameters which are reached after the screen you cancelled on are all set to their default values, which may not be what you want. Always step through all four pages of the wizard therefore: if you don't want to alter any parameters, just press [Enter] to skip through with the currently-set values persisting.

Generally, the default values for most parameters should be acceptable and safe out-of-the-box (though things like where to rip audio files to will, of course, be highly susceptible to a user's unique requirements). For example, the 'default FLAC audio resolution' option you see in the above screenshot will default to 'standard', though values of standard, high and extreme are all valid. If you attempt to set a parameter to an illegal value (for example, setting 'default FLAC audio resolution' to the string 'anything you like'), the default value will be applied instead. Occasionally, setting a value for a parameter will cause changes to be made to your PC, though this is very rare: for example, if you set 'Rip CDs to folder' to a path/folder combo which doesn't exist but which could be created, then the path/folder combo will actually be created for you.

2.0 Parameters, Default Values and Effects

The following table lists all persistent configuration parameter names in both their 'plain English' forms and the form in which they are stored within the configuration file. It shows the default value where one applies and briefly describes the effect the parameter has on the way Semplice works.

Type of Parameter	Parameter Friendly Name	Parameter Technical Name	Default Value	Legal Values	Effect on Program
CD Ripping	Default optical drive	OPTICAL_DEVICE	/dev/cdrom	Any valid device identifier for an optical disk	Identifies the CD drive used to perform CD rips by default.
	Default read offset	OPTICAL_OFFSET	null or blank	Any numeric value, with minus sign prefix is needed	Adjusts the position of the starting block to read the CD from, to account for manufacturing variability. Leave blank to trigger automatic offset detection.
	Use Hyper-Accurate Rip	HYPER_ACCURATERIP	no	yes/no	Adjust for AccurateRip's inaccuracy.Adjust for AccurateRip's inaccuracy.
	Number of re-reads on errors	READ_RETRIES	40	Any numeric value	How many times to try re-reading a CD sector if reading it errors out for some reason. Higher values make rips of scratched CDs slower but more likely to complete.
	Default FLAC audio resolution	FLAC_QUALITY	standard	standard, high, extreme	Whether the FLACs produced by a CD rip should be standard CD audio resolution or higher.
	Delete intermediate files after converting	DELETE_WAV	yes	yes/no	CDs are first ripped to WAVs and the WAVs are then converted to FLACs: this controls whether the WAVs are automatically deleted once the FLACs have been produced.
	Rip CDs to folder	RIP_FOLDER	$HOME/Music	Any valid physical path with read/write access	A valid path where you have write access where CD rips will be stored on disk
FLAC Tagging Parameters	Delete album art after embedding	DELETE_ART	yes	yes/no	If a JPG or PNG is found in the folder when tagging FLACs, should it be automatically deleted after first being embedded within the FLACs.
	Prevent conversion of accented to non-accented characters	ACCENTS	no	yes/no	If you type é or ü (or other accented characters), sometimes those may be converted to plain, unaccented equivalents such as e or u. Set this to 'yes' to stop that happening. It shouldn't happen anyway in most properly-configured Linux environments.
	Force filenames to display bitdepth/sample rate	NAMEBITS	no	yes/no	If yes, then a file called “01 - Adagio.flac” will be saved as “01 - Adagio-16-44100.flac”, with the 16 and 44100 indicating the bit-depth and sampling rate of the audio signal. Set to no, those bits of data are not incorporated into the physical file name.
	Display album art when extracting	DISPLAYONEXTRACT	yes	yes/no	If you ask to extract embedded album art from a FLAC, should the program simply extract it and save it to disk, or should it also display it on-screen?
	Default text editor	EDITOR	nano	Any valid text editor executable name in $PATH	When editing cuesheets and similar files, which text editor should be used?
	Use Custom Tags	CUSTOMTAGS	no	yes/no	Do you wish to specify up to nine custom tags for FLACs? The answer should ideally be no, but if this is set to 'yes', a further nine prompts for the names of the custom tags you want to use will appear in the configuration file editing wizard.
SuperFLAC Management Parameters	Auto-delete per-track FLACs after SuperFLAC creation	AUTODELETE_PERTRACK_FLACS	no	yes/no	When creating a SuperFLAC by merging a bunch of individual FLACs, should the individual files be deleted automatically once the merge has completed, thus leaving behind only the SuperFLAC?
Audio Processing Parameters	Lossy codec quality setting	AUDIO_QUALITY	4	Numeric values 1 to 9	When converting a FLAC to a lossy audio codec, which quality should be used for the lossy files? A value of '4' is 'average' for all lossy codecs. A value of 1 is great quality for MP3s but lousy quality for OGG or WMA; likewise 9 is rubbish for MP3s, but superb quality for OGGs and WMAs.
	Delete source files after codec conversion	AUDIOIN_DELETION	no	yes/no	If you convert an APE to a FLAC, or an MP3 to an OGG, should the source APE or MP3 files be automatically deleted at the end of the conversion process?
	Apply audio boost automatically if appropriate	AUTOBOOST	no	yes/no	If you take the boost volume menu option, should volume analysing and boosting begin immediately, or should the program analyse whether a boost could be applied and then prompt you whether you'd actually like to go ahead and apply it?
	Apply real or metadata audio boost?	METAVOL	real	real or metadata	Real volume boosts physically alter the audio signal in a FLAC; metadata ones merely add REPLAYGAIN_* tags to a FLAC and leave the audio signal unchanged
Program Control Parameters	Display embedded artwork at size	ARTSIZE	380	Any positive numeric value	Determines the size of album artwork to display once it has been embedded within a FLAC being tagged. The value supplied is converted into a square dimension, so a value of (say) 520 will be treated as a height and width of 520×520 pixels
	Use Kitty Graphics	USEKITTY	no	yes/no	If set to no, album artwork will be displayed in-terminal using sixel graphics. Some terminals don't support sixel graphics but do support Kitty graphics instead. Set this to 'yes' for such terminals.
	Size of the Program Logo	LOGOSIZE	220	Any positive numeric value	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 +)	LOGOPOS	0	Any positive or negative number	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.

Detailed descriptions of most parameters and their effects can be found in the relevant sections of the User Manual.

| Back to Semplice Home Page |

seminstall

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-03-31T11:05:17+00:00

Installing Semplice

1.0 Operating System Support

There are four levels of support for installing Semplice onto assorted Linux distros and other operating systems, as follows:

Tier 1: Used by me daily, on real hardware, extensively tested, guaranteed to work
Tier 2: Used by me infrequently, only in virtual machines, lightly tested, tested extensively in the past, things will almost certainly work
Tier 3: Hardly ever used by me and then only in virtual machines. No testing done, unless specific issues are reported, but has worked in the past just fine, so things ought still to work, too
Tier 4: Thought to work, and tested to work in the past, but you're really on your own.

Putting specific, named distros into each tier goes as follows:

Tier 1: Raspberry Pi OS, Fedora, Linux Mint, Apple macOS
Tier 2: Debian, EndeavourOS, Ubuntu
Tier 3: OpenSuse Leap & Tumbleweed, GeckoLinux, Arch, Manjaro, Garuda Linux, Devuan, Linux Mint Debian Edition, Peppermint OS, MX Linux, AntiX Linux, Pop! OS, Linux Lite, Zorin OS, Elementary OS, KDE Neon, Tuxedo OS, Nobara, Ultramarine
Tier 4: Windows

Every listed distro did run Semplice perfectly at some time in the past and, if the distro developers haven't messed around with core libraries too much, they should still work. However, only those distros in Tier 1 will receive extensive real-world testing from Version 2.12 and up. Other distros will receive either light-touch testing to make sure most things seem to work fine (Tier 2), or will only be tested on-demand by users reporting specific problems (Tier 3). I've provided some distro-specific notes and gotchas elsewhere.

Apple became a Tier 1 operating system when I decided at the end of January 2026 to invest in a brand new Apple Silicon iMac. It's now my principle desktop operating system and, as my daily driver, is going to be the platform on which I test things out most thoroughly. I also have access to a couple of old Apple iMacs (from 2015 and 2012) that use Intel CPUs and can only run modern versions of the operating system thanks to Open Core Legacy Patcher: their 'officially supported' operating systems end with Catalina and Monterey respectively. Accordingly, Semplice will be a Tier 1 supported application on only Catalina, Monterey and whatever OS version runs on a 2024 iMac (Tahoe, probably). All other OS versions will be Tier 4 support: definitely do-able and definitely done and documented: but you're essentially on your own.

Windows is a bit of a special case, because it probably runs Semplice just fine… but I have no means of knowing that for sure. Windows 10 reached end of Microsoft's official support back in October 2025, so all the hardware I have running Semplice on Windows 10 is now no longer representative of anything supported by the operating system's own manufacturer. Windows 11 is, of course, fully supported by Microsoft -but I literally have no hardware that is officially supported for running it. I can hack Windows 11 onto a bunch of spare hardware, but it will be an unsupported and unrepresentative platform. The principle, however, is that if you get Windows running the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) then you can install one of the supported distros on that (for example, Ubuntu or Fedora) and Semplice will run perfectly well in that environment (except for CD ripping functionality, which requires direct access to the relevant hardware). So, it's not that Semplice won't run on Windows: it's just that I now expend zero development effort proving it does so. Any issues arising as you try to run it are therefore really yours to resolve. I will certainly offer advice and help if asked, but it will be merely on a 'best efforts' basis. In the meantime, I have written installation instructions for Windows 11 here.

Semplice definitely does not work on the Solus Linux distro.

2.0 Installation

The basic installation procedure for any supported operating system is, in a new terminal session:

wget software.bbritten.com/seminst

The installer is small (around 20KB) , so it will take hardly any time to download it. Once the installer has been downloaded, you launch it in the same folder you saved it to, with the command:

bash seminst

You will first see a screen warning you that the installer will make quite a few changes to your system, if you let it:

You need to type 'y' (and then press [Enter]) to proceed. If you type anything else, the installer will terminate without having touched your system at all.

At the end of the installation, when you first run Semplice, you may find the program display garbled (it is equally possible you won't!). If you do, just visit the Miscellaneous menu, take Option 1 to “edit the configuration file” and then press [Enter] through the various options (without changing any of them, really) until you return to the main program display: you should find all visual glitches gone (though you may need to go back into the configuration options to adjust the size of the program logo: it defaults to being 220×220 pixels in size and that might be too large on standard 1080p resolution displays).

2.1 Software packages needed for Semplice to work

To start with, the Semplice installer will check for the presence of various packages on your system and will seek to install any that it finds to be missing. You can usually just let it do it's thing at this point, but if you are interested, here are the packages/programs that Semplice deems essential to install:

ImageMagick (an image processing program)
fd or fd-find, depending on distro (a file searching program)
ncurses (enables display of forms in a terminal)
coreutils
build-essential or distro-equivalent (enables the compilation of software sources)
cuetools
bc (program allowing Bash to perform non-integer arithmetic)
flac (the library that allows FLAC audio files to be read and understood)
ffmpeg (an audio player)
xclip (a little utility allowing command line management of the clipboard)
curl (a command line tool for fetching files across the Internet)
xterm (a terminal emulator or console window)
dialog (a program allowing the creation and display of user input forms for the terminal)
cmake (a program allowing source code to be compiled)
python and python-devel (libraries necessary for audiotools program to be compiled from source)
git (a tool allowing sacd and audiotools software sources to be downloaded)
sacd

Audiotools is needed to allow Semplice's CD ripping utility to compare your rips with those previously done of the same CD by others, using the AccurateRip database. If your rip agrees with theirs, chances are it's 'good'. If it doesn't, maybe you're using a different pressing or mastering, or maybe your CD contains errors. The sacd package is installed to give Semplice the ability to convert the ISOs ripped from SACDs to more usable audio formats (such as FLAC). Both audiotools and sacd have to be compiled from their source code, which is why the Semplice installer also installs the build-essential packages (or their distro equivalents), which includes tools such as glibc, make and other packages needed to compile software.

If having any of this software installed on your system gives you cause for concern, type 'n' when the installer prompts you and give up on the idea of installing Semplice altogether: the program cannot run without all of them being present, I'm afraid.

3.0 Getting Started, post-Install

Once Semplice is installed, you can launch it by (a) clicking on the launcher provided on the Desktop (some distros require you to 'trust' or 'mark as executable' the launcher before it will work); or (b) clicking the option provided somewhere in the main menu, which is usually to be found under 'Multimedia' or (depending on distro) 'Sounds & Video'. The main program display should then appear:

Operation of the program beyond this point is hopefully self-explanatory, with the 'top menu' giving access to each of the four main functional components of Semplice in turn: Tagging contains all the functionality that allows you to mark up your FLACs with metadata tags and cover art; Audio Processing lets you convert FLACs to MP3s, or OGGs to WAVs, amongst other things. It also allows you to increase the volume of ripped recordings, if they can be volume-boosted without introducing distortion; the SuperFLAC menu lets you merge individual FLACs into single-file, whole-composition FLACs… and to reverse that process should you want to do so; and the Ripping menu contains options that allow you to accurately rip music from standard audio CDs or SACDs.

The Miscellaneous menu contains options for general 'housekeeping': configuration parameters that controls the way Semplice behaves when performing any of its four major pieces of functionality. It's also the menu that contains an option to check for, and to apply, any program updates that I might release in the future… so, it's something you should be using fairly regularly!

In all cases, top-bar menu options can be accessed by right- or left-arrow keys (the menu wraps, so a right-arrow from Quit takes you back to Tagging, for example), or by tapping the first letter of the menu name (so tapping 'T' gets you directly to Tagging, 'R' to Ripping and so on). Once a top-bar menu option has been selected, the numbered menu items within that option will be displayed and can be invoked simply by tapping the number associated with the item. Thus tapping 'T', then '4', will invoke the FLAC renumbering menu item; 'R' then '2' will let you choose which CD device you want to use when ripping an audio CD, and so on.

A handful of options are accessible regardless of which top-bar menu is selected: they are accessible at any time by tapping the letter associated with them (these options are listed on the right-hand side of the main program display area). Thus tapping 'F' will open your operating system's default file manager; tapping 'W' will bring up a folder selection dialog so that you can select a particular folder to set as the program's current 'working folder', and so on. Important options to learn and remember are 'K' to invoke the metadata tag cleaning routine and 'X' to quit the program without further modifying any FLAC files on the way out.

Beyond that quick-start approach, however, you should read the relevant pages elsewhere in the user manual for an exploration (and explanation!) of the rest of the program's functionality,

4.0 Conclusion

Summarising things as compactly as I can, then:

Read your distro's specific installation notes, to see if there are any pre- or post-installation steps you'll need to take
Fully update your distro, so that it's using the latest packages and patches
wget doco.absolutelybaching.com/seminst
bash seminst
Consider deleting the original Semplice folder and executable once you are happy to use Semplice Version 2

I hope all your Semplice Version 2 installations work successfully and that you get up-and-running with the new program quickly and painlessly!

| Back to Semplice Home Page |

semplice

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-02-02T09:57:19+00:00

Semplice Version 2 : The FLAC Manager

User Manual Index

1.0 Introduction

Semplice Version 2 is an all-in-one digital music file management application for classical music (and it's pronounced Sém-pl-chay, with emphasis on the first syllable and the middle syllable more or less thrown away, or swallowed!): it lets you rip CDs and SACDs; tag digital music files; merge them; split them; give them a volume boost; or convert them to and from different audio formats.

What makes Semplice a specifically “classical music” management application? Well, in truth it will rip, tag, merge, split, volume boost or convert a file containing Polo G “music” equally as well as one containing some Beethoven or Mozart: it doesn't make moral judgments about the music files it's asked to work on (though this author might!). But Semplice talks of composers, compositions and performers, rather than 'albums', 'tracks' or 'songs' and 'artists'. Rather more fundamentally, it adheres to this site's view on how classical music files should best be tagged and what metadata belongs in which specific tags. Likewise, it only tags and manages FLAC files, not OGGs or MP3s because it believes classical music deserves to be heard in the best quality -and that mandates a lossless audio codec. Its author also believes in patent-free, open source, non-proprietary and platform-independent software wherever possible, so FLACs are in and ALACs are not. So no, it's not functionally restricted to managing classical music files -but it's definitely aimed at people who 'do' classical music above any other form of music.

(Side Note: yes, ALAC is open source these days, but its heritage as Apple's lossless audio codec means it's really only ever seen on Apple hardware setups. That's not platform independence in fact, even if it could be in theory).

2.0 Core Concepts

2.1 Ripping

Semplice Version 2 can be used to rip digital audio from standard CDs and from SACDs. When ripping standard CDs, the program will determine your CD drive's physical characteristics and use that information to control the way in which data is grabbed from the disk. The data rip is done using the cdparanoia tool, favouring accuracy over speed and thus ensuring as far as possible that the rip is a 'bit-perfect' representation of what was supplied on the source CD. Semplice will also consult the AccurateRip database to give you some idea of how many other people ripping the same CD have achieved the same output results: if you are on your own, confidence in the accuracy of your rip is obviously rather lower than if your rip is bit-identical to the rips of the same CD obtained by dozens of other people.

Semplice Version 2 always rips entire CDs, never just a particular set of tracks. However, it will allow you to indicate where, within a whole CD, different works begin and end. A CD containing two symphonies, for example, will have the first symphony start at Track 1, the second at Track 5. Tell that to Semplice when ripping and it will create two separate folders, one for each Symphony, and rip the appropriate parts of the CD into each in turn. Even though you end up with apparently separate physical rips, Semplice is still able to check the entire rip for accuracy and concordance with the AccurateRip database.

SACD ripping is brand new to Semplice Version 2 and follows the principles outlined in my article on SACD ripping, which remains this site's most popular bit of writing, much to my surprise! The point is that SACD ripping requires an SACD player to be configured and operated in a particular way: Semplice can obviously do nothing at all about helping you achieve that! Assuming you know how to configure your SACD player, however, then Semplice Version 2 will interact with it over the local network to achieve rips to a single ISO file, containing all the SACD stereo channel data (Semplice won't do multi-channel rips). In this way, Semplice provides a simple to use interface or 'wrapper' around the underlying tools that make SACD ripping possible. Other parts of Semplice functionality can subsequently be used to turn the ISO produced by an SACD rip into high resolution FLACs, which can then be tagged and post-processed as usual.

For more details about how to use Semplice to rip classical music CDs or SACDs, please see this section of the User Manual for ordinary CDs, or this one for SACDs.

2.2 Tagging

One of Semplice's main goals is to enable you to add 'metadata' to your FLACs -data which describes what each FLAC is, what music it contains, who's performing it, and so on. FLAC files technically use Vorbis Comments to store such metadata, but most people generally call them 'tags'. Semplice follows this site's general approach to tagging classical music -which is to keep the tags to a minimum, and to store particular bits of metadata in particular tags. You should read that article to understand why Semplice prompts you for some information and is silent on others. Semplice Version 2 also supports the definition and use of up to nine 'custom tags' of your own devising, though I don't recommend you actually use this capability!

Semplice believes that a FLAC should be a 'self-describing entity': that is, all the metadata associated with a FLAC should be embedded within that FLAC, not stored on a file system as a separate file. Separate files go missing, corrupted or accidentally deleted; metadata embedded within the FLAC persists as long as the FLAC does. Thus Semplice alows you to pick a piece of album art from your hard disk and have that automatically squared-up and embedded within the FLAC it relates to.

New to Semplice Version 2 is a two-path tagging strategy: you can go the 'all-in-one, automatic' route, which prompts you for tags and album art in a step-by-step, wizard-like process. Or you can go the 'do it myself, one step at a time, manually' approach. Either will end up achieving similar results.

For more details about how to use Semplice to tag FLAC files, please see this section of the User Manual.

2.3 SuperFLACs and Cuesheets

Most CD rippers will extract each 'track' from a CD and write it into its own digital music file on CD. Thus, if your CD contains four tracks of a symphony, you'll end up with four separate FLACs on your hard disk. Most people tend to refer to this ripping model as 'per-track' ripping.

Semplice offers you the chance to combine or join a number of per-track rips into a single per-composition FLAC instead. Rather than 4 files representing each movement of a Symphony, Semplice will create a single “SuperFLAC” which represents the entire symphony. As well as doing this, Semplice will create a 'description' of where the individual movements stop and start within the SuperFLAC, called a cuesheet. As with album art, Semplice will embed the cuesheet it creates within the SuperFLAC it describes.

Semplice can also be used to take a SuperFLAC and split it back out into separate, per-track files, should you ever need or prefer to go back to a per-track model.

More details about creating, working with and de-constructing SuperFLACs are available in this section of the User Manual.

