BBritten.com - softwares:semplice

seminstall - [2.0 Installation]

hjr (hjr@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 |

semchange

hjr (hjr@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 ”<strong>i</strong>nspect“ 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 |