Starting from this release Minitube requires a subscription of €9.99 / year. I’m trying to keep my apps sustainable and I think this is the only way forward. Subscription can be managed on PayPal or on the Mac App Store. Also the license per platform is gone and now buying Minitube gets you a code valid for all the supported platformed.
Users that bought Minitube less than a year ago don’t need to do anything for now. I hope older users will decide to support further development and keep this app alive.
This release is a major overhaul compared to previous versions. It contains a better search algorithm that also supports genres, besides artists, albums and song titles. Try searching for bluegrass or rnb.
The user interface has received a complete refresh. It’s now more modern, flatter and generally cleaner. Fonts can be zoomed with common keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl++, Ctrl–, Ctrl+0 to reset). Lyrics are bigger and more readable. The toolbar now appears on the bottom of the window but can also be moved on the top by dragging it.
Musictube now streams only audio when video is hidden so it’s even lighter on resources.
Starting from this release Musictube requires a subscription of €9.99 / year. I’m trying to keep my apps sustainable and I think this is the only way forward. Subscription can be managed on PayPal or on the Mac App Store. Also the license per platform is gone and now buying Musictube gets you a code valid for all the supported platformed.
Users that bought Musictube less than a year ago don’t need to do anything for now. I hope old users will decide to support further development and keep this little app alive.
This Musique update is the first Qt 6-based release I do. The main effort has been modernizing the look of the app: a more flat and clean style, with rounded artist pics and a nicer toolbar.
The Info View has been redesigned. Hope you like the centered lyrics.
Thanks to Qt 6, Musique now follows dark/light theme system settings on all platforms. Text is zoomable like in browser.
The crash with macOS < 11 is fixed. 10.14 is required. On the Ubuntu side, the .deb I provide requires 23.04 because of a libmpv version change.
Enjoy this release and maybe support the project by donating.
Hi all, I’ve been working to a GNOME port of the Sofa Server. GNOME is the desktop environment that powers most Linux desktops, including Debian, Ubuntu and many others.
It’s been an interesting work. The Qt-based server written in C++ installs a GNOME extension written in Javascript and communicates with it via DBUS. Cool technologies.
Maybe it is possible and very low-effort to port this work to GNOME Shell derivatives like Cinnamon. I’ll have to investigate this in the future. Let me know if you have any tips.
For now, I’m only shipping a .deb package, unfortunately cutting off distributions not based on Debian. Let me know how to target more distros. Flatpak or snap? Just RPM?
The Sofa Server is free and the Sofa mobile app is freemium with a complete version in-app purchase. Give it a try.
Hi all, Minitube 3.6 is out. Actually it is 3.6.1 because I fixed a few issues present in 3.6. This release fixes channels not loading.
I switched away from the Invidious API and started using a number of Javascript libraries (actually NodeJS modules) that take care of extracting data from YouTube. They are well maintained and easy to update.
The details of running NodeJS modules in a Qt app are interesting and could be the subject for some future technical posts. For now, I’ll just say that it made for a great hacking sprint.
I had to rush this release because Google restricted the Youtube API only to manually approved projects. And their terms forbid any other viewer apart from their own.
So I ported Minitube to use the Invidious API. Linux users will not need a Google API key anymore. So I guess this is an enhancement for them. Donations are welcome (hint hint).
I let Finetune, the automatic music tagger, a bit aside because it basically worked or the problems to fix required too much effort. But I finally took the time to spearhead some long-standing issues.
Crashes. Yes, multithreading is hard and Finetune uses it to do its many tasks in the least time possibile. This time I believe I got my multithreading right and Finetube is now rock stable.
Album release selection heuristics was good and it cannot, by definition, be Perfect™, but in Finetune 2.0 I completely rewrote the algorithms and results are now consistently better.
The visual style also needed a refresh. Finetune 2.0 ships with new icons and overall a more modern UI. Finetune now supports Dark Mode on macOS and dark styles on Linux. Windows support for dark mode will come in the near future.
Sofa, the remote control for macOS is finally published on the iOS App Store. It is available for iPhone and iPad. Get it from the App Store and let me know your impressions.