2.4 Volume Boosting

You may sometimes find that the peak volume level of a particular recording is substantially lower (i.e., quieter) than it could be. For obscure technical reasons, this is very likely to be the case for anything ripped from an SACD, for example -but it can happen with ordinary CDs, too.

One response to a quieter-than-ideal recording is simply to crank up your amplifier's volume control! This can become somewhat awkward when you are listening to multiple works, each with their own higher or lower average volume level, however!

Semplice's more permanent response is to allow you to physically increase the volume level of the audio signal contained within a set of FLAC files: a one-off, permanent volume boost. It does this non-destructively (so if you don't like the volume-boosted results, you can revert back to the original recordings). All volume boosts are non-distorting: that is, they won't make the audio signal 'clip' or otherwise sound 'wrong'. If Semplice detects that an audio signal is already as loud as it can be, without introducing distortion, it won't bother applying any further volume boosting. When it does apply a volume boost, it applies the same boost to all FLACs found in a folder, so that their relative volume level, one to another, is not altered: you won't suddenly find that the slow, quiet, romantic movement of a symphony is louder than the opening movement with cannons and massed timpani, for example!

Full details on Semplice's volume boosting capabilities and how to use them can be found in this section of the User Manual.

2.5 Format Conversions

Semplice takes its cue from this website's general philosophy, that the “correct” audio format in which to store digital classical music is FLAC, the 'free lossless audio codec'. But what if the website you purchased a recording from only happens to supply the music as WAVs or APEs (two other lossless formats)? What if you are going for a long drive and wish to pack a lot of music onto a SD card you can plug into your car's audio system… and that audio system only plays MP3s? For such reasons, Semplice offers the ability to convert between multiple audio formats at will.

As input formats, Semplice can handle the generally-standard FLAC, APE, MP3, OGG, WMA, and WAV formats, plus the special ISO and DSF formats that only apply to files that have been ripped from SACDs.

As output formats, Semplice can handle standard, high-resolution and extreme-high-resolution FLACs, along with MP3, OGG, WMA and WAV.

Full details on how to convert between audio formats (and the instructions on how to add ISO capabilities to Semplice by installing sacd) are available in this section of the User Manual

3.0 Semplice Philosophy!

If any of the above capabilities are of interest to you, I would strongly recommend that you read a couple of my older articles on the subject of how digital classical music files should best be organised, because the reasoning elaborated upon in those articles underpins the way Semplice works (especially in the way it goes about tagging files).

Specifically, I would recommend you read the following two articles:

(Primary) Keys to Music: How information theory should inform your music tagging practice
The Axioms of Classical Tagging - how to tag your classical music files correctly

These establish the idea that the way to identify this recording from that one is to use a combination of composer+composition name+principal performer name/identifier+recording year. The combination of these pieces of information give rise to something those articles (and this website more generally) refers to as the extended composition name.

Having grasped the concept of the extended composition name, the Axioms article then elaborates 17 'principles' of how best to tag your classical music files, most of them derived from that underlying concept.

You may not agree with my thoughts on classical music organisation -in which case, Semplice is probably not the program you are looking for! That's fine: there are lots of other music tagging and audio conversion utilities out there that aren't quite as prescriptive on such matters 🙂

If you can accept the basic premise of Semplice's thinking about classical music, however, then I commend it to you as an easy-to-use tool for managing a digital FLAC collection of classical music.

semquickstart

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-01-22T15:12:46+00:00

Semplice Quick Start Guide

1.0 Introduction

By way of a whirlwind tour of installing Semplice Version 2 and then starting to use it to do something useful, this article will give you a bird's-eye view of the main 'life cycle' steps in Semplice use, as follows:

Program Installation
Ripping a CD
Tagging digital music files
Boosting ripped audio's volume levels
Creating a SuperFLAC from per-track FLACs
Converting between audio formats

Each section will contain a link to the part of the user manual that covers doing that activity in much more detail: this page is just really high level stuff, intended only to give you the gist of what the program can do and the best order in which to do them.

2.0 Installing Semplice

Installing Semplice consists of opening a terminal session and typing the commands:

cd
wget software.bbritten.com/seminst
bash seminst

The first command means we know you're sitting in the root of your own home folder; the second fetches the Semplice installation script; the third runs that script. From that point on, you just follow the prompts and supply the root or sudo passwords as prompted.

A detailed set of walk-through instructions on how the installation process proceeds is available from this page of the User Manual.

3.0 Ripping a CD

Before you can rip a CD, you need to tell Semplice the device name of your CD drive and store that in the persistent configuration parameters. So, to find out the name of your device in the first place, open a terminal and type the command;

lsblk | grep rom

The output will be something like this:

sr0     11:0    1     2K  0 rom

…which tells you the device name is going to be '/dev/sr0'. Your specific device name may well be different, of course. On most Linux distros, the alias '/dev/cdrom' will automatically point to the correct device by default, so use that if you haven't a clue otherwise and it might work.

MacOS is rather different in the way it enumerates optical drives. For a start, it won't list them at all unless there's actually a CD inserted into whatever drive you're using. So, insert a CD before doing anything else. After that, issue this command in a terminal session:

diskutil list | grep CD_DA

You'll see output such as this:

That tells you that the optical drive is now identified as 'disk8 <something or other'. Knowing that, you can tell Semplice that your optical device is known as /dev/rdisk8: you stick a “/dev/r” onto the front of the device name just determined and you make sure not to mention any of the “s…” bits (the 'slices' of the raw device), since they are irrelevant to the device name.

Once you know the device name, take the Miscellaneous menu and then select Option 1 to edit the configuration file. Enter the correct device name against the 'Default optical drive' item, like so:

You don't need to alter the value for any other parameter shown here, unless you specifically want to do so: the defaults should be sufficient for most purposes. You may however want to specify a value for the 'Rip CDs to folder' parameter: in the screenshot, my rips will be stored on my own Desktop. If you wanted it in your Music folder instead, you'd type that in (so, something like /home/hjr/Music would work for me, for example).

To rip a CD in Semplice, you take the Ripping menu and then select Option 1 and then follow the prompts.

Once a CD is in your CD drive, Semplice will read it and present a screen displaying the number of tracks found on the CD. You put an asterisk against each track which marks the start of a new recording: each recording will be ripped into its own sub-folder. For example, if you have a CD containing two Beethoven symphonies, each of four movements, Semplice will display 8 tracks; you put an asterisk against both tracks 1 and 5. Tracks 1 to 4 will then be ripped to one folder and tracks 5 onwards will be ripped to a second. Up to the number of tracks on the CD in the first place, there is no practical limit on how many separate recordings you can create from a single CD in this way.

At the end of the ripping process, you will be left with a set of FLAC files in each recording's sub-folder. They will not be named correctly (just 'track01-cdda-16.flac' and so on); they will have no metadata associated with them; there will be no album artwork associated with them. Semplice just extracts the audio signal from the CD and leaves the subsequent acquisition of all that sort of thing to you as a separate, manual exercise performed post-rip.

Full details on how to rip CDs using Semplice can be found on this page of the User Manual.

4.0 Tagging Digital Music Files

Tagging digital music files is done by taking the Tagging menu and then selection Option 1 (Auto-Tagging).

However, in order to tag FLACs with metadata using Semplice, you first have to put Semplice 'into' the folder that contains the FLACs. You can do that either by physically 'cd-ing' to the folder in a terminal and then launching Semplice from within that folder; or you can do it by launching Semplice from anywhere and then using the W shortcut key to set Semplice's working folder. Either way, Semplice ends up 'seeing' the set of files it needs to tag.

Tagging consists of editing the prompts Semplice shows you. The prompts will be in three separate screens: (1) Album-wide information, such as composition and composer name; (2) Performer details (conductor, orchestra, choir and so on); and finally (3) track-specific data (such as tempo indications). The prompts will additionally be pre-filled with data, from various sources as follows:

Semplice always remembers the last set of tags you supply in a session (though quitting the program completely clears its memory). Therefore, Semplice will offer to use the last set of tags supplied to tag the new set of FLACs being worked on. This will mean all prior tags being proposed for the new recording's FLACs -which won't be accurate in every detail but may well mean the conductor, orchestra and soloists will be correct second time round, without you having to re-supply them from scratch.
Semplice can also prompt you with pre-existing tags that it reads from your FLACs. Often, record companies will tag their FLAC downloads, so they contain some metadata already (albeit most of it will be wrong!) and Semplice can therefore use this pre-existing metadata as prompts for its own tag proposals.
Finally, if there are no previous tags you've supplied nor any pre-existing tags already within the FLACs, Semplice will read the physical folder name on disk and use that to propose tags. If you've named the working folder 'Symphony No. 5 (Bernstein - 1972)', for example, then Semplice will understand that the ALBUM tag should be “Symphony No. 5 (Bernstein - 1972)”, the recording year should be “1972” and the distinguishing artist should be “Bernstein”: it will thus pre-fill the prompts for those tags with that information. You'll still need to fill in the gaps, of course.

In the worst case scenario, when there is no data you've previously supplied, no pre-existing metadata to read and you haven't named your physical folders correctly, you'll be looking at a pretty blank set of tag prompts! You'll therefore end up having to type in your tag data from scratch: however, there aren't many tags to be supplied, so even in the worst case, it isn't terribly painful to do.

Only when you submit the complete set of edited tags are they applied to the FLAC files themselves.

Any specific tags you need to adjust after the auto-tagging process completes can be edited by taking one of the other numbered menu items in the Tagging menu. For example, to add album art to your FLACs, you'd use Option 5; to correct a track title, you'd use Option 3 and so on.

Full details on how to tag your FLACs, including several worked examples, can be found on and linked to this User Manual page.

5.0 Volume Boosting

After you've tagged your digital music files, you might want to give them a volume boost. Multiple recordings will have been ripped from a single CD which was engineered to have an 'overall' acceptable volume level. As separate recordings, however, that average volume may no longer be appropriate: you might consider boosting the volume of the quiet symphony so that it is as loud as it can be without getting distorted, whereas the loud symphony can be left as it is. Volume boosting is commonly needed after ripping music from an SACD, as they are deliberately mastered about 6dB quieter than they 'could' be in order to avoid distortion creeping in during the recording and mastering phases of an SACD's production: a post-rip volume boost of such audio material can be safely performed without introducing distortion because the material is now in FLAC format. Note, however, that volume boosting is entirely optional.

Volume boosts can be real, physical adjustments to the audio signal contained within a FLAC: this is known as a 'real volume boost' and is the default mode of Semplice's volume boosting operation. If the idea of irreversibly altering the audio signal in your FLACs is anathema to you, however, you can instead opt to do a 'metadata-only boost'. Metadata boosts don't alter the audio signal but merely write into your FLACs a set of new metadata tags which describe what volume boost your music player should apply to the audio signal in real time.

Real boosts require the re-encoding of your audio files, which can take time and will consume disk space (at least temporarily); metadata boosts take mere seconds as only an analysis of the loudness levels within your FLACs is required. No re-encoding takes place and no extra disk space is consumed.

Full details on performing volume boosts can be found on this page of the User Manual.

6.0 Creating SuperFLACs

Having ripped, tagged and volume-boosted your music, you may wish to convert it into a single-file 'SuperFLAC', rather than leave it as a multi-file, per-track set of separate FLACs. This is useful (1) when your music playing software can't do gapless playback properly; or (2) when you care about your file system, which generally works better with fewer, large files than with multiple, smaller ones, regardless of which specific file system you use.

A SuperFLAC contains within itself all the audio data from a set of per-track FLACs, just in a single file. It additionally contains a 'cuesheet', which explains how the music data within the SuperFLAC can be read and interpreted back into per-track-like data. Music players which can read and interpret cuesheets (such as DeadBeef, Foobar2000 or Clementine/Strawberry) can thereby still display multiple 'virtual' tracks to be played individually, even though there's only one physical file storing all the data.

Creating SuperFLACs requires that a working folder has been identified that contains the per-track FLACs that are to be merged together. Do that as usual: either launch Semplice from within a folder of FLACs, or use the 'W' option to identify a suitable 'working folder'. After that, take the SuperFLAC menu, Option 1 Merge tracks into SuperFLAC. Taking that menu option automatically and immediately triggers the creation of a SuperFLAC (which means that, temporarily, your hard disk needs enough free space to contain both the original per-track music files and the merged SuperFLAC). Once the SuperFLAC has been created, you are prompted to delete the original per-track source files, though you can decline to do so. A configuraiton file option allows you to automatically delete the per-track source files if you prefer (see the Miscellaneous menu, Option 1).

Complete details on SuperFLACs, including a step-by-step walk-through of the process, can be found on this page of the User Manual.

Note that a SuperFLAC can be split back out into a multi-file, per-track set of FLACs using the SuperFLAC menu, Option 2.

7.0 Audio Format Conversions

You may need to convert FLACs into MP3s (for playback in a car stereo system, for example); or you may buy music in APE format that you wish to convert to FLACs; or you may rip an SACD into an ISO and then need to convert the ISO into a set of FLACs. For various reasons, therefore, you may want to take advantage of the fact that Semplice can perform conversions between nine different audio codecs and formats.

Doing any audio conversions first requires that Semplice can see a folder full of audio files of one format or another: that requires launching Semplice from within that folder initially, or by launching it and then setting a working folder with the 'W' option.

After that, take the Audio Processing menu, Option 2. You are prompted to specify first the source audio format and then the desired output format. There are only five possible output formats (FLAC, AIFF, MP3, OGG and WMA), though FLACs can be output as standard, CD-quality FLACs; high-resolution FLACs equivalent to what most SACDs would contain; or as extremely high-resolution FLACs equivalent to what audiophiles would consider their golden ears are best suited to listen to. Note that if your source audio format is ISO or DSF then only FLAC and AIFF formats are available as outputs. If you really want to convert the super high-quality audio from an SACD to lossy, low-quality MP3 (for example), you'll have to convert to FLAC first and then perform a second conversion to MP3.

As soon as you select an output format, the audio conversion process begins automatically.

Usually, the output files will co-exist alongside the source files, once the audio conversion process completes. You can therefore move them to SD cards or other devices using standard file copying tools and techniques. However, you can configure Semplice to automatically delete the source files, if this is appropriate. Take the Miscellaneous menu, Option 1 to set options for 'Delete source files after audio conversion', for example (the default is 'no', of course).

A second parameter there governs the quality of output whenever a lossy audio codec is selected as the output format: by default it's set to a value of '4', which is 'middling' quality, regardless of whether you're outputting to MP3, OGG or WMA. You can adjust this to higher or lower values to achieve higher or lower output qualities, though the scale works differently for different formats (a quality of 9, for example, would result in excellent quality WMA and OGG formats, but lousy MP3 ones).

Full details on performing audio format conversions in Semplice can be found on this page of the User Manual.

8.0 Conclusion

Generally speaking, Semplice is best used in the order I've shown the above sections: rip music, tag it up, boost it, SuperFLAC it, convert it when needed. Obviously, however, each of these Semplice 'capabilities' are independent of each other and you can accordingly dip in and out of its menus in whatever order makes most sense to you at the time. If you've bought some FLACs online, for example, you won't be needing Semplice's ripping options, but will be diving straight into its tagging ones; if you've ripped an SACD you might want to use Semplice's volume boosting capability, but maybe not so much if you've just ripped a standard audio CD… and so on. Make use of the functionality you need; ignore the functionality you don't want or like, basically!

| Back to Semplice Home Page |

semripcd

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-02-02T19:27:54+00:00

Ripping Standard Audio CDs

1.0 Introduction

Semplice Version 2 now includes CD ripping functionality.

Semplice CD rips are basic, in the sense that they are always of the whole disk and no attempt is ever made to do any metadata or album art fetching: for classical music, all Internet-sourced metadata is complete rubbish and you'll end up spending more time correcting it than you would in simply typing it in from scratch in the first place (which Semplice's Tagging menu is there to help you do, of course). Semplice CD rips are, however, always accurate: for starters, the ripper uses the cdparanoia tool to ensure that defective parts of a source CD are read and re-read as many times as needed to arrive at a 'true' output. As an additional factor in achieving an accurate rip, Semplice will examine your optical drive and try to determine a 'read offset' for it: most optical drives read data from block X when they've been instructed to read it from block A. Knowing that difference between requested and actual read locations allows Semplice to adjust the stream of data coming off the CD and thus ensure it's an accurate representation of the data that was originally pressed into the CD. Finally, Semplice will attempt to compare any rips you get it to do with a database of other people ripping the same CD (called the AccurateRip database). If you all end up with the same bits in the same places, you can be very confident that your rip is bit-perfect. This functionality comes from Semplice's interaction with the audiotools package, which is therefore a software prerequisite for Semplice: usually, Semplice will automatically install this package for you as part of its own installation process. If for some reason Semplice fails to install it for you, then CD ripping will still work, but no querying of the AccurateRip database will take place to see if your rip is equivalent to anyone else's. See Section 5 below for instructions on how to manually install the audiotools package should you need to do so (though hopefully, unless you're running a weird distro configured in weird ways, you won't need to do so!)

Semplice CD rips always output FLAC files, ready to be tagged with suitable metadata and otherwise post-processed into catalogue-able state.

Semplice Version 2 now also includes a convenient front-end for ripping SACDs.

SACDs are much more complicated to rip than standard audio CDs: you'll require specialised hardware to read the disk, for one thing. Semplice cannot help you with that side of things! But you then need to interact with your SACD player over a home network -and that's the bit that Semplice now puts a nice front-end on, making things a little easier to configure and execute. Semplice's SACD rips always result in the production of an ISO: a single file containing within itself the entire musical data contained on the source disk. ISOs can be turned into FLACs for more convenient playback using Semplice's audio-converting capabilities (found under the Audio Processing menu).

In the following sections, I'll outline the various configuration parameters which control the standard CD ripping process and how you should set them to suit your own circumstances. I'll then work through an example of how the ripping process works. Finally, I'll point you to a separate article that walks you through the SACD ripping procedure, which is very much sui generis!

2.0 Ripping Configuration Parameters

All Semplice Version 2 configuration parameters are set by using the Miscellaneous menu, Option 1:

I'll work down the list of parameters in the order they're presented in the above screenshot.

2.1 Default Optical Drive

If your Linux PC only has one optical drive, it's probably called /dev/cdrom or /dev/sr0 and there's no question about it being the 'default' one, as it's the only one! You can therefore leave this parameter blank, since Semplice will default to using the one and only optical drive you have anyway.

That is not true on macOS, however: on that platform, you are required to manually identify your optical drive and type its name in here. To complicate matters, as far as macOS is concerned, your optical drive doesn't even exist until a CD has been inserted into it. So, for macOS, insert a CD and then open a terminal session and type the command:

diskutil list | grep CD_DA

You should see output such as this:

The device name is hinted at in the last column of output: all my entries show that the device is called “disk8”. The 's1', 's2' and so on entries that are tacked on to the end of the name should be ignored: you want the plain, vanilla drive name, not the 'slices' that the currently-inserted CD contains (which mere mortals call 'tracks'!) Once you have a device name, stick the text /dev/r in front of it: in my case, to create a /dev/rdisk8 value. It's this form of the device name which you type into Semplice's configuration screen.

The point is that you may have multiple drives attached to your system but this configuration entry tells Semplice which of the multiple possible drives to use by default. You can always override the default setting at any time by using the Ripping menu Option 2 : Specify Optical Drive. Note that this only works on Linux, however: use of multiple optical drives on macOS is not supported at all and may produce ugly errors if attempted. The configuration entry on macOS is fixed and compulsory -and taking Option 2 to specify a different drive simply won't do anything on a macOS installation.

On Linux, however, Option 2 will work to itemise non-default optical devices. In the earlier screenshot, for example, you can see that I've configured /dev/sr098 to be my default drive; but using Option 2, I see this:

…which allows me to pick /dev/sr0 to use instead. Selecting a drive manually with Option 2 doesn't alter what the default device is said to be in the configuration file: the selection made here is therefore only valid for the duration of the current Semplice session (or until you re-take Option 2 and change it to be a different drive, for example).

If you have difficulty knowing what device name to set the default optical drive to when using Linux, you can do a few things that might help:

Use Option 2 to list all optical drives on your system: the /dev/sr0 or similar device name will be visible there

Open a command prompt and type the command lsblk | grep rom: that will list something like 'sr0' as a device name, so prefix that with '/dev/' and you should be in business:

Try using /dev/cdrom: that's the common default name for an optical drive on most Linux systems.

Try issuing the command eject -d at a terminal prompt and see what device name it returns:

If you still end up mentioning a string value for this parameter which doesn't correspond to an actual, physical device accessible by your PC system, you'll see an error when you first try to rip a CD:

There's nothing you can do at this point (except click OK to return to the menu, of course). You'll need to determine a correct device name and set that in the configuration file before any rips can take place.

