FOSSPicks
Rymdport
We looked at the brilliant Magic Wormhole some time ago. It's a command-line tool that sets up an encrypted peer-to-peer file transfer between your machine and any target machine out in the wilds of the Internet. For this to work, a network's NAT needed to be negotiated, as did any firewalls, and the connection itself needed to find a way to talk to the destination. But Magic Wormhole handled all of this transparently, with users needing to do little more than type send followed by a path to a file, or receive, followed by a code the sender is shown. It was brilliant, and still is, for one off ad-hoc transfers. But Magic Wormhole still requires a little command-line knowledge. While this isn't something that will likely bother Linux users, it may trouble Windows and macOS users trying to accept a transfer.
This is where the weirdly named Rymdport can help. It's an implementation of the same wormhole protocol wrapped inside a graphical user-interface. It was even called wormhole-gui for a while, but the project has diverged to use a native Go implementation of the protocol. This allows it to compile natively and run without any dependencies on many different platforms, so you can even link to the binaries if you have contacts you need to send a file too easily. The application is easier to use than the command-line version, with tabs for sending and receiving files and file requesters instead of tab complete for selecting files and directories to transfer. Its best feature is being able to show multiple transfers at the same time, with progress bars for each transfer to show how it's going. The latest version creates a QR code to encode the code word. It's a great solution for any time you need to send a file to someone, and a good upgrade over the original Magic Wormhole.
Project Website
https://github.com/Jacalz/rymdport
Audio metadata editor
tone
Image metadata is common, especially for photos. Most photo processing applications will have a panel showing exposure, focus, date, location, and dozens of other attributes, all of which are written into the file as metadata when a photo is taken. Metadata like this can even be viewed and edited on the command line, with utilities such as exiftool. But we don't often consider that audio files include a similar set of data related to their production. This data includes album names, track sequence, recording data, artists, and many other optional attributes. A few of these might be displayed by your audio player of choice, but it most likely won't let you edit this data. The tone command-line tool helps with this. With tone, you can parse audio metadata in bulk and edit the tags they contain. It's perfect for ensuring your favorite music is properly tagged, and that metadata in the audio from different sources remains consistent. It has no dependencies, and it is ideal for running occasionally on whatever computer is hosting your music collection.
There are two modes of operation. The dump mode will output the metadata for the majority of audio files you throw at it, from MP3 to FLAC. It can do this formatted for the command line – or formatted into something more programmatically useful with JSON. Arguments can be used to include whole directories, to exclude specific types, or even query a specific attribute through JSON. It's also a quick and easy way to see what an audio file is all about if you can't tell from its filename. You can also use tone as a tool to populate your own collection spreadsheet or database. To balance the dump mode, there's a tag mode, which lets you set most commonly used audio tags, including genre, artist, series, part, and title. A clever auto-import option lets you set these values with strings taken from the filesystem path, and you could easily subvert this with a script to perform far more advanced operations. This makes tone the ideal tool to use when you find yourself with a complex audio metadata problem.
Project Website
https://github.com/sandreas/tone
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