Sparkling gems and new releases from the world of Free and Open Source Software
Myuzi
Myuzi is a desktop music playing application that describes itself as a "Spotify alternative," only without the need for a subscription or the arduous advertising. This might sound like the application is bypassing Spotify's strict user license, but it's not. None of the music that appears when you use Myuzi's search, or any of the music you hear when you click play, is sourced from Spotify. Instead, Myuzi's music comes directly from YouTube, which makes it the audio equivalent to one of the many video and download tools that can help you explore YouTube without being tempted by its web-based suggestions. This makes more sense with music because listening to music shouldn't necessarily involve staring at a screen or should at least keep it to a minimum, especially when it comes to finding what you want to listen to. Myuzi is brilliant for this because it purposefully keeps things simple and distraction-free so you can focus on what's playing.
Its single window is split into three tabs: one for creating and playing playlists, another for searching and playing results, and a final tab for settings. The last tab only includes volume and the option to mute playback. Beneath all of the panes is the transport control, showing the currently playing track, progress through the track, and transport controls for rewind, play, and forward. To get started, you search for something you're interested in, select the result you want to hear, and click play. A moment later, you'll hear only the audio associated with whatever the YouTube video might be, free of any distractions or dubious camera angles. Favorite tracks can be added to your own playlists, and multithreaded playback keeps everything smooth. What's great about this approach is that YouTube can often be the only place to find certain rare tracks and live performances, and you often want a simple music player that helps you listen to those tracks. Myuzi is exactly this.
Project Website
https://gitlab.com/zehkira/myuzi
Gopher browser
Gophie
Despite the fact that many people think the Internet is synonymous with the World Wide Web, the two are distinct from one another. The Internet is primarily a transport layer, responsible for connecting computers to each other. The World Wide Web is a protocol with associated software, the web server and web browser, serving content as web pages to create a vast interconnected web of, well, everything. We know you know this, but it's sometimes good to remind yourself that there's an Internet beyond the terrible distractions of the web. And one of the oldest is Gopher. The Gopher protocol is actually a contemporary of HTTP, created in 1990, and shares many of the same characteristics of the early web. It uses a server and client arrangement to allow access to a simple content system that could link to various online resources, including Telnet services, FTP sites, and other Gopher servers (all of which became known as Gopherspace).
Gopher's content pages were incapable of the rich multimedia experience that HTML allowed, which held it back at the time but is now a refreshing change from the world of pop-up ads and tracking cookies. And remarkably, the world of Gopher is still available. All you need is a modern Gopher client for your Linux desktop and that's exactly what Gophie is. Gophie is a desktop shell around the Gopher text environment that fully supports the original specification, including search functionality, integrated binary file downloader, Telnet sessions, and linked text documents. It's also completely customizable. While the main window does only contain the raw text of Gopher output, you can still change the colors, style, and background to suit your environment. But the best thing about it is that using Gopher is a refreshing change. There are still plenty of sites out there, and they're typically of a higher quality than the average web page, especially without the onslaught of automatically playing videos and sound.
Project Website
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