2.2 Default Read Offset

Semplice will attempt to identify your chosen optical drive and compare it with a list of known devices stored in the AccurateRip drive database. If it manages to identify your drive, it will be able to look up what 'read offset' to apply to it. When your drive tries to read the first audio sample off a CD, it will 'miss' by a known, regular amount: try to read sample 1, it might read sample 7 or sample 103 instead, for example. To correct for this tendency to read-ahead or -behind of where it's meant to, we apply a read offset (of -6 or -102 in these examples), and this will ensure that the drive actually starts reading where want it to.

The process for computing an appropriate read offset is length and convoluted: you usually have to rip a number of popular and well-known CDs and compare your results to those submitted by others users. Semplice does not do it that way! Instead, it simply identifies the optical drive's manufacturer's name and searches for that in a database of pre-computed read offsets. If it finds a unique match, great. If not, then Semplice will not be able to apply a read offset automatically (i.e., it will actually use a read offset of zero, which almost certainly won't be correct). If Semplice is unable to determine a read offset for you, you can instead set the Default Read Offset in the configuration settings to a numeric value of your own devising. Positive numbers just go in as numbers, negative ones with a minus-sign prefix: so you might type in '6' for 'positive 6' or '-6' for 'negative six', for example. If you type in a leading plus-sign, however, Semplice will automatically understand what you meant, so typing “+6” works, too.

Be aware that if you're using an optical drive manufactured by a reputable and reasonably well-known company, there should be no need to set a Default Read Offset. Just leave it blank and Semplice will dynamically work out what offset to apply every time you rip something new. If you choose to supply a value for this parameter, that value over-rides anything Semplice might have worked out for itself …and unless you know exactly what you're doing, that might mean your CD rips will be inaccurate. Only fill this parameter in, in other words, if you're using an obscure optical drive that the AccurateRip database has never heard of!

I should finally add that none of the above is true if you're using an Apple SuperDrive on macOS! That drive has its manufacturer's identity deliberately obscured by the operating system …and since Apple used multiple manufacturers to make SuperDrives, there's no single read offset that can be applied to SuperDrives in the abstract. Without a manufacturer's identifier, however, no automatic working out of what the correct read offset should be can be made by Semplice. If you're in this situation, therefore, my advice is to temporarily attach the device to a Linux machine and get the manufacturer's identity from there. You could even run Semplice on the Linux box and get Semplice there to determine a read offset for you: once you know it there, plug it back into your Apple device and manually set the default read offset value in the configuration options to be what Semplice-on-Linux told you it should be. The other alternative is not to use a SuperDrive at all: if you use third party devices, Semplice can identify their manufacturing identifier and thus compute an automatic read offset as it would have done on Linux. You can read more about the problem with SuperDrive read offset detection here.

By way of practical example, here is what I see when I plug my Apple SuperDrive into an AlmaLinux server:

That tells me I need to be searching the AccurateRip database for a drive with some variation of “DVDRAM GUE1N”… and lo and behold:

…there's a match and it tells me my SuperDrive was manufactured by LG and has a read offset of +6. So: 6 is what I enter into my configuration parameters and it will be good for all future rips.

Another worked example, this time on Linux. Here's what Semplice recognises my optical drive to be (using Ripping menu Option 2):

So, although it was a no-brand-name £12 el-cheapo from Amazon, it turns out my drive was manufactured by HP: a reputable enough brand! If we consult the AccurateRip drive database manually, we see this entry:

This tells us that we ought to expect Semplice to use a read offset of plus 6 (and that 140 other people have used the same make of drive in the past!). As I rip a CD with Semplice using this device, the screen shows me:

Lo and behold, Semplice has worked it out and arrived at 'Using read offset: 6'. So it got it correct, at least as far as the AccurateRip database is concerned. Now let me override that by setting an explicit offset in the configuration file:

So, here I'm insisting on a read offset of 327 for whatever reason. What happens when I rip my next CD, then? Well, first you are warned that a manual override has been supplied:

Secondly, as the rip progresses, you'll see your manual setting appear in the appropriate place:

So, the short version is: don't supply a default read offset yourself unless you have to, unless you're running on macOS and using an Apple SuperDrive, in which case you must supply a default read offset that you've worked out for yourself.

If Semplice can determine the correct offset for you automatically, let it do so. The parameter is there for those people using weird and wonderful hardware that is rare enough not to have an entry in the AccurateRip database!

2.3 Use Hyper-AccurateRip

Please do not switch this parameter on by setting it to 'yes': leave it set to its default value of no. If you enable the parameter, your rips may well be super accurate (as the parameter name implies) but they will be completely unique and you'll have ripping results which are not matched by anyone else who has ever ripped the same CD in the past. This may make you feel warm and fuzzy and slightly superior, but it essentially renders the entire AccurateRip technology non-functional and is therefore less than ideal. The parameter is there for those who insist on scratching nit-picky data itches, not because it makes any practical sense!

For a fuller description of the reason why someone might, in a fit of madness, want a 'hyper accurate rip' capability, read this old blog post of mine.

The short version is that when the people devising the AccurateRip system first determined what the 'true' drive offsets for optical drives were, they computed it incorrectly and were out by 30 frames. If AccurateRip says your read offset should be 6, therefore, it should really and truly be -24. This is probably pedantically and technically correct, but it's useless information: misreading 30 frames of CD audio means you're missing 0.6 milliseconds of audio from the start of the CD. It's an error that's really not worth worrying about and is never actually audible. Therefore, hyper-accurate rips are of no practical use at all, but turning them on does mean no confidence about the quality of your rips can ever be determined or reported.

The point is that AccurateRip works on aggregating rip results from lots of users who are not correcting for the 30 frame error. So thousands of rips will be reporting one result …and if you've turned HyperAccurate Rips on, you'll be reporting a completely different result. Your result might, technically, be more 'correct' than theirs: but you'll nevertheless be on your own and your rips will accordingly be declared inaccurate.

The feature was written into Semplice for completeness's sake, not because it is of any practical use.

2.4 Number of re-reads on Errors

If your CD is scratched, old, covered in jam or otherwise not in pristine condition, reading it will inevitably encounter errors. Fortunately, most CD read errors can be worked around because of the error-correcting codes embedded within the data stream itself. It just takes multiple attempts to read the data in the tricky spots to get an error-corrected result. Such re-reads are done entirely automatically as the need arises -but if we didn't put a hard limit on them, Semplice might try re-reading the same bit of a damaged CD for ever!

This parameter therefore controls how many times Semplice will re-read bad data sectors until it either gets a good, correct result or gives up. The default number of re-reads is 40. If the error can't be corrected after 40 retries, the rip carries on regardless, with bad data left in the rip (probably audible as a click or pop). The higher the number of re-reads, the slower a CD rip will generally take; a lower number goes faster, but might mean more pops and clicks in the final result. You have to find a re-read level that balances speed and accuracy in a way you're happy with: the default of 40 is meant to provide a 'reasonable' outcome in most circumstances.

2.5 Default FLAC Resolution

FLAC is inherently a lossless audio codec, meaning that though it is a compressed version of an audio signal, every part of that signal can be recovered by decompressing the data. This parameter therefore has nothing to do with the 'quality' of a FLAC produced by Semplice: definitionally, all FLACs are perfect!

Rather, this parameter deals with situations where non-standard CDs are being ripped. A standard audio CD contains data sampled at 44,100 times a second (44.1KHz), with each sample being stored as a 16-bit value. This '16-bit, 44.1KHz' signal is therefore considered Semplice's standard FLAC output. The literal value of 'standard' for this parameter, as shown in the screenshot at the beginning of this page, is therefore also the default value for this parameter.

You may, however, occasionally encounter CDs that use a higher sampling rate or bit-depth and wish your FLACs to reflect that, too. For example, I recently ripped a DVD-Audio, which claimed to have been sampled at 88.2KHz using 24-bit values. Dealing with such disks, you may want Semplice's FLAC output to use a higher-than-normal encoding,too. The parameter therefore also takes literal values of high (resulting in 88.2KHz, 24-bit FLACs) or extreme (which results in 176.4KHz, 24-bit FLACs).

There is no value in ripping a standard audio CD to either of these higher 'resolutions', but the option is there for people who may encounter non-standard CDs, high-resolution FLAC downloads, SACDs or audio DVDs and wish to preserve as much of the music signal as possible.

2.6 Delete Intermediate Files

Semplice has to rip a CD initially to WAV files: large, lossless digital audio files. It then compresses those WAVs into FLACs, which preserve all the audio data in the source WAV, but at about half the original size. That rip-and-convert functionality is entirely automatic. The end result is, of course, two files for every track on the original CD: one WAV, one FLAC. The question then becomes: do you want Semplice to automatically delete the WAVs after the conversion process completes, as they are merely uncompressed equivalents of the FLACs and are thus, strictly speaking, superfluous to requirements? Remember that the original WAVs can always be reconstructed perfectly from the FLAC, by using the audio conversion options found under the Audio Processing menu.

Valid settings for this parameter are either yes or no, with yes being the default.

2.7 Rip CDs to Folder

By default, Semplice will write its WAVs (and thus FLACs) extracted from an audio CD to the $HOME/Music folder of the user doing the rip. You can set this parameter, however, to make Semplice write its output to anywhere else you prefer. If the folder you specify here doesn't exist, it will be created for you the next time you perform a rip, assuming you have the appropriate privileges needed to do so. If the folder cannot be created because of permissions or other system issues, the default of $HOME/Music kicks in as before.

3.0 The Ripping Process

To begin ripping with Semplice, make sure your optical drive is actually connected to your PC (if it's a USB device, for example); that a valid audio CD has been inserted into the drive; and ensure that the drive's tray is closed. If those three conditions are met, simply press R to get to the Ripping menu and then tap 1 to begin the ripping process. Semplice will begin by listing all the tracks on the CD, asking you to place a marker where each new recording on the CD begins. For example, consider this tracklisting from a CD of Christoph von Dohnányi conducting Stravinsky and Bartók:

Looking at that set of tracks, I hope it is obvious that tracks 1 to 14 make up one 'recording', and tracks 15 to 16 make up a second, entirely different recording: the fact that they are both supplied on the same CD is irrelevant, as Axiom 8 says! Therefore, when I start the ripping process in Semplice and it presents me with this screen:

…my job is to scroll up and down the list of tracks until track number 1 is highlighted and press the Space Bar so that an asterisk appears next to that track inside the square brackets; and to then scroll down until track 15 appears and do the same thing:

Once Semplice knows the start of each recording, it will split this rip out into separate folders of FLACs as appropriate: in this case, I'm obviously going to end up with two folders, one for the Stravinsky and one for the Bartók work. There is no limit to the number of recordings you can carve out of a CD in this way (subject only to the number of tracks on the CD, of course) -and if the CD is an entire recording, not needing to be split up into separate rips, you can just click the 'Submit' button without having put an asterisk next to any track at all. You could also just put an asterisk next to track 1 and click 'Submit', too: both approaches mean 'this is an entire recording'.

Once you've identified the start of each recording contained on the one CD, highlight the [Submit] button and press [Enter] (you can also click the Submit button with a mouse, if you prefer). The ripping process starts practically immediately:

As you can see, Semplice will confirm what optical drive it's using, the folder it's ripping to, and the read offset it's using to ensure an accurate rip. The progress bar then ticks up periodically as new 'frames' of the CD are read in turn. Whilst that's happening, you might want to inspect the folder where Semplice says it's writing the rip. In my configuration file, I've got the 'Rip CDs to Folder' parameter set to /home/hjr/Desktop -but you can see from the above screenshot that Semplice has created a sub-folder on my Desktop, called 'SempliceMusicRip-2024-03-19'. In other words, Semplice will always create a date-based sub-folder within where your parameter file says to write rips. Inside that sub-folder, you'll get additional sub-folders, one per rip:

Here, you can see my rip of the Dohnányi CD is in-progress and therefore only the first six tracks have been ripped so far -but they're being written into a 'RIP_01' folder. The Bartók tracks will, when ripped, end up in a 'RIP_02' folder. Semplice will keep creating new 'RIP_xx' sub-folders as needed: you can rip multiple dozens of CDs in one day and end up with a 'RIP_142' folder, for example!

You'll notice from that last screenshot, too, that the rips are coming off the CD as WAV files: uncompressed, lossless audio data. That will get sorted for you soon enough!

Here's my file manager once more, after everything has been ripped from the one CD: you'll notice the two RIP… folders and the multiple ripped tracks within each:

So, I identified two starting tracks when the rip process first began; now I've ended up with two separate RIP… folders and inside each I've got a bunch of FLACs, not WAVs: the conversion from WAV to FLAC is done automatically for you.

Back with Semplice, for this rip I now see the following message:

For classical music rips, I'm afraid this will be quite a common occurrence: classical music is not the world's most popular form of music, so the AccurateRip database often doesn't have records of other people ripping the same CDs as I tend to rip! This message is not an indication of anything going wrong with the rip, therefore: just that you are pretty much on your own on the planet having ripped it! Out of interest, you could visit the $HOME/.local/share/semplice2/rip folder at this point and check the contents of the ripaccuracy.txt file contained within:

It's mostly gibberish, of course: those 'Checksum' columns are the digital 'fingerprints' of your rip and its those which should match up with the same fingerprints produced by other rippers of this CD. As the 'disc not in database' statements make clear, however: on this occasion, no fingerprint matching can be done. All I can do is therefore click 'OK' on the message box Semplice's displaying and return to the main menu (with the disk being ejected from the optical drive as I do so).

If your CD is one of the more popular ones, such that other people have ripped it in the past and had their digital fingerprints added to the AccurateRip database, you'd have seen this sort of response from Semplice at the end of the rip:

Here, the 'Confidence = xx' message tells you how many other entries in the AccurateRip database match your own digital fingerprints. In my case, 11 other people have ripped this CD with the exact same audio signal output as me… which is intended to give you a feeling of some confidence that your hardware isn't doing uniquely weird things when reading a CD.

Remember that if you have switched on Hyper-Accurate ripping in the parameter file (please don't!), Semplice will not even attempt to do a confidence check for your rip: it will simply remind you that you can read all the gory technical details in the ripaccuracy.txt report, as found in $HOME/.local/share/semplice/rip.

Finally, note that on macOS, no attempt is made to check the accuracy of a rip with the AccurateRip database. The software needed to do so does not run on macOS, unfortunately.

Summing up, therefore:

Semplice rips accurately, not speedily
On Linux, it works out the read offset for your optical drive automatically, but if that fails, you can supply a value of your own. On macOS, you must supply your own value if you're using a SuperDrive, though auto-detection works OK for non-Apple drives
It always rips whole disks
But it can split out different parts of a CD into separate sub-folders: you just tell it what tracks indicate the start of new recordings on the one CD
The rip produces WAVs, but these are auto-encoded into FLACs. By default, the intermediate WAVs are deleted when the rip concludes
On Linux, an attempt is made to find your CD in the AccurateRip database and, if it can be, a confidence value will be returned. If it can't, it doesn't mean the rip is wrong; it rather means your musical tastes are somewhat specialised! This accuracy check does not happen on macOS, however.

Important Note: I've just said that “On Linux, an attempt is made to find your CD in the AccurateRip database”… but that's only true if the Semplice installer was able to install the Python audiotools package correctly during its own installation. That should be true for all supported Linux distros, but if that audiotools installation process goes wrong for some reason then Semplice will silently not perform an AccurateRip database lookup (and this is what happens on macOS, in fact). Remember too that it also won't do a lookup, even if audiotools is installed correctly, if Hyper-Accurate Rips are enabled in the Semplice configuration file.

4.0 Post-Rip Processing

The Semplice CD ripping functionality results in folders called lovely names such as RIP_01 and RIP_02 and so on, along with FLAC tracks with delightful names such as track01.cdda-16.flac and the like! Once the rip has finished, therefore, your work is all before you: the folder names need (according to Axiom 17!) to represent the extended composition name of the recording… and then the job of marking up each of the tracks with appropriate metadata begins. That is a job more fully described in the tagging part of this user manual. For now, I'd content myself with a bit of folder renaming, resulting in this:

With the physical folders correctly named so as to represent each of the 'recordings' I ripped from my CD, I'm off to get tagging!

5.0 Ripping on MacOS

I've already mentioned (see Section 2.2 above) that CD drive detection is problematic on macOS, as the drive simply doesn't exist as far as the operating system is concerned until an audio CD has been inserted. That lack of auto-detection means you need to get familiar with the command diskutil list which will produce output similar to this:

The disk that lists “CD_DA” items is, indeed, your CD optical device: in my case, that's /dev/disk4. You must convert that name into a raw device equivalent: that's done by sticking an 'r' on the front of the device name. So, if my optical drive is /dev/disk4, I must tell Semplice (in Miscellaneous menu, Option 1) that my default CD device is /dev/rdisk4.

I also mentioned that there are problems with the automatic detection of correct read offsets if you're using an Apple SuperDrive as your optical device. There's no way around that, I'm afraid: you just have to plug it in temporarily to a non-Apple computer and get that PC to identify the device correctly. Once you know the device identifier, you can manually consult the AccurateRip database to determine the correct read offset for your drive.

The other issue that arises with CD ripping with Semplice on macOS varies, depending on what version of macOS you're using and whether or not you installed Semplice's dependencies using Homebrew or MacPorts. If you used MacPorts on a fairly ancient version of macOS, you're probably in good shape: the cdparanoia software used to perform the actual ripping from CD comes down and is installed as, indeed, as cdparanoia. If you use Homebrew, however, then you may well find it is installed in a way that makes the executable get called cd-paranoia: it's one of the more irritating name changes I've come across! Semplice tries to work around this by creating a soft-link called 'cdparanoia' that points to the cd-paranoia executable. It ought to work out of the box, but if it fails horribly, hunt around your system to find out what the executable is actually called and where it's installed (typing which cdparanoia or which cd-paranoia can help). Semplice always runs “cdparanoia”, so a judicious use of aliases or softlinks to 'create' something that looks like that name but actually points to the real executable might be needed.

The only other problem Semplice has with ripping on macOS is one of permissions: it will always produce pop-ups saying 'Semplice needs access to removable drives' and similar security alerts. I know of no way to suppress these warnings, so just get ready to click 'Allow' multiple times as they appear.

| Back to Semplice Home Page |

semripsacd

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-01-19T13:21:15+00:00

Ripping SACDs

1.0 Introduction

SACDs were invented around the turn of the Millenium: they were meant to be the next big thing in home audio, with multichannel support and 'high resolution' audio data, far surpassing the 44,100Hz sampling rate and 16-bit depth of the original ('standard') audio CD. Unfortunately, the Internet came along, everyone started streaming their music and SACDs promptly stopped being made in quantity around 2009. They clung on in classical music circles, however, and today new classical releases on SACD are not rare.

Without getting into audiophile arguments, I'm just going to state that no human ear is actually capable of telling the difference between a standard audio CD and the exact same recording in SACD high resolution: if you are very young or very exceptional, you might be able to hear signals with frequencies higher than the maximum 20,000Hz of standard CDs, but it's vanishingly unlikely… especially given the median age of classical music listeners, whose high frequencies will have left them by their thirties at best. However, when record companies were producing classical music SACDs, they would often re-master their old recordings -and if you compare an old standard CD recording to its re-mastered SACD equivalent, then you very likely will hear a big improvement. It's not the extra bits or the higher sampling frequency of the SACD audio signal you are hearing, but the efforts of the recording engineers who are re-working their old recordings. Obviously, if you are into multi-channel audio (I'm not: I've only got two ears!) then that aspect of SACDs will make them attractive to you, in their own right, too.

What I'm trying to say, briefly, is: there is no reason for an audiophile to choose SACD over CD if the masterings are identical on the two delivery formats. But if you want multi-channel or if you want to obtain the latest re-mastering of an old recording, then SACD may well be something you are interested in.

Ripping SACD data from a physical SACD disk is, however, not trivially easy as it is for standard CDs: specialist hardware and software is needed. In particular, you can only read the SACD layer of an SACD disk in a special player that has an appropriate laser pickup: these days, we call them Blu-ray players. So you'll need one of those …and it can't be just any old Blu-ray player, either. It has to be one of a certain select group of models that are known to permit SACD ripping. Once you own the right Blu-ray player, you need to obtain special software to put it into 'server' mode, whereby it can share the contents of its disk tray over the home network. Getting the player to use that software in the right way and actually act as a server… well, that's a battle all by itself! But if you manage it, then you need some software running on a 'client' PC that talks to the Blu-ray player and rips the data off its disk, over the network, onto your PC's hard disk. It's only this last point that Semplice Version 2 can help with: it provides a simple interface that lets you 'point' to a suitable Blu-ray player that has already been put into 'server mode' and then Semplice will do the audio-grabbing. All the other stuff that has to happen before SACDs can be ripped is something you have to do for yourself and get right before Semplice can cover the last mile.

Accordingly, you should read my independent article on ripping SACDs before you go any further. It explains the sorts of Blu-ray players that will work; it talks you through the preparation of a USB drive with special software that will make the player act as a server; it walks you through the networking shenanigans needed to make a laptop or PC able to talk to the player. It then goes on to talk about the sacd_extract software that can be used to grab the SACD data off the player, over the network: it's only this last part of the process that Semplice Version 2 puts lipstick on, providing a friendly wrapper around what otherwise would be a command-line horror show!

This part of the Semplice Version 2 user manual therefore assumes that you have a suitable Blu-ray player, suitably configured and connectable over the network. You should be comfortable with the various operations and keypresses you need to do on the Blu-ray player side of things to put the player into 'server mode'. If you've done all of that, read on!

2.0 The Semplice SACD Ripper Interface

When you take Semplice's Ripping menu Option 4, you are first prompted to point to a folder which will store the ripped SACD data when it eventually comes across the network:

Here, I've navigated my way through to my Desktop folder. You can do that by typing the path out in full in the lower, horizontal panel you see directly above the [OK] button. You can also use the upper panel to point at folders and press the [Spacebar] to select them, repeatedly, until you end up at the right location: the lower panel will automatically update to display the path of the folders you've selected to date. Use whichever of the two folder traversal mechanisms you are most comfortable with. However you do it, the selected folder will be where Semplice creates a sub-folder, into which the SACD rip will be saved. Press [OK] when you're ready to proceed:

You are now asked to type in the IP address of the SACD player. Semplice does some basic checks on what you've typed when you press [OK]. If you've typed a completely invalid IP address (for example, 192.168.137.500), the input box will be cleared and you'll be given another chance to type in something that's valid. If you've typed a valid IP address but it's not an address that's actually in use by anything, there'll be a bit of a pause as Semplice tries to contact the given address, but eventually you'll see this response:

Click OK here and you'll simply be returned to the main Semplice program menu. Only if you type in an IP address that is valid and contactable and which belongs to an SACD player that is sitting there, SACD inserted, ready to serve across the network, will you see this:

In the background here, you'll see the Semplice program running with a message displayed in yellow: “Invoking the SACD ripper in another terminal session'. On the right and in the foreground, you can see that other terminal session has made contact with the SACD player and is busy pulling data across the network from it.

Semplice creates a sub-folder called SACD_ISORIPSwithin the folder you previously specified, and the SACD data being ripped is stored within that, like so:

Here, you see that I specified /home/hjr/Desktop; Semplice has created a /home/hjr/Desktop/SACD_ISORIPS sub-folder, and within that sub-folder, a 'Bach Collegium Japan…' sub-sub-folder has been created. That sub-sub-folder name is dependent on the SACD being ripped: they all come with metadata about the artist and composer (usually very poorly and inconsistently done!) and Semplice just uses that to create a folder whose name matches the disk being ripped.

You'll note that, regardless of the folder name, the SACD data is being stored as a single file, ending in the .iso extension. As I explain at length in my full SACD ripping article, SACDs can be ripped either into multiple per-track DSF files or into a single per-disk ISO file and there is precisely zero difference between them in terms of the amount or quality of the audio data that they end up containing. If you desperately want separate DSF files, you can manually perform the steps I outline in that full article. Semplice has, however, been written only ever to output to the per-disk ISO format and there's no altering that. It is also true that Semplice has been hard-coded only to extract the two-channel stereo signal from an SACD. If you want multi-channel, you should again use the manual way of ripping SACDs explained in my full ripping article.

For now, however, we're done: when the rip reaches 100%, the new terminal session that was opened will close automatically and you'll be returned to the Semplice main menu.

3.0 Post-Rip Processing

Some media players can play SACD ISOs directly. I don't know any that do personally, but I've read reports that DeadBeef can do so. On Windows, allegedly Foobar2000 with appropriate plugins can play them, too. If your music player of choice can cope with playing ISOs, you can skip this next step! For the rest of us however -and, particularly for me using my own Giocoso music player, which definitely cannot play back anything other than FLACs- there's going to be a need to 'translate' the SACD ISO rip into a more conventional audio format. Semplice can help with that, using features in its Audio Processing menu, Option 2 (“Convert between audio formats”).

Before taking that option, however, press W to change the working folder, to be the one where the ISO was ripped to:

Here, you see me having navigated my way right down to the 'Bach Collegium Japan…' sub-folder that we know was the location for the ISO file to be stored. When I press [OK], that sub-folder will now be my 'working folder'. You'll see this reflected in the header-area of the main Semplice program display:

The yellow text there tells me that my 'Working folder' is now, indeed, the Bach Collegium Japan sub-folder created by the ripping process, so I know I'm in business. Once an appropriate working folder has been selected, I can then take the Audio Processing menu, Option 2:

Semplice can handle eight different audio formats as inputs, but it will only display as options on this dialogue ones it finds in your current working folder. In my case, therefore, only the ISO - High resolution lossless is shown.

Your job is simply to make sure the 'ISO - High resolution lossless' item is highlighted and press the [Spacebar]: that puts an asterisk in the brackets next to it which indicates the ISO format has now been selected. Click [OK] to proceed:

Here you are presented with a list of the various audio formats Semplice can output to. In principle, Semplice can output to five different audio formats (FLAC, AIFF, MP3, OGG and WMA). Additionally, there are three different resolution FLAC options: standard CD Audio 16-bit, 44.1KHz; hi-res 24-bit, 88.2KHz; and super hi-res 24-bit 176.4KHz. However, Semplice does not permit the direct conversion of ISOs to a lossy output format, so you won't be offered the chance to convert to MP3, OGG or WMA now. If you want to convert a SACD ISO to OGG, say, you'll have to first convert it to FLAC or AIFF losslessly and then convert those lossless formats to OGG in a second conversion process. This is why my screenshot shows only four lossless format options for converting my ISO directly.

In my case, I'd probably convert my ISO to 'Standard FLAC': that's the same FLAC an ordinary audio CD would output to, using a sample rate of 44,100Hz and a bit-depth of 16 bits. I'd choose that option because it creates perfect sound at relatively small disk space cost. Audiophiles will, of course, want the 24-bit 'high resolution' audio outputs. The 'Hi-res FLAC' option will produce 88.2KHz sample rate, 24-bit FLACs: they'll be about four times the size of a standard FLAC, with no audible improvement in audio quality for 99.99% of mere mortals. The 'Super Hi-res FLAC' option outputs 192KHz FLACs at 24-bit: they'll be eight times the size of a standard FLAC, and will again contain nothing that ordinary ears will ever be able to discern differently from the standard FLAC option. So, if you have 'golden ears', feel free to output to one or other of these higher resolution options; people of my age will do perfectly fine with standard FLACs! Remember: the point of ripping from an SACD was to get to the re-mastered audio, rather than the ordinary CD data, which was probably lifted from an old mastering. Whether you now output to standard, high or bonkers resolution FLAC will make no difference to you hearing that re-mastered version. It's purely a matter of how much disk space you want to throw away on the enterprise.

For the record, most SACDs claim to be mastered to the DSD64 standard, and though it's difficult to be precise about it because the technologies are so different, that's generally thought to be equivalent to 88.2KHz FLACs. If you are ripping an SACD (or converting a downloaded ISO) that claims to be DSD128, DSD256 or DSD512, then those are usually thought to be best represented by 192KHz FLACs.

Anyway: my snarky comments about audiophiles aside, you pick whatever flavour of FLAC you feel happiest with: Semplice can handle all three output formats with equal ease. But for me, I'm sticking to the standard FLAC output, so I press [Spacebar] when that option is highlighted and an asterisk appears next to it, to indicate it's been selected. I then press [OK]. A short message appears saying to 'press any key to start' …and when I do press a key, this happens:

If you see this message, it's because you're missing an important piece of necessary software, installation instructions for which I'll discuss separately in Section 4 below. The software is called sacd and is something that Semplice usually automates the installation of during its own installation process. So, if you see this message, something went wrong with Semplice's cunning attempts to install sacd for you: you'll then need to install it yourself, if you want this ISO conversion capability to work. As I say, see Section 4 below for instructions on how to do that. (Note that macOS works differently and uses different SACD conversion software which Semplice will always install correctly for you).

For now, I'm going to assume Semplice has successfully installed sacd during its own installation process and, if that's the case, when you pressed that 'any key to start', this would have happened instead:

First, you get a little message in yellow at the bottom of the screen to say that the ISO is being split. Were you to visit the rip folder in your file manager as this is going on, you'd see something like this:

You'll see in this screenshot that the ISO file is still there, all 2.8GB of it… but it's now accompanied by a bunch of WAV files. These are lossless per-track files that are being extracted out of the ISO. That process can take quite a while, so be patient. When it's complete, the Semplice program display will change to this:

…which again tells you in yellow, at the bottom of the screen, that the WAVS are being converted into whatever flavour of output FLAC you previously selected (in my case, standard ones). That can also take a minute or more to complete, but once it has you'd see this back in the original rip folder:

Now you see all the files are 16-bit FLACs (if you'd picked a higher resolution output, there would be a '-24' embedded in the file names). You'll notice that the WAVs have all been deleted: this happens entirely automatically and is behaviour you cannot alter. They were merely intermediate files, produced as a necessity whilst the transition from per-CD ISO to per-track FLACs was being made. They serve no purpose once the FLACs are in existence and so are deleted immediately the conversion process ends. However, though the screenshot above does not show this, the original ISO is not deleted. It is 'the source of truth' for this audio, of course, and so it is left there on disk, in case you decide to convert to a higher resolution FLAC after all, or in case you just want to keep the ISO around as well as the FLACs.

Anyway: at this point, you now have FLACs produced from an SACD, playable by pretty much any and every music-playing software in existence! Of course, those FLACs won't have any meaningful metadata within them, so the next step into getting these new FLACs into a catalogue-able and listen-able state is to tag them up with the best metadata you can muster: but that's something I'll cover in the tagging section of this manual.

Please note that the conversion process on macOS is slightly different from that described above for Linux. Rather than output to .WAVs, the macOS conversion process produces intermediate .DSF files which are then converted onto your choice of output format before then being deleted. Additional sub-folders within your SACD_RIPS folder will also automatically be created, though your finished FLAC or AIFF output files will end up being found in the same folder your ISO is stored in.

4.0 Installing Sacd

Note: this section of the documentation does not apply to Semplice running on macOS, which uses a different software stack to decode SACD ISOs to that used on Linux.

Semplice makes an effort to install all its software dependencies automatically, including the sacd program that is needed to convert ISO files ripped from SACDs into WAV files (which Semplice can then convert into other audio formats, of course). Unfortunately, sacd is seldom in the standard software repositories for most Linux distros …and even when it is, it's often the wrong one, so installing it is better handled as a matter of downloading its source code and then, literally, compiling that into a usable binary executable. That sounds troublesome -and it can certainly be a messy sort of operation if you're not used to it! That's why Semplice tries to automate this compilation process during its own initial installation. You can test whether Semplice's efforts worked by simply opening a command prompt and typing the command: sacd. You should see a response similar to this:

If you see that sort of usage help text, it means sacd is installed correctly and functioning properly: you need read no further in this section, therefore!

Try as it might, however, Semplice cannot guarantee that its sacd installation efforts will succeed. If they don't for one reason or another, you will have seen above (Section 3) that subsequent attempts to use Semplice to convert an ISO ripped from an SACD will fail with a warning message about sacd not being available on your PC. If that happens to you and you want to correct it, these are the steps you'd need to take, though the required steps will depend on the distro you're using:

Arch-based Distros

On Arch, Endeavour, Manjaro, Garuda and similar distros, you can install sacd from the Arch User Repository (AUR), using a command such as:

yay -S sacd

If you're using pamac or another front-end to the AUR, substitute in an equivalent command as appropriate. Obviously, you will have needed to install all the software necessary to compile packages when installing yay or pamac, so that shouldn't be an issue for you now.

Other Distros

Other distros will first need to be made into platforms that can compile source code into executable binaries. The commands will be distro-dependent, but these usually do the trick:

Debian: sudo apt install git cmake binutils pkg-config build-essential python3 python3-dev
Ubuntu: sudo apt install git cmake binutils pkg-config build-essential python3 python3-dev
Fedora: sudo dnf install git cmake binutils pkg-config gcc kernel-devel python python-devel
OpenSuse: sudo zypper install -t pattern devel_basis ….followed by…. sudo zypper install cmake python python-devel git

Be aware that some distros seem not to know of a package called 'python3-dev', but will install the necessary software if you substitute in the name 'python3-is-dev' instead. Assuming you get this bunch of software installed, you can move on to downloading the sacd software itself and compiling and installing it, with the following commands:

cd
git clone https://github.com/Sound-Linux-More/sacd.git
cd sacd
make
sudo make install

The first 'cd' command is simply there to make sure that all this stuff happens inside your own $HOME folder. The sacd software should be downloaded to a sub-folder that will be created for you automatically, called 'sacd', by the second command listed here. You then simply move into that sub-folder (with the second 'cd' command) and issue the 'make' command to compile the software. The final command copies the compiled executable into the /usr/bin folder, so sudo privileges are required at that point.

And that should be that: once sacd has been installed, you can clear up the debris left behind from this entire build process by issuing the commands:

cd
rm -rf sacd

These commands merely remove the source code folder, not the installed, compiled executables. If you type the command sacd at this point, you should see the display of advice on how to run the program properly shown in the first screenshot of this section.

Note that on Ubuntu 22.10, I then had to issue one extra command to make the operating system aware of where, precisely, all the shared files that sacd depends on were actually copied to: that distro seems to build things into /usr/lib64 rather than vanilla /usr/lib, and that makes sacd itself think the files it depends on are missing. A simple sudo ldconfig /usr/lib64 issued before you issue the first 'make' command will fix that problem, however. Any distro in the Ubuntu family is likely to be affected by the same problem, of course (and fixed by the same fix!)

If this all seems a lot of a palaver to go through for just getting to listen to some classical music, remember: you wanted to swim in the sea of SACD! If you don't do SACD ripping, you don't need to do any of this… and if you do, you only have to do this once!

5.0 Conclusion

Summing all of the above up, therefore: you need to do prior setup and configuration of your Blu-Ray player, as per my full article, before you even attempt to use the SACD ripping functionality in Semplice. Once that is done and your player is in 'server mode', offering the contents of its disk tray over the network, Semplice's SACD ripping option provides a convenient front-end to connect a client to the player and start extracting the stereo SACD audio data from the SACD disk.

ISOs produced by this ripping process can sometimes be played directly, depending on your choice of player: but if you want to add metadata or play the music in software that does not support ISOs, you'll need to convert them to a more conventional audio format, such as FLAC.

Semplice's standard Audio Processing menu, Option 2 will do that for you: you can only convert an ISO to a lossless FLAC or AIFF format, however. You can choose one of three possible output resolutions for your FLAC outputs.

Converting an ISO to a FLAC (or AIFF) takes a lot of disk space because intermediate WAV files (or DSF ones on macOS) are created to make the conversion process work. These intermediate files are always deleted automatically, however. The ISO files themselves are never deleted automatically: that's left as a manual exercise for you to perform once you are happy with the FLACs produced

| Back to Semplice Home Page |

semsuper

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-01-21T13:30:12+00:00

SuperFLACs

1.0 Introduction

Back at the beginning of January 2021, I wrote a blog post in which I deplored the tendency of classical music to be presented (on CDs, the radio and so on) as a series of 'tracks', rather than as a 'whole composition'. I pointed out back then that 78s didn't come with 'tracks' (though they were short-playing enough probably not to need any!), and that quite a lot of 33⅓ rpm LPs also didn't. Tracks didn't really become a 'thing' until the invention of the CD -and they are (in my view) totally inappropriate for classical music, anyway.

By this I mean: Beethoven didn't write four separate 'things' he threw together to make a symphony. He wrote a single symphony that happens to be comprised of four distinct, but related, movements. Accordingly, I would want my music collection to have a single 'item' for 'Symphony No. 5'. I might well be cognizant of the fact that it has 'sections' within it with names such as 'Allegro con brio' or 'Andante con moto', whose existence might be acknowledged by some piece of logical metadata; but I certainly wouldn't want to organise my physical music structures around the existence of movements. It's a bit like quarks in physics: they have no separate existence and cannot (should not, in the case of classical music!) be accessible individually. Those are highly personal opinions, of course: you're welcome to disagree and to listen to your music however you deem best for you!

Apart from such 'metaphysical' opinions about the non-tracky nature of classical music, there are practical matters to deal with, too. Computers store digital music on some sort of disk storage; disks require a file system; most file systems perform better when you present them with a few large files, rather than with lots of small ones. Therefore, turning a 4-track symphony into a single file called 'Symphony No. 5' is better for your file system than making it store 4 separate files, one per movement, on it. In the case of a Handel oratorio, you might even have over 80 or 90 separate 'tracks' on a double CD set, so there the advantage into storing the work as a single 'work' and not 90 separate sub-works is even more pronounced.

Another practical reason for thinking in this way is that some digital music players cannot do 'gapless playback', where one movement is supposed to play seamlessly after the previous one ends, in attacca style. If you present such a player with a single FLAC which is comprised of all the music that the four separate tracks on a CD contained, then there are no transitions between different digital files to be managed -and thus even players incapable of doing proper gapless playback now cope just fine, because they've only got a single file to worry about.

It is for these various reasons that Semplice offers you the ability to combine or merge separate per-track FLACs into single, per-composition “SuperFLACs”. The name 'SuperFLAC' is one I kind of cooked up, I'm afraid, and has no real validity outside these pages! It simply means 'a single large FLAC file that contains concatenated audio from multiple, individual source files, with an embedded cuesheet that describes where each source file began and ended'. Four files, each representing different movements of a symphony, are thus combined into a self-describing single file which contains the music for the entire symphony.

Semplice also offers you the chance to split a SuperFLAC back out into its component per-track files. To do this, it simply reads the embedded cuesheet (which describes when each original source file stopped and started) and uses the stop/start times to cut the SuperFLAC up into smaller pieces. A single file containing all the music for an entire symphony can thus be broken out into the four files, each one representing a separate movement, which were on the original source CD, should you ever want or need to do so.

Finally, if you buy your digital music in the form of FLAC downloads, you may occasionally come across vendors that supply the download in the form of a single giant FLAC, but with an accompanying external cuesheet which describes where each component 'track' stops and starts within the single file but the cuesheet itself is a separate physical file on your file system. Semplice therefore also has the ability to split a single FLAC out into component tracks based on the contents of such an external cuesheet.

All these capabilities are made available under the 'SuperFLAC' menu option in Semplice. You do not need to have used any other Semplice menu options (with one exception which I'll describe in Section 2 below) before using any of these SuperFLAC options, but you do need to have launched Semplice from within a folder full of FLAC files in the first place, or to have tapped the W key to set a working folder that contains a bunch of FLACs.

2.0 Configuration Options

In the Semplice configuration file, there's only one parameter that controls how the SuperFLAC functionality behaves:

The parameter Auto-delete per-track FLACs after SuperFLAC creation controls whether or not source files are deleted after they've been combined into a SuperFLAC. The default is 'no', and that's the setting I'll employ in what follows, too.

3.0 Creating SuperFLACs

Let us step through a worked example. Suppose you have a folder containing FLACs ripped from a CD, like this:

We see the folder consists of music belonging to a single composition (Britten's Mont Juic suite), and has been ripped from a CD in the form of four separate tracks or movements. Semplice is going to be asked to combine these four individual files into a single SuperFLAC that contains all the music for the suite in just one file -but with an embedded cuesheet that describes when each movement within the single file stops and starts.

I therefore launch Semplice from within this folder, or tap W to set this folder as the working folder, and take the SuperFLAC menu, Option 1 to merge these tracks into a SuperFLAC. The program immediately responds:

The 'Merging files…' text and spinner indicates that work is being done. If you were to watch progress in your file manager, you might see something like this:

That is to say: any embedded album or cover art found in the first FLAC in the folder is written out to the folder as a file called 'albumart.jpg'. An analysis of all the FLACs in the folder is then performed, working out their durations: that information is written into a text file called cuesheet.cue. Finally, Semplice starts concatenating the per-track FLACs in the folder into a new FLAC which has a '-superflac' temporary name: it's this part of the proceedings that (a) can take quite some time; and (b) means that you temporarily need double the space to house both the per-track FLACs and the -superflac equivalent. Incidentally, it's because the main part of the file name for that '-superflac' FLAC is derived from the ALBUM tag found in the first FLAC's metadata that, if you haven't tagged up your files at all before attempting to create a SuperFLAC such that the ALBUM tag is empty, you'd see this error message:

If you use Semplice's own tagging menu to add tags to files, it's the COMPOSITION tag that you want to fill in at this point. Ideally, however, you'd create SuperFLACs after carefully tagging the per-track FLACs, not before… so this shouldn't be an issue that affects you!

Anyway: once the concatenation process is complete, you'll see this message:

Here, you are prompted to delete the per-track FLACs that have now been merged into a new SuperFLAC (provided you haven't answered 'yes' to the configuration option about auto-deleting the source files after a merge, of course). You can say 'no' here, in which case control returns to the SuperFLAC menu and the folder on disk will be left containing both the original per-track FLACs and the new per-composition SuperFLAC: creating SuperFLACs is a non-destructive process, right up until the moment you choose for it not to be!

If you say 'yes' at this point, however, then the per-track FLACs listed in the dialog are deleted from disk and the SuperFLAC is renamed to remove the '-superflac' designation:

As you can see, any PDFs or other files that might have been in the folder remain in the folder: the merging process only ever affects FLACs, nothing else.

You can see from this, I hope, that creating SuperFLACs is not exactly difficult!

4.0 Checking the Metadata

If we now took Tagging menu, Option 7 to review the metadata associated with the FLACs in the working folder, we'd see something like this:

This is the first part of the metadata, at least: you can see from the '58%' indicator that the data scrolls off at the bottom. We'll see that in a second. For now, note that all the 'standard' tags are present in the new SuperFLAC: composer, album, genre, performer and so on. Where did that data come from, given the FLAC we're looking at has only just been created? From the first of the original FLACs. If that was tagged correctly, its tags are taken to 'stand for the whole' and are thus saved and applied back to the SuperFLAC once it's been created. More interesting, perhaps, is Tag [:10]: CUESHEET… because that's the start of the embedded cuesheet which describes the internal contents of the new SuperFLAC. Let's take a look at its main contents, since we can only see the first line of it in that screenshot above:

The cuesheet is constructed with a modest amount of metadata description (ARTIST, PERFORMER, FILE… and so on). Then there's the crucial stuff: each 'component' track is listed in turn, with a start time only. You have to look at the next track's start time to work out how long this track lasts. For example: Track 02 is said to start at 2 minutes 56 seconds (and a bit); Track 03 at 4 minutes 42 seconds. Therefore, we can deduce that track 2 lasts for 4:42-2:56 = 1 minute, 44 seconds. Compare that to the CD track listing:

…and we're pretty close. The difference between 1:42 and 1:44 is a bit of lead-in plus a bit of rounding, mostly on the part of the record company when printing the CD booklet! Absolutely no music signal (including silence) is actually lost when creating SuperFLACs, put it that way.

Each of the tracks listed in the embedded cuesheet can be thought of as a 'virtual track' within the SuperFLAC: we know when it starts and we can work out how long it lasts. Some music players can actually use that data to present a SuperFLAC to you as if it was literally a bunch of individual FLACs sitting on your hard disk:

That's the DeadBeef music player (stupid name, excellent player!) displaying four 'tracks' and allowing each of them to be selected and played individually, if that's what you wanted to do (and again, note that DeadBeef has done its own maths and rounded to achieve different apparent timings again: the differences don't represent anything real or audible). Alternatively, of course, you could play this SuperFLAC in my own Giocoso music player (excellent name, excellent player!):

…and this makes no attempt to display or play tracks, but is simply going to play the entire piece as a single composition. The choice is yours: creating a SuperFLAC doesn't mean you can never access individual movements again in the future. It just means they are not front-and-centre in your way of thinking about music unless you want them to be.

5.0 Splitting SuperFLACs

Having experimented with SuperFLACs, you may decide that you don't particularly like them and wish to reverse the merging process that created them. That's easy to do, fortunately. It's what Semplice's SuperFLAC menu, Option 2 will do for you. As usual, before taking this menu option, you either need to have launched Semplice from within a folder containing a SuperFLAC you wish to dismantle, or tap the letter W to set as a working folder a directory that contains a SuperFLAC.

Let's start, once more, with this state of affairs:

That's a single, 50MB SuperFLAC, plus a PDF booklet that is irrelevant for current purposes. When I take the SuperFLAC menu, Option 2, this immediately happens:

The 'splitting masterfile asunder' message appears at the bottom of the program display area, along with a spinner to indicate that work is being performed: as is to be expected, if you were splitting a SuperFLAC of Wagner's Ring, you could expect to be sat watching the spinner for quite a long time! For smaller compositions, much less time needs to elapse -but be patient anyway! One way or another, you'll eventually see this:

Click [OK] or press [Enter] to dismiss that message and you'll be returned to the SuperFLAC menu once more. And that's pretty much all there is to un-SuperFLACing a SuperFLAC!

If we check the results of this work in our file manager, we'd initially see this:

The first thing we spot is that the original 50MB SuperFLAC is still present on disk. Semplice never deletes a SuperFLAC it has been asked to split: that means you need double the disk space, at least temporarily, of course. It also means that, again, Semplice is trying hard to be non-destructive when doing these FLAC manipulations: if you don't like the result of the de-merger, you've always got the original SuperFLAC to fall back on. The second thing to note is that a new sub-folder has been created for us, called 'split'. If we drill down into that, we see this:

…and now we have four individual FLACs once more. You'll notice that they've all been named nicely and that all appear to have embedded album art (given that the file manager icon for each file is a representation of the cover art for this work). That's all been extracted from the original SuperFLAC and then re-applied back to the per-track files. Again, we can check that with Semplice's Tagging menu, Option 7:

I've positioned things here mid-scroll: Track 1's metadata is disappearing off the top of the screen, with Track 2's coming in to view from below. You can see that the 'canonical' tags are all there, safe and sound, right down to the existence of 'good album art'.

One word of warning, however: Semplice's Audio Processing menu, Option 1 can be used to perform a 'volume boost' on a set of FLACs, which might be supplied at lower-then-maximum volume by the record company for one reason or another. If you have set the configuration option Apply real or metadata audio boost to metadata, then the volume boost consists of adding a set of REPLAYGAIN_ metadata tags to your FLAC files (rather than performing a physical volume boost that modifies the FLAC audio signal directly). Those tags will survive a merge and will be copied across to the resulting SuperFLAC. If, however, you subsequently split a SuperFLAC with REPLAYGAIN tags, the resulting per-track FLACs will not have their REPLAYGAIN tags preserved. You will need to perform a fresh metadata volume boost for the correct ReplayGain values to be re-computed and applied to each track separately.

6.0 Splitting with External Cuesheets

The SuperFLAC splitting or de-merging feature is primarily intended to work when the cuesheet describing the 'virtual tracks' making up a SuperFLAC is embedded or stored within the SuperFLAC, as was described in Section 4 above. However, it can also work on files which only have an external cuesheet. Sometimes, you may purchase a single FLAC download, accompanied by an external cuesheet, like this one:

Here you see the 250MB+ FLAC accompanied by a standalone .cue file. If you launch Semplice from within such a folder (or use the W key to set it as the working folder) and attempt to split the FLAC using the SuperFLAC menu, Option 2, this happens:

…which is exactly the same as what happens when the cuesheet is embedded! The 'splitting masterfile…' message appears and is eventually followed by a confirmation message. Looking back in the file manager, we see:

That tells us the split per-track FLACs are sitting in the 'split' sub-folder, as usual. It also tells us that the cuesheet has been deleted from disk. This is not a drama however: it's disappeared off the disk because, as part of the split process, Semplice actually embedded it within the SuperFLAC! You can look in any metadata viewer and see it there:

So that's the metadata for the original single FLAC file: it has a CUESHEET tag, clicking on which (in Kid3 metadata editor) reveals its full contents. Back in the file manager, if you were to inspect the 'split' sub-folder, you'd see:

The per-track FLACs are there, in good health. Generally, you will find that the metadata embedded into these per-track files won't be very extensive, because the source cuesheet is usually missing a lot of usable information. However, that's easily rectified by changing Semplice's working folder to the 'split' sub-folder and working your way through the Tagging menu!

Anyway, the point is: Semplice's SuperFLAC splitting capability doesn't really care whether the cuesheet driving the split is external or embedded. It will handle either with equal ease.

There are a couple of scenarios where things might not go so smoothly, however. The first one is if the external cuesheet is in a weird format: if Semplice cannot parse it correctly, it will either bomb out with an error, or the split folder it creates will end up not containing anything. There's no real fix for that: it's up to you to obtain a cuesheet that parses correctly because it uses the correct syntax (which is rather convoluted!) One common error I've encountered, however, is that the cuesheet is often prepared by someone who was obviously using Windows. Windows ends lines with a carriage return and a line feed character (CRLF); Linux generally ends lines with simply the LF character; macOS tends to use just the CR one. Some text editors let you swap between the different line endings, so sometimes its enough to find your text editor's line-ending setting and flip it from one to the other and save the resulting change. Here's the option in Kwrite (and Kate), for example:

Most GUI text editors I can think of have equivalent options buried somewhere in their menus!

A second scenario arises where your FLAC contains an embedded cuesheet and the file system has an external cuesheet to hand: the natural question is which one to use when splitting the SuperFLAC? Well, Sempice can't guess, so it asks:

You simply pick one or other of the buttons and hit [Enter] when the one you like is highlighted: Semplice then splits using the selected cuesheet, ignoring the other.

A final situation I could just about envisage might also arise: what if your working folder has two FLACs in it? Well, Semplice's seen that one coming, too:

I mean, the whole definitional point of a SuperFLAC is that it is one FLAC which contains within itself 'virtual tracks': it literally makes no sense to have multiple FLACs each wanting to be treated as a SuperFLAC! Of course, the fix at this point is to put each of the FLACs into its own sub-folder and split each in turn there.

Other than these edge cases, however, I hope you can see how easy it is to join and split FLACs and SuperFLACs at will: you have immense flexibility in how you want your digital music files to reside physically on disk, basically!

7.0 Editing Cuesheets

I was actually a bit dubious about adding this capability to Semplice at all, because cuesheets, as previously mentioned, have a very precise and subtle syntax that it's easy to mangle… but there have been many occasions on which I've tagged a recording and its separate track-FLACs as, say, 'Symphony No. 5 (Bernstein - 1967)' and then converted the nicely-tagged track-FLACs into a lovely SuperFLAC… only to then read the CD booklet and notice that the recording was actually made in 1968. I've also been known to tag things as 'Bernstien' and not notice the typo until after the SuperFLAC has been created! In the old days of Semplice Version 1, the way to fix these sorts of typos was, potentially, to split the SuperFLAC, re-tag the tracks, then re-create the SuperFLAC, which was a pain. So, on the understanding that the capability is there just to tweak little bits of a cuesheet with minor typo corrections, the Semplice SuperFLAC menu Option 3 has been provided.

Take that menu option when the working folder is set to a folder that contains an embedded cuesheet and you'll see this sort of response:

Semplice has, essentially, extracted the embedded cuesheet to a temporary file on disk, called tmp_cuesheet.txt, and presents it to you in the text editor of your choice (configurable in the Miscellaneous menu, Option 1, and set to nano by default). You make the minor textual edits you need to make… and then you save the resulting file. You then have to manually close down the xterm window that launched the editor in the first place. That triggers the write-back of the modified cuesheet into the SuperFLAC so your edits take effect. Here's another screenshot of the same thing, after I've set my editor of choice to Kate:

Again, the way Semplice spawns an xterm window which then itself launches the text editor means that closing this all down is at least a two-stage affair: save the edited text in the editor, using whatever key combinations or mouse clicks are standard for that editor, then close the editor if necessary, then close the xterm window. Only then does control return to Semplice -and only at that point are your edits saved within the SuperFLAC.

I'll stress once more: don't muck about with anything numeric within the cuesheet: track numbers and timings should be considered verboten unless you really know what you're doing. But a mis-typed track title, or a composer's name, or a missed accent on the conductor's first name… fine.

Incidentally, I hope it doesn't need stating, but external cuesheets can be edited at any time by a standard text editor, simply pointed at it on disk. It requires no special abilities, whereas Semplice is entirely concerned with editing embedded cuesheets, which is an entirely different proposition.

8.0 Conclusion

I hope the above has shown you that there are good technical reasons for minimising the number of music files you store on a file system and that there are good 'ideological' reasons for wanting compositions stored as single units which you have to listen to completely, rather than as separate 'bits' which you can pick-and-choose to listen to. To accommodate the need for turning per-track rips into per-composition single file SuperFLACs, Semplice's Option 11 makes merging FLACs together a painless, non-destructive process. The only definitive requirement before creating SuperFLACs is that your source files are tagged with at least an ALBUM tag: that will be used to name the resulting SuperFLAC.

Semplice also provides the ability to split single-file FLACs back out into per-track FLACs, regardless of whether the single-FLAC's 'descriptor' cuesheet is embedded within itself or is stored as an external file. All file-splitting options are, again, non-destructive.

Finally, a cuesheet that's been embedded can now be edited and saved back to the SuperFLAC from whence it came, using Semplice's SuperFLAC menu, Option 3 capabilities.

You may decide never to bother with SuperFLACs and cuesheets, but should you wish to do so, the capabilities are definitely there.

| Back to Semplice Home Page |

semtag

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-01-19T16:26:07+00:00

Tagging FLACs

1.0 Introduction

One of the main reasons for Semplice to exist is its ability to 'tag' FLAC files with metadata describing the contents of the music contained within the FLAC. Semplice's first 9 main menu options are all geared to this end: each option allows you to type mostly free-form text describing the exact nature of the music being catalogued. You can specify its composer, the composition name, the performers on this particular recording… and so on.

Technically speaking, we don't 'tag FLACs': we add 'Vorbis Comments to FLACs' instead… but it amounts to the same thing and this guide will refer to 'tags' and 'tagging' henceforth.

There are a lot of equivalent tagging programs already available to achieve this sort of outcome, of course. Semplice's principle differences from those are: (1) it never fetches any metadata from sources on the Internet, because such sources are always wrong and totally useless; and (2) it talks the language of classical, not 'popular', music. Thus it talks of composers and compositions, not artists, albums or 'tracks'. That doesn't mean Semplice can't be used to tag non-classical music: the program makes no moral or artistic judgments about the FLAC files it is presented with! But the 'fit' of the program interface and the language it uses was definitely with classical music listeners in mind. This emphasis on classical music is also the reason why Semplice cannot and will not tag anything other than FLAC files: it shares this website's philosophy that classical music ought to be listened to in the best possible quality and that, wherever possible, open source software should be used in preference to anything proprietary or platform-specific. Thus, Semplice will not tag MP3s or WMAs, for example.

Semplice is also a child of this website's philosophy on how best to tag classical music, which I'll talk about in more detail below. It will not ever create, for example, a tag for ALBUM ARTIST, because there is simply no equivalent in classical music for 'the guy performing the music on this CD, though he didn't write it or perform it first', which is what that tag is meant to mean in non-classical music circles. All classical music (with the exception of some more contemporary classical music performances) are always performed by the guy who didn't write the music: it tends to be that way when your composers died hundreds of years ago! As another example: this site likes to catalogue a work by its composer -and will store that metadata in the ARTIST tag, because the composer is the primary artist people always have in mind when thinking about classical music. It's Wagner's Götterdämmerung, not Solti's or Böhms; it's Beethoven's Fifth, not Bernstein's… and so on. As I say, I'll discuss this in more detail shortly, but the point to make now is that Semplice's tagging model may not be one you entirely agree with -and, in that case, it's perhaps not the FLAC management tool for you.

One other broad brush feature I'll mention now, too: Semplice's tagging approach is based on a physical ordering of your FLAC files. When it applies the composer tag, for example, it does so to every FLAC it finds in the current folder. When it says 'this is Symphony No. 5', it says that to all the FLACs it can see in the one location. If you've got a folder full of FLACs ripped from a single CD that happened to be of Beethoven's 5th and 1st symphonies, then clearly Semplice's tagging approach is going to be wrong for all the FLACs that belong to the first symphony. Only once you've physically separated Symphony No. 1's files from Symphony No. 5's files does Semplice's 'per folder' tagging strategy work properly. Again, this approach may not please people who think 'what came on the CD' is more important than 'Beethoven wrote this, and he also wrote that', but it's entirely consistent with the way this website thinks digital music files should be properly organised.

With such philosophical quandaries introduced, let's get down and dirty with the business of tagging your FLACs with Semplice!

2.0 The Semplice Tagging Model

I have explained the technical and logical underpinnings for my view on how best to tag classical music files in several previous articles. First, I explained how we can uniquely distinguish 'this recording of that work' from 'that other recording of the same work'. Something that uniquely distinguishes between two pieces of data is called a 'primary key', and I went into some detail about what I believe the correct primary key for classical music is in this article. Having established classical music's primary key, I then went on to explain its practical consequences for the way we tag classical musical digital files. With tongue somewhat firmly in cheek, I declared there were seventeen Axioms of Classical Music Tagging in this separate article.

I recommend you read both those articles now if you haven't already done so. Everything that follows is based on them! Here, though, is a brief summary that is Semplice-specific and is a distillation of what those two articles set out at length.

2.1 Necessary Tags

Semplice considers that there are only 8 tags which are needed for tagging classical music correctly. These are:

ARTIST
ALBUM
COMMENT
GENRE
RECORDING_YEAR
ALBUM_ART
TRACKNUMBER
TITLE

From all these tags, Semplice further believes that, in order to uniquely identify any recording from any other, similar recording, it's necessary to concatenate some of these tags into something called the extended composition name. Essentially this means taking the basic ALBUM tag and adding to it parts of the COMMENT and RECORDING_YEAR tag. Thus, we take 'Symphony No. 5', performed by Leonard Bernstein and recorded in 1983 and create an extended composition name of Symphony No. 5 (Bernstein - 1989). This extended composition name is then written back into the ALBUM tag.

The ARTIST tag is used to store the composer's name. This is because the composer is probably the most important organising idea in classical music: there are five bazillion recordings of Beethoven's fifth symphony… but only one Beethoven, for example. However, there is a very good, practical reason for making ARTIST mean 'Composer' -and that's the fact that nearly every software music player in existence organises its display around the ARTIST tag, whilst very few are even aware that a COMPOSER tag might exist, let alone pay any attention to it as an organising principle if they do spot it.

The GENRE tag is a simple, usually one-word, way of 'chopping up' a composer's output into manageable chunks. Confronted with 1000+ folders of Bach's music, for example, it might be nice to be able to say 'these are cantatas; those are violin concerti; the masses and oratorios are over… there' and so on. More fundamentally, too, it's useful to be able to characterise the type of composition being catalogued, so that you can later search and filter by that 'type'. Instead of saying 'play me some Haydn', wouldn't it be useful to say 'play me a Haydn mass' or 'play me a Haydn symphony'? The assignment of a GENRE tag gives you that future functionality.

The recording year is actually stored in a tag sometimes called DATE and sometimes YEAR (different programs tend to use either term interchangeably). Semplice likes to use DATE, but it still is meant to store only a year in which a specific recording was made.

A good, visual identity for your digital music files is very important in helping you to navigate your way around them, mentally and practically. CDs come with elaborate cover art (mostly: we won't mention the Beauty Farm recordings!) precisely to help establish a strong visual identity for this performance of a work as compared to that one. Semplice therefore wants to embed album art files within the FLACs they are associated with (rather than, say, be left as separate files in the folder, called 'folder.jpg', as Windows tends to want to do, for example). If you point Semplice to a piece of album art to use to tag a FLAC with, it will dynamically resize it to be as big as possible (without being pointlessly huge) and will store it in something called a 'Picture Block' (which can be thought of as an ALBUM_ART tag).

Finally, movements within a composition need to be uniquely identified. The whole thing might be called 'Symphony No. 5', for example, but we need to know this FLAC is the 1st movement called 'Allegro con brio' and that FLAC is actually movement 4, also called 'Allegro con brio'. Since the names of the movements are identical, we need a 'track number' to distinguish them from each other. Thus Semplice will first prompt for a 'starting track number', and then tag each file found within the same folder with numbers starting at that initial number and incrementing in steps of 1 thereafter. The auto-sequence is then stored in the TRACKNUMBER tag.

I've already hinted that the TITLE tag should be used to store the identifying name of each movement in a symphony or other instrumental work, which will usually be a tempo indication. If you're tagging an opera, though, then the TITLE might be the first few words sung at the start of that track. In any event, Semplice will prompt you to supply track titles and you are free to type as much or as little text as you like at that point. Whatever data is stored in the TITLE tag, plus the TRACKNUMBER tag, will become the file's physical file name. Thus, if you've tagged a file that was initially called (say) Track01.flac with TRACKNUMBER=1 and TITLE=Allegro con spirito, Semplice will automatically re-name the file to be 01 - Allegro con spirito.flac. It does this because of Axiom 17: your music collection's logical organisation should match, as much as possible, it's physical structure -not for any reason of blind ideology, but for the very practical reason that software music players will organise things by tags (i.e., the logical data you've supplied) but your operating system's file manager will display things by physical attributes (folder names, file names and so on). Therefore, it's practically useful that what you see in one tool should match up with the way the other tool displays the same stuff.

So, those are the eight “must haves”. Semplice also creates two “possibly nice to have, but likely to be pointless” tags, too! The first is PERFORMER. This is prompted for explicitly, so there's nothing to stop you typing anything you like in here, but it's intended to be the full name of the one person making this recording unique and distinct from any other. For example, in the COMMENT tag, you may type Leonard Bernstein, New York Philharmonic Orchestra. The idea is that, in such a case, your PERFORMER tag will be just “Leonard Bernstein”. It's simply a textual simplification: if COMMENT is “x,y,z”, can you be sure to filter on just “z” at the end of the list when subsequently searching for music to play? By separating “z” out into its own tag, you can, regardless of the rest of the COMMENT tag and its possible punctuation horrors. Secondly, Semplice creates a COMPOSER tag without telling you. It does so by merely copying the contents of the ARTIST tag, meaning that tag data is, essentially, pointlessly duplicated. The purpose of such pointless repetition is simply that some music players expose, filter, search and order by COMPOSER, so having something in such a tag seemed useful at the time. It's a bit of an historical cling-on, and I would neither worry nor rely on it too much!

One final tag is always created by Semplice: a TAGDATE one, that stores within it the current date, represented as the number of seconds since the start of the Unix epoch (January 1st, 1970). It's a house-keeping detail that is of no practical consequence or importance, but if you ever need to convert the large number of seconds it displays back into a human-readable date/timestamp, you can plug it into various online converters.

2.2 Custom Tags

In flagrant violation of my own Axiom 1, Semplice optionally permits you to add a further 9 'custom tags' to your FLACs, so that it becomes possible to record the name of the tea lady during the recording sessions, the key signature of the recorded work, or the name of the recording engineer, for example. More seriously, some people seem to want to record the CD catalogue number or the record company producing the recording and so on. You'll never subsequently be able to use such tags for anything, of course, because most music playing programs won't know to look for these 'non-standard' tags, let alone know what to do with them if they read them correctly. That you find a piece of information crucial doesn't mean anyone else will! So, though accessing the custom metadata will be a problem, at least the data will be there inside your FLACs.

You assign names or prompts to the custom tags you are sure you want to use:

Once you save your configuration file with these custom tag names configured, the next time you tag a set of FLACs, one of the screens you'll see is this:

The names previously configured are now used as prompts, so you can type appropriate information against each (or any) of them.

In summary, then: Semplice will always prompt for the eight 'essential' tags; it can optionally be configured to prompt for up to 9 other 'custom' tags; and two tags are always created from the data supplied for the 'essential eight' that basically repeat already-provided data for later ease of use in search, display and filtering. A final TAGDATE is also hard-coded into your FLACs.

3.0 Manual v Auto-Tagging

There are two basic approaches you can use with Semplice to tag your FLACs: walk through a wizard-like interface that prompts for recording-wide tags, then track-specific ones; or visit separate menus where each specific component of FLAC tagging is handled separately. Semplice calls this 'Auto-tagging' versus 'Manual tagging'.

Auto-tagging is accomplished by taking the Tagging menu, Option 1. It prompts you to supply necessary tags into a series of forms, such as:

…where Composer, Composition, Distinguishing Artist, Genre and Recording Year can all be specified in one go. After that, you get to specify the entire cast and crew representing the performing artists for this recording, followed by track-specific titles, such as:

When you've supplied all the appropriate metadata, Semplice then, as part of auto-tagging, re-numbers all the tracks starting from 1 and also embeds any cover art that it finds in the same folder as the FLACs, squaring up and resizing the artwork if it needs to.

Manual tagging achieves much the same thing but takes five menu options to do so! Each of the Tagging menu, Options 2 to 6 gives direct access to one of the tagging forms that the auto-tagging wizard makes you step through to reach. Manual v. Auto tagging is not an either/or proposition, however: the two complement each other nicely. The auto-tagging wizard gets things mostly right, most of the time, and in a way that ensures you don't forget to supply crucial bits of information. The manual tagging options let you swiftly edit or correct previous tagging efforts, or to achieve particular tagging results that the auto-wizard isn't designed to achieve. Use both approaches interchangeably, therefore.

4.0 Tagging in Detail...

So now you know what data Semplice's tagging options prompt for and where it saves it inside each FLAC. You also know the difference between auto and manual tagging methods. With all that in mind, here are links to detailed walk-throughs of the auto and manual tagging menu options, plus some other menu options not directly related to tagging at all:

| Back to Semplice Home Page |

semtagauto

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-01-22T11:08:44+00:00

Auto-Tagging

1.0 Introduction

Auto-tagging is a wizard-driven tagging process. You are prompted to supply in turn metadata about:

Recording-wide data, such as: Composer, Composition, Distinguishing Artist, Genre, Recording Year and Performing Artists
Recording-wide custom tags, if they've been turned on and configured
Per-track titles, unique to each FLAC

Once that metadata has been supplied, the wizard will then automatically and without prompting:

Re-number and re-name all FLACs, starting at 1 (thus, a file called 07 - Allegro.flac might end up being called 01 - Allegro.flac, for example, and internally have a TRACK NUMBER=1 tag)
Look for a JPG, JPEG or PNG file within the same folder as the FLACs being tagged, and embed the first such graphics file discovered automatically within each track as album or cover art
Apply a 'cleaning' process to a FLAC's complete set of metadata, removing any 'non-canonical' tags and ensuring only the 'canonical' ones remain, in a meaningful order

The auto-tagging wizard will generally try to prompt you for data in the relevant fields: the question then is simply where Semplice sources those metadata prompts from? There are three possible sources:

From the FLAC files themselves, by reading their existing metadata and re-displaying it as a prompt</li>
From the physical folder characteristics within which the FLACs being tagged are currently housed</li>
From metadata supplied in an immediately prior tagging session</li>

If you were using Semplice to edit a little typo in one particular tag, for example, it would be madness to start with a completely clean slate and have you type every tag back in from scratch! In that circumstance, it would surely make more sense to read all the existing metadata from the FLACs, display that to you on a nice form and let you slightly adjust the one tag that needs fixing: hence, the first item in the above list of sources. If you've just purchased some digital music from an online source, however, the chances are that reading existing metadata will be an exercise in futility: if the FLACs contain any metadata at all, it's likely to be useless. For this reason, if you tell Semplice to source its prompts from existing metadata and it turns out that there is no metadata for the relevant tags, then Semplice will 'improvise' some data for you, by parsing the folder name in which the FLACs live. If the folder name is in the form of Composition Name (Distinguishing Artist - Recording Year) and no existing metadata for Composition, Performer or Recording Year exists, then Semplice will parse that folder name into at least three possible recording-wide tag prompts for you and display them on the relevant form, for you to edit or delete as you see fit.

Finally, if you've got a CD containing half a dozen different compositions, you may well labour long over getting the metadata for the first one correct but the correct approach for the remaining compositions would, surely, be to re-use that first submission as the source for all further metadata prompts. Sure, specific items such as the Concerto or Symphony number will be wrong for the second and subsequent recording, but correcting that would be a minor change: at least by borrowing the composer name, orchestra details and conductor name from the first recording you'd be getting a good proportion of the metadata for the second and subsequent recordings correct without having to re-type anything.

Let's see how these auto-tagging principles work in practice. I'll use this CD as a worked example:

You'll note that the single CD contains three separate recordings. Steuart Bedford and the English Chamber Orchestra play throughout all three recordings, whilst Lorraine McAslan plays violin on one of them. Additionally, everything was recorded at the same time, in 1989. So, if I spend the time getting one of these recordings tagged correctly, the composer, orchestra and recording year will be right for all the two others. The genre is shared by two of the recordings (“orchestral” for the Canadian Carnival and Mont Juic suite) but will need to change for the third (“concerto” for the Violin Concerto).

So with that in mind, let's see how I'd go about tagging this CD.

2.0 Tagging in Practice

Auto-tagging works best when you've prepared your physical file and folder layout ahead of time to properly represent the logical construction of the CD. Continuing to use the Britten/Bedford/McAslan CD as a worked example, therefore, it's useful to note that I bought this as a FLAC download from Prestoclassical, and it came down from the Internet exactly like this:

That is, there are 8 numbered FLACs, one JPEG file for the cover art and a PDF, representing the electronic version of a CD booklet, all sharing the same download folder. The first job, therefore, is to knock this physically into shape: that is, separate out files into different physical folders, each folder representing a 'recording' or composition or work that happened to be delivered as part of a single CD's-worth of music. I'd end up with something like this:

Here, you see I've created three new sub-folders, each of whose names is the extended composition name -that is, the 'normal' composition, plus the 'distinguishing artist' and a recording year. I've then moved the relevant FLAC files into each sub-folder, and copied the PDF and JPEG file into all three sub-folders. Thus, the Violin Concerto's FLACs are now housed in a folder called 'Violin Concerto (McAslan - 1989), along with the cover art and PDF.

2.1 Select a Working Folder

Now I can launch Semplice. Immediately after having done so, however, and before you can tag, you need to be 'inside' the folder which contains the FLACs you want to tag. So, the first requirement is to set the correct working folder. That's done by tapping the 'W' key:

This is a fairly straightforward folder navigation dialog. You can do things manually by literally typing the path you're interested in in the horizontal panel, just above the OK and Cancel buttons. If you do that, the folders shown in the upper panel will automatically change to display the contents of the path as you type it. You can also use the upper panel directly: scroll up and down until you're sitting on a folder name and then hit the [Space Bar]. That makes Semplice 'go into' that folder, and the path displayed in the horizontal panel will update to record the fact. In this way, you can 'drill down' into your folder structure. In the screenshot above, you can see I've reached the folder inside which I just created the three recording-specific sub-folders mentioned before. That is not sufficient! Semplice needs you to be inside a folder containing FLACs, so in my case, it's not enough to be in the 'Britten Violin Concerto' parent folder: I need to move into a specific sub-folder into which I moved my FLACs earlier:

Here, I've entered into the Candian Carnival sub-folder. You can't see the FLACs themselves in the main panel, but the fact you can only see '.' and '..' entries there tells you that you've reached the end of the line: there are no further sub-folders to descend into. I can therefore arrow or tab around the screen until the [OK] button is highlighted in red and then press [Enter]. This immediately returns you to the main program menu:

If you read the top of this screen carefully, focussing on the yellow text, you'll notice that the working folder now displays the 'Canadian Carnival Overture…' name. That's visual proof that everything you now do will be affecting the FLAC or FLACs found in that particular physical folder on your hard disk.

Now, because this is the first time I'm tagging anything from this CD, it would make sense to see if Prestoclassical supplied this FLAC with any usable metadata (though chances are low!) -and therefore, Option 1 would be the most appropriate tagging option to take …which I'll do now.

2.2 Starting to tag...

Now you are ready to begin the tagging process. Select the Tagging menu, Option 1 and you'll immediately be presented with this:

This comes right back to the problem posed in Section 1's introduction above: where do I want to source the 'metadata prompts' from. In this case, since it's the first tagging done with Semplice, there is no 'previous submission' I can meaningfully use, so my choice sort-of has to be the 'Read existing metadata' one. So I can use the Tab key to switch back and forth between those two options (or just use the left- and right-arrow keys to achieve the same thing). Once 'Read existing metadata' is highlighted, I press [Enter] to accept the choice. Immediately, I see this:

Semplice has read the first FLAC in this folder and extracted its existing metadata as suggested data entries for the five recording-wide tags shown on this form. This is metadata that was placed in the file by Prestoclassical -or perhaps by their suppliers, Naxos. Who knows?! In either case, it's not very good metadata: the recording year is completely wrong; no piece of classical music should have a genre of 'Classical' and there seems to be a fatal mixup in someone's mind between the guy who wrote the music and the guys & gals who are merely performing it: Steuart Bedford and the English Chamber Orchestra, great as they may be or were, are not the Composer! Finally, any recording you've got that has “etc” in its title is being impossibly vague!

So: it's read the existing metadata …and you can quickly see that it's pretty hopeless stuff. All of it needs correcting… so you need to make friends with the Ctrl+U key combination: that wipes out the data in whatever data entry field you're sitting in when you press it. Your job is therefore to use the up- and down-arrow keys to move to a data entry field, press Ctrl+U to clear it and then type in something more sensible instead. If any of the existing metadata looks re-usable with just a bit of tweaking, then you can move to a data entry field and use the left- and right-arrow keys to move through the existing entry, before using the Delete and Backspace keys to remove any existing letters or typing new letters into place. Do that and, with a careful bit of typing, you end up with something looking like this instead:

When the data is ready to be submitted, press the [Tab] key to move to the Submit button. With the [Submit] key highlighted, press [Enter] to move on. If you instead select [Cancel] and press [Enter], you'll be returned to the Semplice main menu without anything having been changed in your FLACs. Incidentally, too, the tagging you see in the above screenshot conforms precisely to the assorted strictures of my Axioms of Classical Music Tagging article -and is accordingly recommended to you by way of 'best practice'!

2.3 Performing Artists Details

When I press [Submit] on the completed 'recording metadata' form, I see this:

Sadly, most commercially-supplied FLAC files are going to have this problem: the relevant metadata is often supplied as part of an ALBUM ARTIST or ARTIST tag, which is not where Semplice expects the performing artist data to reside. Press Ctrl+U to clear the 'no existing metadata' warning, therefore, and get typing:

In the main panel of this display, you can type for as long as you like (up to a maximum of 4GB of text!). It will scroll off to the right if the lines are long enough, but you can also press [Enter] to make hard line breaks. As I've recommended in my Axiom article, I would suggest you always supply composer, orchestra, choir and soloists in that order, in a comma-separated list, missing out any component elements that don't apply for a specific recording -exactly as I've done above, in fact. The usual text editing rules apply: the delete and backspace keys work as you'd expect; you can also left- and right-arrow through text to get to a specific bit that you want to edit; you can also use the up- and down-arrow keys to move to different lines of text, if you've added line breaks into the text at any point.

When you're ready, you press [Tab] to move down to the Submit and Cancel buttons. If you press [Cancel] at this point, you'll be returned to the main menu, and nothing at all will be written to your FLACs: they'll remain exactly as they were before you started the auto-tagging wizard. If you press [Submit], however, then your album-wide metadata is written to all your FLACs in turn: if there are lots of FLACs or your PC is a bit feeble, you may see a message to this effect displayed briefly at the bottom of the screen. With few FLACs and/or a decently-powerful CPU, that message might disappear before you get a good chance to read it, though! Anyway: the main thing to grasp is that this is a bit of a point of no return: if you press [Submit] at this point, your FLACs will be modified. You can press [Cancel] later on during the wizard, but those changes will remain.

2.4 Custom Tags

Once the recording-wide tags have been submitted, you might see this sort of screen:

This is the form used to supply Custom Tags to a bunch of FLAC files. These were discussed in my overview of Semplice's tagging model, the general tenor of which was: please don't use Custom Tags!! If you have them switched off in the Semplice configuration file (which is the default), then you will simply not see this screen at all. However, if you've chosen to switch on their use in the Semplice configuration file and have then also set up at least one custom tag name there, then this screen will display the up-to-nine custom tags you've defined. You can fill in the data fields as appropriate and press [Enter] once the [Submit] button is highlighted to have that metadata added to your FLAC files' tags:

Custom tags, by the way, are never re-used when tagging subsequent recordings. You always have to type them in from scratch, which is another reason why their use is strongly not recommended.

2.5 Per-Track Tags

At this point, a form showing entry fields for each FLAC file found in the current working folder is displayed:

Once again, Semplice tries to help by fetching the metadata already present in the FLACs for each track and displaying it, in case it happens -miraculously- to be usable! In this case, there's only a single FLAC making up this particular work and its existing per-track metadata is mostly OK, though we don't include the composer's name in per-track tags! A bit of judicious right-arrowing and use of the backspace and delete keys soon knocks this into suitable shape, however:

Once again, I would now tab round to the [Submit] button and hit [Enter] when I got there: I am at that point immediately returned to the main menu and it may be difficult to know whether anything has happened! But let's examine what has happened at length, next.

2.6 Auto-Tagging Consequences

A quick visit to your physical folder in the file manager of your choice will soon reveals things certainly have changed since before you launched the auto-tagging wizard:

The first thing to notice that the PDF booklet files are still there, completely untouched. Semplice never messes with any file which isn't a FLAC or a piece of album artwork, so PDFs will survive the auto-tagging process completely unscathed, always.

Second, however, you'll spot that the .jpeg file which was there has been deleted. That's happened because the configuration file contains a setting called Delete album art after embedding: it's on by default, and I've not changed that. Anything that gets embedded in my FLACs as album art is thus automatically deleted from the file system as a standalone file, without warning or confirmation. While we're on the subject of album art, here's what was originally embedded in the FLAC by Naxos (or Prestoclassical!):

Now here's the equivalent, post-auto-tagging:

Spot the difference? The artwork is now 1400×1400 pixels in size, not 1409×1409: when the auto-tagging wizard embeds artwork, it resizes it according to the following rules:

Only files with .jpg, .jpeg or .png extensions are considered valid art files: BMPs or ICOs or WMFs need not apply!
If there are multiple candidate art files present in the working folder, there is an order of precedence: JPGs beat JPEGs which beat PNGs.
If there are multiple candidate art files with the same extension in the working folder, the first when files are listed in alphabetical order is assumed to be the intended candidate
Candidate files are resized to be square, always, by measuring their largest dimension and then using that to resize based on the following rules:
1. Candidates that are larger than 1400 pixels in their largest dimension are resized to be 1400×1400
2. Candidates that are larger than 900 pixels but smaller than 1400 pixels in their largest dimension are resized to be 900×900
3. Candidates that are larger than 500 pixels but smaller than 900 pixels in their largest dimension are resized to be 500×500
4. Candidates that are smaller than 500 pixels in their largest dimension are resized to be that dimension square (e.g., a 320×280 image will be resized to be 320×320)
All resizing is done without regard to aspect ratio: the smallest dimension is just forced to be the appropriate size, regardless of what skew that introduces to the final image. For this reason, it's best to always start with candidate files that are square or nearly so.
After embedding, the embedded artwork is deleted from disk if Delete album art after embedding is set to yes in the configuration file. The default value for this parameter is, indeed, yes -so if this is not behaviour you want, be sure to adjust your configuration file to set the parameter to be explicitly 'no'.
Artwork files which are present in the working folder but which are not considered candidates for embedding are never deleted. If you had a JPG and a PNG, for example, then the JPG would take precedence for embedding and would thus be auto-deleted after embedding (by default), but the PNG would not be deleted and would thus still exist as a file in the working folder.
If there are no candidate artwork files in the working folder, all FLACs are simply left without embedded artwork: you are not prompted to fetch or point to art files which might be stored elsewhere on your hard disk. You'll need to use Tagging menu, Option 6 to apply non-local artwork to your FLACs as a separate exercise in that case.

Third, a close comparison between my file manager screenshot before and after auto-tagging reveals some interesting changes. Here's the before-shot once more:

And here's the equivalent after-shot:

You'll spot that the file names have been changed! First, the bulk of the filename is now in 'tracknumber - tracktitle tag' format. That is, since I said this track/file was 'Canadian Carnival, Op. 19', that has become this FLAC's physical file name, preceded by the '01 -' that indicates the track has acquired a track number of 1. Secondly, though, you'll notice that the file name has acquired some weird-looking numbers: instead of 01 - Benjamin Britten Canadian Carnival, Op. 19.flac we now have 01 - Canadian Carnival, Op. 19-16-44100.flac. The new '-16-44100' parts of the name are the 'bit-depth' and 'sample-rate' at which this audio track was recorded and/or ripped. The “16” means this is a 16-bit audio file (as you would expect on a standard audio CD), and the “44100” means that the music signal contained in this file has been sampled at 44,100 times per second -again, exactly the specification used by standard audio CDs. FLACs ripped from SACDs or purchased as 'high resolution FLACs' might end up with -24-88100 parts in the file names: 24-bit, sampled at 88.1KHz. The idea is that merely by looking at the file name here, I can tell whether this FLAC was sourced from high-resolution media or 'ordinary' CD. Adding these bits of technical information to your FLACs filenames is optional: it depends on the answer to the 'Force filenames to display bitdepth/sample rate' question in the Semplice configuration file:

As you can see, I've set mine to be 'yes', which is why Semplice automatically added them to my file names when adding the tag data to the files. The default value for this parameter is 'no', so it doesn't happen unless you explicitly request it to do so.

Some file name changes will be less obvious, but they can happen …and they're not configurable. That is, Semplice always makes filenames NTFS-safe. This means removing characters in file names which would be considered 'illegal' on the Windows-specific NTFS file system and replacing them with underscores. NTFS will not, for example, allow a file name to contain ampersands, question marks or asterisks, so Elgar's movement called “***” from the Enigma Variations becomes a bit of a problem! By replacing dodgy characters with underscores, Semplice makes sure all files it works on can be stored on Windows-based file servers and shared over the network: Elgar's movement would end up being called something like 13 - ___.flac, for example! Bear in mind that 'illegal' characters are only removed from physical file names: the metadata tags stored inside the FLAC can be as illegal as you think they need to be!

Finally, the tags in this FLAC have, as part of the auto-tagging process, been cleaned. If I had inspected the tags for this file when first shipped by Prestoclassical (using Tagging menu, Option 6), I would have seen this

You can see the poor original metadata: things like 'etc' in the ALBUM tag, the name 'Benjamin Britten' in the TITLE tag, and so on. Obviously, we've now improved that, as we'll see. More importantly in this context, however, is that there are a bunch of weird tags here that are not 'standard' as far as my Axioms of Classical Music Tagging are concerned: LABEL, COPYRIGHT and ISRC and not tags which will ever help you find music to play so are, as far as this website is concerned, 'non-canonical'. By way of contrast, if I check the metadata of the file post-auto-tagging, I now see this:

Now all the tags appear in a coherent, single list with the main tags (composer, composition, genre and so on) coming first. The strictly peculiar custom tags are there at the bottom of the list, because I insisted they be there for the purposes of this documentation …but, apart from them, all those non-standard, non-canonical tags have been removed. That's what 'tag cleaning' means and results in …and is something that the auto-tagging wizard very much does as it completes its work.

2.7 Final Steps

There are a couple of things the auto-tagging process does not change, however, and which are things which you might want to consider doing immediately post-tagging.

For starters, you may wish to use the Audio Processing menu Option 1 to boost the volume of the just-tagged FLAC (many FLACs are mastered at a recording level that works for the CD as a whole, but once individual recordings are separated out, that 'average level' is too low for some: the volume boost option can fix that problem). This process is explained in greater depth elsewhere in this manual.

Secondly, if your just-tagged recording consists of multiple, separate, per-track FLACs, you might consider 'merging' them into a single FLAC that contains within itself the entire audio signal that was previously stored in the individual track-FLACs. This is is the business of creating 'SuperFLACs' and is performed by taking the SuperFLAC menu, Option 1. Again, the philosophy and practice behind this step is explained in detail elsewhere in this manual.

Finally, you may want to quit Semplice entirely: you do that by typing 'Q' to get to the Quit menu and then take one of the two possible options when you get there. The Quit menu Option 1 re-cleans your tags (so is strictly unnecessary for me in my worked example, since that's just happened because of the auto-tagging process! It doesn't do any harm to re-clean, however) and then exits Semplice entirely; the Quit menu Option 2 simply quits Semplice, without doing any new tag cleaning on the way out. An even shorter way of achieving the same thing is to tap the 'X' key: that quits-without-cleaning, too. In other words, typing K,X is functionally the same as typing Q,2.

One other option presents itself, however: don't quit Semplice at all, but simply navigate to a new working folder (use the 'W' option to do so) and start tagging the next recording obtained from your source CD …which is precisely what I'll do next.

3.0 Second and Subsequent Tag Sessions

Without leaving Semplice, therefore, I'm now going to type W and select the next of my recordings from this Naxos CD I'm working on:

As you can see, this time I'm selecting to work with the Violin Concerto recording: I've navigated into the correct folder and can press [Enter] once the [OK] button is highlighted. The top of the Semplice program display indicates the change of working folder has taken effect:

So I'm now ready to start tagging this new recording up …and since I spent some time, back in Section 2, getting all sorts of metadata correct for the first recording on the CD, it now makes sense for me to take the 'reuse previous submission' option when I select the auto-tagging option once more:

When I press [Enter] with that option highlighted, I see this:

Do you notice how, in the title bar of the window, we know we're working on the Violin Concerto recording …and yet here we see the same metadata we just provided earlier for the Canadian Carnival recording. It's obviously 'wrong' in the sense that the 'Composition' field is completely bonkers this time round… but it's a lot better than I'd have seen if I'd taken the 'read existing data' option instead:

In this case, not a single data entry field would have been salvageable: Ctrl+U would have been put to work overtime and a lot of typing of fresh data would have ensued. With the 're-use prior' option taken instead, I obviously need to edit the data prompts, but there is potentially much less work involved overall:

By re-using the previous submission, therefore, I speed up the data entry process -in this case by a little; in other cases, perhaps by quite a bit. By selecting to re-use the previous submission, too, the performing artists prompt will be pre-filled with usable data:

…and tacking the violinist's name on to that involves relatively little typing:

…and, just like that, I get appropriate metadata for the new recording without having to type in the conductor or orchestra details at all. Imagine if this had been an opera and you'd typed in all the cast details for CD 1 of the recording… how much time would you save by merely re-applying that earlier submission when it comes to tagging up CD 2 of the same recording?!

4.0 Summary

To conclude, therefore: auto-tagging is the business of re-numbering tracks starting from 1; embedding artwork into the FLACs if present in the folder; and prompting you via a wizard-like interface to supply album-wide and track-specific metadata tags which are then written to your FLACs.

When starting the wizard, you are asked whether you want to source 'metadata prompts' from the existing metadata stored within the FLACs themselves (useful for the first tag of the day; or when seeking to do minor edits or 'touch-ups' of existing data); or whether you wish to re-use metadata prompts supplied in the immediately-previous Semplice tagging session (useful for second and subsequent tags of the day, and when a single CD produces multiple recordings all of which usefully share large amounts of metadata).

Auto-tagging concludes with the automatic 'cleaning' of the metadata tags associated with all FLACs in a working folder, meaning that non-canonical tags (such as copyright notices or internal record company catalogue numbers) are stripped from the FLACs, and leaving behind only the canonical tags (plus any custom tags you've configured).

Should you need to 'correct' any aspect of the work that auto-tagging has inflicted on your FLACs (such as re-numbering them, or embedding different cover art), that's the job of the various manual tagging operations, which are discussed in detail elsewhere in this guide.

| Back to Semplice Home Page | Tagging Home |

semtagman

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-01-22T11:08:25+00:00

Manual Tagging

1.0 Introduction

Manual tagging with Semplice Version 2 means using five distinct menu options to achieve in five separate actions what the auto-tagging option performs in a single walk-through of five sequential wizard screens. You would choose to do things this way, rather than step through the auto-tagging wizard, when you know precisely what specific adjustment to tags you want to make, or when the auto-tagging wizard would make (or has made) an incorrect automated choice for you. For example: if you wanted to edit the contents of the Recording Year tag because you'd got it wrong earlier, it would be a bit daft to go through five pages of a wizard to make the one, very specific, correction: instead, you'd take Tagging menu, Option 2 and adjust the one tag directly, job done. Or consider the case where the auto-tagging wizard has just numbered all the tracks on the second CD of an opera set from 1 onwards: you really want CD 2's tracks to be numbered from 18 onwards, so they follow on seamlessly from the first 17 ripped from CD 1. The auto-tuning wizard always numbers from 1 onwards, but starting from 18 (or any other number) is precisely what taking the Tagging menu, Option 4 will let you do. Similarly, whilst auto-tagging will automatically embed album art if it's present in the same folder as the FLACs being tagged, Tagging menu Option 5 will let you point to a piece of cover art found anywhere on your hard disk: the manual tagging equivalent has just a bit more optionality and customisability than its auto-equivalent.

The main organising principle to grasp when dealing with the multitude of manual tagging options is: does the tag you're about to set apply to all tracks at once, or are they track-specific. Things like the name of the recording (“Symphony No. 7 (Bernstein - 1967)” for example) would obviously apply equally to all four tracks that are part of that symphony. But “Allegro con brio” or “Adagio” would be track-specific titles. Likewise, track numbers affect each FLAC in a folder differently, whereas embedding album art means all FLACs in a folder get 'hit' with the same artwork at the same time!

Here, I'll step through each of the manual tagging options in turn and explain what each does. Note that you need to be physically in, or to have actively selected, a 'working folder' before any of these options will work correctly. That means either cd-ing to a folder full of FLACs and launching Semplice from there, or to tap 'W' and use the resulting folder navigation dialogs to choose a working folder that contains some FLACs. Do one or other before attempting to tag things which Semplice cannot actually 'see', please!

2.0 Set Recording-Wide Tags

When you take Tagging menu, Option 2, you'll first be prompted with this message:

You are asked to choose whether the next screen should display metadata read from the first of the FLACs in the working folder, or if the metadata you supplied when last using Semplice should be displayed instead. You'd select the 'Reuse previous submission' option if you were, for example, tagging the second symphony ripped from a CD: you've probably already spent time carefully tagging the first one and nearly all the details for that first symphony would apply unchanged to the second, so it would make sense to re-use that first symphony's metadata as a template or model for this second symphony. By contrast, you'd use the 'Read existing metadata' if your previous Semplice session had been spent tagging up, say, an opera that had no relationship at all with the new string quartet you're now moving on to tag: the previous session's metadata would be useless for the new recording, and the new recording may have some usable metadata already in it (depending on where you bought it from, I guess!). Pick one of these options and press [Enter]: for the sake of demonstration, I'll choose the 'read existing metadata' option:

Now you see the point of making that earlier choice. The form displays five 'canonical' tags that you need to supply appropriate data for …and the fields have been filled in with data that may or may not be useful to you: the source of that data is what you previously chose. In this case, Naxos or Prestoclassical have embedded some metadata of their own devising in my FLACs and thus the 'read existing metadata' option has populated as many of the fields as it can by reading it from the first of the FLACs in the folder.

Note that if the 'from existing metadata' option is taken and there is literally no metadata available in the FLACs to read, then Semplice will invent some, if possible, from the physical folder name. Remembering from Axiom 17 that your physical folder names should in some way mirror the logical structure of your music collection, Semplice assumes that the name of the working folder currently in use will at least approximate the Composition name, so will fill that field in for you from that. If your physical folder name happens also to contain the other components of the extended composition name (i.e., distinguishing artist surname and recording year), then those two bits of information will be extracted and displayed in the relevant data entry fields, too. The presence of actual metadata for any of these fields, however, stops Semplice's game of 'let's guess from the folder name' in its tracks!

You will note from the previous screenshot that none of the existing metadata makes much sense, however! The 'Composer' field has been filled with details about the orchestra and conductor performing this piece. The 'Composition' field has been filled in with a hopelessly vague description of the main work on the source CD which happens to be precisely not the work being tagged! (The actual work name is shown in the previous screenshot at its very top, in the title bar of the Semplice window: Mont Juic Suite). This is, unfortunately, likely to be the case for any freshly-bought FLACs, because record companies don't understand how to tag classical music properly! The 'Composer' field for Semplice is the same as the ARTIST tag: and, clearly, Naxos or Prestoclassical think that the ARTIST tag is where the names of the performing artists on the recording should go. That's really a consequence of my Axioms of Classical Music Tagging, in which Axiom 2 says that the COMPOSER tag and the ARTIST tag should be identical for classical music: clearly, Naxos isn't a fan of that idea, but that's how Semplice was written. Fair enough: we can disagree on that nuance… but there's really no excuse for tagging this music with the meaningless genre of 'Classical' and getting the recording year wrong (whenever it was re-packaged, it was recorded in 1989)!

Anyway: we tried! We got Semplice to display the existing metadata in the hope that it would be at least partially useful… but it isn't. There's nothing for it than to use Ctrl+U to clear each field in turn and type in fresh metadata from scratch:

The one data entry field that might puzzle you here, I think, is the 'Composition' one: if it's a recording of the Mont Juic suite, why has it got 'Bedford' and '1989' in brackets after it? Well: this is an example of the extended composition name, as explained in Axiom 5. I might have many recordings of the Mont Juic suite: how do I tell thisrecording of it apart from any of the others? The answer is to say who is conducting (or performing) in this recording, which is likely to be distinct from those other recordings. Steuart Bedford is thus the performing artist that distinguishes this recording from any other -which makes 'Bedford' the surname of the “distinguishing artist”. In different contexts, however, even the conductor's name doesn't make things unique: Karajan recorded Beethoven's 5th at least three times, so how to tell each of his recordings apart from each other? The year in which they were recorded is the uniquely-identifying factor there… and hence the extended composition name takes the form “regular composition name + bracket + distinguish artist surname + hyphen + recording year + bracket”, exactly as you see it here.

Other than that, just note that though the various fields are quite short to look at, they'll accept practically indefinite entries: each can be up to 4GB in size, technically!

You can up- and down-arrow to move between fields as you feel the need; you use right- and left-arrows to move within the text visible in any field. I've already mentioned Ctrl+U to wipe out the entire contents of a field; you can also use the [Delete] and [Backspace] keys to delete individual characters within a data value. Press the [Tab] key to move between the data entry area and the Submit/Cancel buttons area. Press [Enter] when either the Submit or Cancel button is highlighted in red to perform the appropriate action -though note you can actually mouse-click either button to achieve the same outcome, too.

If you click Cancel, your data entry up to that point is lost and nothing is written to the FLAC files: you are returned to Semplice's Tagging menu without any file alterations having been made at all. If you click the Submit option, however, then your data is saved to memory -but not yet written to the FLACs themselves (so, if you accidentally press [Submit], you can then press Ctrl+C to terminate Semplice entirely, and your FLACs will still not have been altered).

The Submit option does, however, trigger the display of this new screen:

If the FLAC had contained metadata in the COMMENT tag, that would be displayed to you here. In my case, no such metadata was found to pre-exist, so a message to that effect is displayed instead. As it says, press Ctrl+U to clear that message out and start typing new metadata from scratch. As the dialog itself says, you should supply performing artist details here, in accordance with the provisions of Axiom 3. Ideally, this means you type in conductor, orchestra, choir and soloists in that order as a comma-separated list, missing any of those components when not appropriate. If there is no choir, for example, leave it out; if there are no soloists worth mentioning, don't mention them:

Again, the text you enter can be up to 4GB in size. It can, though is not recommended, to contain carriage returns (i.e., forced new lines) and blank lines. You can arrow left and right through the text to make edits at any time; the delete and backspace keys can be used as needed. Tab round to the Submit/Cancel area and if you click Cancel, your entire data entry up to this point (i.e., on both the five-fields screen and this one) will be lost and your FLAC files will be completely unchanged. Click Submit at this point, however, and all that data will be written at once to your FLACs, irreversibly.

Here's the state of my metadata for this composition before I press Submit on the above form, therefore:

You'll notice that ARTIST still says 'English Chamber Orchestra' (instead of Benjamin Britten) and the recording year is still a full day/month/year in 2005, rather than a simple 4-digit year, corrected to be 1989: so you can see that nothing has yet been written to these files. Let me now click Submit on the previous Semplice screenshot, therefore:

Now, you can see that ARTIST is 'Benjamin Britten'; DATE is '1989', GENRE is 'Orchestral' and COMMENT is the 'Steuart Bedford, English Chamber Orchestra' entry I made on the second of the recording-wide tag entry screens above. We see evidence, therefore, that the new metadata has been written to these FLACs -though you might note, in the top left-hand corner, that the file names have not been touched and, specifically, the files start with numbers 5, 6, 7 and so on. You can also see that TRACK NUMBER is set to 5 for the first of these files: supplying recording-wide tag data does not change anything about the FLACs or their metadata beyond what you were prompted to supply, in other words.

3.0 Set Track Titles

As per Axiom 8, the only track-specific metadata that should be supplied are track number and track title. In the context of classical music, track titles are tempo indications or, in an opera or oratorio, a brief recitation of the opening words of the track. When you take Tagging menu, Option 3 Semplice will count the number of FLACs in a folder and present a data entry field for each one:

Once again, Semplice reads the metadata (if any exists) from each of the FLACs it finds in the working folder and presents it to you to be edited or otherwise knocked into shape. Note that there is no option to 'reuse a previous session's entry' at this point: Semplice considers the likelihood of it being useful to re-use a prior tagging session's track-specific data to be so low as to not bother with!

Data entry is as usual: Ctrl+U to wipe an entire entry field; right- and left-arrows to navigate within an entry; backspace or delete to remove individual characters from an entry; up- and down-arrow to move between data entry fields; tab key to switch between the data entry fields and the submit/cancel buttons. Your job is to make TITLE tags that conform to the precepts of Axioms 8 and 10:

Just the musical facts, no movement numbers, no mention of data which is more properly thought of as 'recording-wide', such as composer names or performer details, and so on. If you click Cancel at this point, you'd be returned to Semplice's Tagging menu and no data would have been written to your FLACs. Click Submit, however, and some significant data modifications to your FLACs are made. Here are the files and their metadata before I click Submit:

And here's what things look like after I click Submit:

There are a couple of things to note here. Firstly, the TITLE tag is now a lot shorter than it was originally. Clearly, the 'minimal musical facts' that I entered on the per-track tagging form has now indeed been applied to the physical FLAC files. Secondly, however, look in the top left-hand corner of the screenshots: whereas before I was dealing with files called things like '05 - Lennox Berkeley, Benjamin Britten M…', I'm now working with files called '01 - Andante maestoso-16-44100.flac'. Writing TITLE tags triggers Semplice, in other words, to apply the TITLE to the physical file name itself …and to start numbering the files in the folder from zero-padded 1 (that is, the first file here used to be called 05… but is now 01…).

You might notice, however, that this causes a bit of a problem, in that file 01 - Andante maestoso is still tagged as having TRACK NUMBER 5: that's because it was indeed the fifth track on the original CD. Semplice follows the precepts of Axiom 9, however, and insists that every recording's first file should be numbered from 1 onwards. We'll have to sort out the physical file number v. track number tag discrepancy later on (see Section 4 below).

Where did the '-16-44100' bits of the new file name come from? Well: it's optional, but when editing the Semplice configuration file (Miscellaneous menu, Option 1), you'll see a prompt for the question: Force filenames to display bitdepth/sample rate. By default, that parameter is set to 'no'… but if it's set to yes, then Semplice adds the technical characteristics of the audio signal contained within the FLAC onto that FLAC's file name. A standard audio CD contains an audio signal that is sampled 44,100 times a second, and each sample is represented by a numeric value that can be stored within 16 digital bits of data. Hence, standard audio CD is 16-bit, 44100 samples/sec. If your FLAC was ripped from a standard audio CD, it took will have a 16/44100 audio signal -and that's what Semplice has discovered and included in my file name for me. If I'd been dealing with a high resolution audio signal ripped from an SACD, on the other hand, I might well see '-24-88200' or even '24-192000' in the file names, since those sorts of sources sample their audio at much higher rates and store the sample value in 24-bit data. It's a good idea to set bitdepth and sample rate on for filenames, I think, for it then allows you to determine the source of your FLACs simply by looking to see if they are high resolution FLACs or not …but the decision is ultimately yours.

4.0 Renumber Tracks

We just saw that physical files might well end up numbered from 1 onwards, whilst their internal, logical TRACK NUMBER tag is set to 5 or more (for example). This obviously needs fixing -and Semplice's Tagging menu, Option 4 lets you assign sequential numbers to your FLACs, starting from any arbitrary point. Once a new TRACK NUMBER tag has been applied, Semplice will bring the physical file name into agreement with it. Using this option is pretty straightfoward:

You are asked to type in a starting number: Semplice will increment it as many times as needed to get to the end of the FLACs in the working folder, and in each case (a) write the new number into the TRACK NUMBER tag; and (b) rename the physical file so that its name also reflects its new track number. If you leave the field blank and just click [OK] (or press [Enter]) without having entered a number where prompted, the number '1' is assumed. But you can explicitly type '1', as well. Or you can type any other number you like. Here's the situation before I press [OK] here:

The file names are already 1, 2, 3 and 4…something-or-other, but as we saw at the end of Section 3 above, the internal TRACK NUMBER tags are still 5, 6, 7, and 8:

So, I'm going to just clock [OK] on the new Semplice prompt and see what happens:

Well: these look identical to before, so the new numbering hasn't altered the physical file names at all, as they already were named starting at 1… though you might notice that the 'Modified' column in my file manager display now says 'Just now…' against each FLAC, rather than at some point 'Today'. That indicates that the files have undergone some sort of update or modification very recently. An inspection of the tags inside the files reveals what that modification was:

Now we see that the file names 01… has, indeed, a TRACK NUMBER tag of '1', too.

If I re-run this track numbering routine, this time I'll type something into the prompt:

…and now we see the new consequences:

Internally, we now see:

Again, we see that track numbering means the physical file name and the internal TRACK NUMBER tag are kept in sync. That's rather different to the Tagging menu, Option 3 which sets track titles. That does change physical file names to match the TITLE tags supplied and numbers files from 1 upwards, but changing the TITLE does not alter the TRACK NUMBER.

The ability of this menu option to number tracks from any arbitrary starting number onwards is important when you're ripping multi-CD recordings. On this recording of Handel's Messiah, for example:

…you'll note that CD1 contains tracks 1 to 16, and CD2 contains a further 21 tracks. If you used Semplice's auto-tagging option to tag up each CD in turn, you'd end up with a folder containing the first CD's FLACs with everything numbered from 1 to 16, which is fine. But the second CD would also be numbered 1 to 21 …when, in fact, if the two sets of tracks are to share the same folder (because they're from the same composition and recording), the second lot need to be numbered 17 onwards. Only by using Semplice's Tagging menu, Option 4 can you assign track (and hence file) numbers 17, 18, 19 and so on. Tagging this CD would therefore be a multi-pronged exercise:

Rip CD 1 into one folder
Rip CD 2 into a second folder
Auto-tag CD 1, using the 'read existing metadata' option
Auto tag CD 2, using the 're-use prior session's metadata' option
Correct the track numbers in CD 2's folder using Option 4's Renumber Tracks capability
Move FLACs from CD 2's folder into CD 1's folder

And at that point, you'd have a single folder containing the whole of Messiah, with files which don't overlap each other and track number tags that don't repeat. Option 4's ability to renumber from arbitrary starting points is thus fairly important when it comes to cataloguing any multi-CD recording correctly.

5.0 Embed Album Art

Axiom 16 says that album art is important, should be large, good quality and embedded within the FLAC file it describes. Semplice's Tagging menu, Option 5 seeks to help make all that a possibility by letting you point to some piece of album (or cover) art in JPG or PNG format and writing that into the FLAC file itself. As part of that embedding process, too, Semplice will 'square up' artwork and resize it to be either 500×500 pixels in size, 900×900 pixels or 1400×1400 pixels, depending on the original size. If the original size is smaller than 500×500, then the image is simply squared up to whatever the largest dimension is (so, a 380×420 pixel image would become a 420×420 one).

Squaring the image means Semplice will distort it, because it doesn't preserve the image's aspect ratio, so it's best if the original imagery is square or nearly-square to start with. Take this real-life example:

It's clearly a good-quality but highly rectangular image: let Semplice do it's embedding tricks on this and it will end up as this:

…and to get it square, the image has been stretched in the vertical and compressed in the horizontal directions. This is probably the worst example I could think of coming from my own music collection, but generally, if you start with album art that's nearly square anyway, Semplice's adjustments are not going to be very noticeable.

Semplice only embeds JPGs or PNGs -but JPGs can have .jpg or .jpeg extensions: Semplice doesn't care either way.

If the Delete album art after embedding configuration parameter is set to yes, then the source image will be automatically deleted after the resized version of it has been embedded into your FLACs. That parameter is set to 'no' by default, however, so it won't happen unless you explicitly switch it on.

Once you take the Tagging menu, Option 5, you'll be presented with this screen:

It's a fairly standard file-and-folder selection dialog, which always starts at whatever your working folder is currently set to. At the top, you have two panels: the left panel shows you folders, the right shows you files within folders. You can use the arrow keys to move up and down listed items in either panel. Use the [Tab] key to move between panels and the other components on the screen. When a folder is highlighted in the left panel, press [Spacebar] to select it and 'go into' it. If you need to back up out of a folder, it's simplest to just click in the long, horizontal panel of text that spells out the current folder and its full path and start deleting: the upper panels will dynamically change to reflect what the path in that horizontal area is displaying. Here, for instance, I have deleted the 'o' from the word 'Concerto', and the left-panel is therefore displaying the sub-folders of the /home/hjr/Desktop folder:

Anyway, by whatever combination of key-presses and typing you prefer, your job is to use the dialog to navigate to somewhere where you can point to a JPG or PNG image, which can be anywhere on your hard disk:

Make sure you actually press [Spacebar] when the JPG or PNG is highlighted in the right-hand panel: you want the horizontal panel's text to specify the complete path and filename of the image you're selecting. Here, you see 'R-413…jpg' does appear, spelled out, in the horizontal panel, so I'm good to click [OK] (or press [Enter]). If I were to click [Cancel] (or select it with arrow keys and [Tab] presses and then press [Enter]) I would be returned to the Semplice Tagging menu, with nothing having been written to the FLACs in my working folder.

As soon as you have selected a valid PNG or JPG image and pressed [OK], it is physically written into every single FLAC in the current working folder in turn. If the 'delete album art after embedding' configuration option has been turned on, the source image is deleted off your hard disk automatically, no matter where it resides on that disk. Once all writes to FLAC have completed, you are returned to the Semplice Tagging menu.

The key difference between manually tagging FLACs with artwork using this Tagging menu, Option 5 and doing it via auto-tagging (Option 1) is that Option 5 lets you point to artwork stored anywhere on your PC's locally-attached storage: auto-tagging only uses artwork stored within the working folder itself.

6.0 Set Custom Tags

As I mention in my Axioms of Classical Music Tagging article, I strongly discourage the use of custom tags (i.e., up to nine 'non-canonical' tags used to store data that you find useful but which no-one else on the face of the planet is!), and the Tagging menu, Option 6 will, when taken, usually only display this message:

This tells you that (a) you have to enable the use of custom tags in the first place; and (b) you have to configure what custom tags you want to use before you can actually use them. Click [OK] here to return to the main menu.

Configuring Custom Tags is done in the Miscellaneous menu, Option 1: Edit Configuration File:

At the end of the second page of configuration options, you'll see the last item is simply labelled 'Use Custom Tags', to which you answer yes or no. The default is 'no', so you need to deliberately change that here before pressing [Enter]. Do so, however, and you'll immediately be taken to this screen:

Here, you set up the names you want to see used for your custom tags. These names need to be short (ideally less than 15 characters) and space-less: if you enter one called 'General Notes', for example, Semplice will automatically convert that to be GENERAL_NOTES, all in upper-case and with an underscore replacing spaces. You might, for example, type things in like this:

Submit that lot (by pressing [Enter]) and then complete the rest of the configuration wizard. When you finally get back to taking the Tagging menu, Option 6, this time you'll see this sort of thing:

…and now you see that the 'labels' that you created in the configuration wizard are now presented as upper-case prompts, for each of which you can supply a value. Click [Submit] and those values are written back to the FLACs in the current working folder, in the usual way. An inspection of the tags inside a FLAC (using a tool such as kid3 or MP3Tag) will reveal this sort of thing:

Here's where you see that, though Semplice displays the custom tag prompts with spaces, in reality they are embedded within the FLAC with underscores (look at 'CD ID NUM', for example, and see how it is stored as CD_ID_NUM). Similarly, where I had originally said 'General Notes' in mixed case when editing the configuration file, you can see from above how it has been stored as GENERAL_NOTES, all in upper case.

Whereas the names of the custom tags you want to create need to be kept short and sweet, the values you can assign to each of them can be up to 4GB of text …which is about 1000 times the amount of text in the complete works of Shakespeare, so you shouldn't lack for anything in that regard!

There are several warnings to be made about using custom tags, though. Firstly, once they are set to be on, you shouldn't unset them -not without accepting that data loss will result. In other words, when Semplice 'tag cleans', it eradicates tags it thinks shouldn't be associated with a FLAC. If the 'Use Custom Tags' configuration setting is 'yes', then Semplice will not clean out tags which are part of the set of configured custom tags. But if you set 'Use Custom Tags' to 'no', then Semplice will regard previously-configured custom tags to be now 'not acceptable' and will wipe them from your FLACs the next time they are cleaned by it.

Secondly, if you configure 'Custom Tag 1' to be 'General Notes', it's important to never change that to mean 'Key signature' or something equally custom! Changing the tag name or prompt doesn't change the content of the data associated with that tag, but will mean old data is vulnerable to permanent loss and will become at least temporarily invisible, too. For example:

This is me deciding to re-configure my earlier custom tags: I'm changing the 'label' associated with Custom Tag 1 so that it now prompts for 'key signature' not 'General Notes'. When I take Tagging menu, Option 6 after completing this configuration change, I see this:

Where have my 'general notes' gone?! They are no longer visible on this screen, though they would be visible to anyone inspecting the FLAC's metadata at exactly this time:

Note that 'Tag 10 GENERAL_NOTES' is still there, safe and sound… it's just that the Custom Tag editing form cannot display it, since 'General Notes' is no longer a configured tag. Worse, if I were to clean the metadata associated with this music now (by pressing the K button) and then re-inspect the surviving metadata, I would see:

Since GENERAL_NOTES is no longer a configured custom tag, Semplice's tag cleaning procedures don't regard it as having 'protected status' …and therefore simply deletes the data associated with it, permanently and without possibility of recovery.

The short version is, therefore: if you insist on using custom tags, configure them ahead of time and then don't touch them again. Changing their name will trigger eventual data loss, should Semplice's tag cleaning procedure ever be deployed against parts of your music collection in future.

7.0 Conclusion

In this section of the Semplice User Manual, you've seen how five separate menu options gives you access to functions that allow you to provide recording-wide or track-specific tags. You can take any or all of those options, in any order, to achieve overall tagging of your FLACs to the standards set out in my Axioms of Classical Music Tagging article. Obviously, if you don't agree with the basic thrust of those axioms, you aren't going to find Semplice's manual tagging options very useful, but they've worked for me for a quarter of a century, so I figure they might be useful to you, too!

Fundamentally, the five manual tagging menu options only do what a single, complete pass through the auto-tagging wizard (Tagging menu, Option 1) achieves -but they do provide at least two new key pieces of functionality: the ability to renumber tracks starting from something other than 1; and the ability to apply album cover art using art files stored anywhere on your PC's local storage drives. The album art functionality is a convenience; the ability to renumber from something other than 1 becomes pretty important when ripping a multi-CD work that you hope to treat as a single entity in the end, since overlapping track sequence numbers would make that an impossibility.

The auto- and manual-tagging approaches are complementary, not mutually exclusive. That is, you can use auto-tagging to get things “mostly right” and then use any of the manual tagging options to fine-tune things. If I was ripping the second CD of an opera, for example, I'd auto-tag it (meaning its tracks start from 1) and then use Tagging menu, Option 4 to 'correct' the track numbers so that they followed in sequence from where the tracks on CD1 ended. Similarly, I might forget to put a downloaded bit of cover art into the working folder before launching the auto-tagging wizard; not a problem if, after the auto-tagging, I were to take Tagging menu, Option 5 to finally point to where I'd downloaded it. Use the two mechanisms interchangeably, therefore: think of auto-tagging as the broad brush approach, with manual tagging options as the fall-back, fine-adjustment mechanism.

| Back to Semplice Home Page | Tagging Home |

semtagother

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-01-22T11:09:02+00:00

Other Tagging Menu Options

1.0 Introduction

Semplice's main tagging options have been previously described here and here), but options 7 to 9 add further tagging management capabilities to the program, namely:

The ability to view the current state of tags embedded in all FLACs in the current working folder
The ability to extract or view album art from the first FLAC in the current working folder
The ability to edit the contents of an embedded cuesheet

On the whole, they provide fairly unusual functionality and are not therefore likely to be options that you make extensive use of: but it's important that you know what each of them does in turn.

2.0 View Current Metadata

Taking the Tagging menu, Option 7 will reveal the metadata already embedded within the FLACs found in a working folder, no matter where that data has come from or how it was put there. So, to begin with, make sure you launch Semplice from within a folder full of FLACs or that you press the W key and navigate to and then select a folder full of FLACs. Having done that, taking Option 7 will reveal something like this:

Semplice displays the tags associated with each FLAC in the folder in turn: you just scroll down (with the down-arrow or PgDn keys) to read the tags associated with each new file in turn. The data is expressed in the form of tag number (which is really irrelevant) and then TAG-NAME=TAG-VALUE pair. Thus, from the above screenshot, you can tell that this FLAC's ALBUM tag has been set to a value of “Mont Juic Suite (Bedford - 1989)”. Note that the display is of all tags, even ones that Semplice does not support or regard as 'canonical': hence the ISRC tag shown above, or the COPYRIGHT one. The one tag that Semplice cannot display on this form is the embedded album art one:

You will certainly receive a message that 'Good album art detected OK' displayed at the top of the list of tags for a file, or a “*** No album art detected ***” message if that's the case instead, but you won't get to see any embedded album art using this menu option.

All files in the folder have their tags displayed with double horizontal lines dividing one FLAC's tags from the next:

The little blue down-arrow and (+) icon tells you that you haven't yet reached the end of the display (as does the blue percentage indicator).

Hopefully it is obvious that this display is read-only: you cannot edit the tag data using this menu option (that's what the various auto- and manual-tagging menu options are for!), but merely display it. When you've seen enough metadata, just click [OK] or press [Enter] to return to the Semplice Tagging menu.

3.0 Extract Album Art

You've just seen that viewing the metadata associated with a FLAC using Tagging menu, Option 7 tells you whether embedded album art exists or not -but it doesn't let you actually see it. That's what Tagging menu, Option 8 is for:

As you can see, taking Option 8 immediately causes album artwork to be displayed in a small overlay window. That's technically only true, though, if the Display album art when extracting configuration file option is set to 'yes' (see Miscellaneous menu, Option 1, second page). However, the default value for that option is indeed 'yes', so what you see above is what will happen by default. If you set the parameter to 'no', then album art is still written to the current working folder, but it is not displayed: you can obviously open the art file in the graphics editor of your choice after that.

Note that Semplice only reads the embedded artwork from the first FLAC in the working folder only and merely assumes that this stands duty as artwork applicable to every FLAC found in that same folder.

As well as optionally displaying the artwork read from the FLAC, Semplice always saves a copy of it into the current working folder, as a file called albumart.jpg:

If the original albumart.jpg is larger than 500×500 pixels in its largest dimension, Semplice also creates a half-sized replica of the extracted artwork (called, as you see here, albumart_half.jpg) and displays this half-sized image as the artwork overlay. Artwork that's smaller than 500 pixels big will just have an albumart.jpg created and have that image displayed as the overlay directly. The point is that you might have embedded artwork of, say, 3000×3000 pixels and if Semplice just displayed that, unless you are running a state-of-the-art 5K or better monitor, you'd see nothing else on your screen! It thus tries to keep things usable and display something of a sane size -but still saves the insane-sized original on your hard disk for whatever later use you want to put it :)

Incidentally, though the menu option is called extract album art, be clear that “extract” does not imply “delete”. The album art is not removed from the original FLAC. It is simply read and saved to disk.

Finally, if you try to extract album art when none is actually present inside the first FLAC in a folder, you'll be told this, as follows:

Remember that with regards to artwork, Semplice always follows the precepts of Axiom 16: album artwork needs to be embedded within FLACs, not merely reside in the same folder as them, as standalone files. So Semplice only reads artwork from a FLAC (or writes it to it, using Option 5): it cannot be used to display a standalone folder.jpg, for example.

4.0 Edit Embedded Cuesheet

A cuesheet is a text file that describes the virtual tracks that exist within a single FLAC. Some purveyors of digital music files supply a single FLAC along with a descriptive cuesheet, as it simplifies the file transfer to only have to download 2 files, rather than dozens. For example:

Here, I have a single, 268MB FLAC, and a tiny text file cuesheet. If we examine the contents of that cuesheet by opening it in a text editor of some sort, we'd see something this:

So, you (and any music player that can understand cuesheets!) can see that there are four tracks contained 'within' the one FLAC file, three belonging to one symphony and the fourth belonging to a different symphony. Some music players can interpret cuesheets directly:

That's the DeadBeef music player, understanding the 4 tracks and their timings without difficulty. Cuesheets are quite handy, in other words, for allowing a single FLAC to be treated as though it were a track-based audio CD …and therefore, if there are spelling mistakes in them, it would be quite handy to be able to edit them into shape! Well, the example cuesheet I've shown you so far is what might be called an external cuesheet: it's a standalone file, usually with a .cue file extension, that can be edited straightforwardly in any text editor of your choice:

Here, I've edited the Performer name into more usable shape and altered the TITLE of track 1… changes which DeadBeef is happy to pick up next time it plays this music:

In case you missed it, Track 1 used to say “Symphony No 3-1.P…” and now says “Symphony No 3: Part 1” and in the title bar of the DeadBeef window, it used to say “Khandjan, Lazarev” and now says “Lazarev Khandjan”.

So editing an external cuesheet is easy …but cuesheets can also be embedded, stored within the FLAC it describes, just as album art can be. Editing something that's not a file on your hard disk but merely a piece of metadata inside a FLAC is, obviously, a bit trickier than editing an external cuesheet -and that's why Semplice's Tagging menu, Option 9 exists, because it allows you to do precisely that. The same functionality can also be accessed via the SuperFLAC menu, Option 3, by the way.

If I took that option right now, I'd see this:

That's to say: Semplice cannot be used to edit external cuesheets. That's what your basic text editor is for! Only if a cuesheet has been embedded inside a FLAC can Semplice's Option 9 assist… so I need to go find a new recording that has an embedded cuesheet to demonstrate things further! Here's a case in point:

Here we have a folder full of …just a single 600MB+ FLAC file. There's no cuesheet visible in the file manager at all. Let's take Semplice's Tagging menu Option 9 now:

As you see, Semplice responds in this case by finding the embedded cuesheet, extracting it to a temporary file and then opening it in a text editor. The text editor Semplice chooses to use at this point is configured in the Miscellaneous menu, Option 1, on the second page of configuration options:

In this case, it's been set to 'nano', which is a command line editor common on Linux systems (and is, in fact, the default default editor!). Let's say I change it now:

…and then I re-take the Tagging menu, Option 9 afresh:

This time, Semplice launches an intermediate xterm window, which in turn launches an instance of the Kate text editor.

I will say that regardless of which text editor you use to edit your embedded cuesheets, the process is a little cumbersome: you have to edit the cuesheet text and then remember to save your work in that editor (so, in Kate, I'd do File → Save, but in nano, I'd do Ctrl+X then tap 'y' to save). That, however, is not the end of it! Since your text editor was launched by an intermediate xterm window which is an entirely different terminal session to the one Semplice is running in, Semplice will not see your changes, even though saved, until you remember to close the intermediate xterm window, manually. Getting your cuesheet edits recognised by external programs is always a two-part process: save in the editor, then close the xterm window.

As an example, let me make a bonkers edit to the first track of this opera by Britten's:

Here's the data as it is originally:

Track 1 says it comes from Act 1, somewhat unsurprisingly. So let me, ahem, 'improve' that now:

Now the cuesheet says it comes from Act 99. I haven't saved this edited text in nano yet: so, what does DeadBeef think of this music when I try to play it?

Well, perhaps unsurprisingly, DeadBeef is still reading the cuesheet as saying track 1 belongs to Act 1. Fine: let me save my edit in nano (which is Ctrl+X, then Y to confirm):

Notice how the window in which nano was running has turned completely empty: nano has finished running in it, but the xterm window itself has not yet been closed. What does DeadBeef think when I play my opera now?

It's still reading the file to say the track 1 is from Act 1… despite me having saved my edit! So finally, let me close that blank xterm window down and see what DeadBeef thinks now:

At last, track 1 is said to come from Act 99. This is demonstrated proof that only when the xterm window is closed does the saved edit get stored back into the original FLAC.

It is a little clunky, I will freely admit: but this way Semplice ensures it can edit the cuesheet in any editor you want to use, at the price of having this multi-step edit-save-close process to have changes written back to FLACs. You can, of course, use any other tag editor of your choice to edit embedded cuesheets directly, if you prefer: Semplice just offers this capability as a convenience, not on the understanding that you're not allowed to use other programs! The real point of this menu option is to be able to correct issues that arise after having created SuperFLACs (which always triggers the creation of an embedded cuesheet): that is why Semplice repeats the 'Edit embedded cuesheet' as part of the SuperFLAC menu, Option 3 as well as the Tagging menu, Option 9.

Finally, note that it makes no sense to have more than one FLAC in a folder and yet still be wanting to use cuesheets: definitionally, a cuesheet describes the internal contents of a single FLAC, always. If it happens, for bizarre reasons, that you use this menu option when working on a folder that contains two or more FLACs, the cuesheet data is extracted from, and written back to, the first FLAC in the folder only.

| Back to Semplice Home Page | Tagging Home |