I’m happy to announce the release of Musique 1.1! This release brings many improvements. I tried to listen to user feedback and set priorities accordingly.
Last.fm scrobbling finally comes to Musique with a streamlined UI. I hope you’ll appreciated the effort I made trying to avoid clutter and keep the app “preferences-free”.
The music collection scanning has seen various improvements. It is now much faster. At least 2x or 3x faster. Photos are found for a greater number of artists. Track titles are now corrected automatically using data from Last.fm. Album covers are loaded from image files following common naming conventions such as “cover.jpg”, “front.jpg” and “folder.jpg”. Album covers embedded in audio files are also supported. Once the scanning process is complete, remote album covers and artist photos will start downloading in the background.
Lyrics embedded in MP3 files are now supported.
Album release year inside tags has now precedence over Last.fm often incorrect release year.
On Windows, an important bug causing duplicate tracks after a rescan has been fixed. On the Mac, the UI has been enhanced by using the native, rounded search box and a new style for the sliders. Also application menu items such as “Quit” and “About” should be properly localized for languages other than English.
Enjoy and spread the word about Musique!
This update to the initial Musictube release brings polish, stability fixes and UI refinements to the app.
You can now browse artists similar to the one you’re listening to. A great way to discover new music. 1.1 also brings social sharing and supports Twitter, Facebook and Email. You can now set the maximum video resolution to 360p, 720p or 1080p. Higher video resolution also means higher audio quality. This Musictube version handles lesser known artists much better and skips YouTube videos that don’t really match the tracks in the playlist. The playlist is now restored across sessions and a Stop after this track command is now available.
Most importantly, two crashes have been fixed and the app is now rock solid. Also a bug with very short songs not playing has been fixed.
I hope you enjoy Musictube 1.1!
Happy new year everybody! Just in time for the Befana, I’m releasing Minitube 1.7. Put it on USB sticks together with candy inside colored socks for the little ones!
This release features clickable usernames in the playlist, so you can start watching the video author’s channel with a click.
Another much requested feature is a “Manually start playing” option. It allows you to pick the right video before starting playback and to try other searches without interrupting the current video.
Especially for the Mac, I worked on enhancing the visual style to be more pleasant and feel more native. Now the app doesn’t quit on window close and minimizes on Command+M. The seek bar and volume slider sport a new style and the search box is the rounded, native one.
The “Stop after this video” option can be useful in many situations, I use it with my kid so I can pretend that the cartoons are over.
Other minor enhancements include a window “Float on Top” option and the ability to skip to the previous video (with keyboard shortcut).
Enjoy and spread the word!
I’m happy to announce that Minitube reached version 1.6! These are the changes:
- Find the missing parts of a video
- Mac OS X Lion full-screen mode
- Share a video using Facebook, Twitter or email
- Fixed bug with very short videos not playing
- Fixed a (rather paranoid) security issue with temporary files and made sure temp files are always deleted
- Dropped Mac OS X PowerPC support. Apple has made it really hard to support PPC on Lion. PPC users can keep using version 1.5
I finally made a decision on the new name for Minitunes. Thanks to all the people who made interesting suggestions. I think Musique is a cool name. Very simple and self-evident.
Anyway, this is not just a rename. It is a new release that brings even more polish to Minitunes Musique.
A disk-based HTTP cache speeds things up, especially if you’re going to rescan your library. Support for Mac OS X Lion full-screen mode has been added. On Mac and Windows there is a nice crossfade between views. A crash when quitting the app while scanning the music collection has been fixed. Also a long standing bug with missing application icon in Linux packages has been fixed.
Another big news is that finally we have a Windows version. So Musique is now fully crossplatform. Spread the word to friends using Windows!
Just a quick note to announce that Musictube is now available on the Mac App Store and on the Ubuntu Software Center. Yay!
In the middle of summer an idea came to my mind and I quickly noted it in my GMail tasks. Weeks later, when back in Rome, without thinking too much about it, I started working on it in my usual code-as-theres-no-tomorrow style.
Here’s the idea: YouTube is full of music videos. I have coded a YouTube player. I have coded a music player. These things converge. And the place where they meet is a kind of YouTube player specialized in music. Or a music player that streams music from YouTube.
I’m really proud to introduce you to Musictube. Musictube lets you listen to music on YouTube in a much more convenient way. Musictube integrates album covers, artist pictures and lyrics. Musictube also features a “Live” mode for listening to live performances only, and a “Cover” mode that plays covers and remixes of the original song. There are many other details to talk about, but since this is a one-of-a-kind app, you’re better downloading it and see for yourself.
Musictube is available for Mac, Windows and Ubuntu. Get it.
Translate it!
I automatically imported some translated strings from my other apps into Transifex. If you care, you can finish the translation for your native language here.
A note to Linux users
Musictube is not Free Software. The Ubuntu package is for sale just like for the other platforms. Other Linux distros are just left out in the cold for now. Please don’t bash me for this: not everything can be GPLed. Bear with me as I experiment with various business models. By supporting Musictube you indirectly support my other GPLed projects: they share large amounts of code and many enhancements can flow from Musictube to Minitube and Minitunes.
A few hours ago I’ve come back from free camping on a beautiful mountain. When I logged in I found out dozens of users were complaining about Minitube not working. Here I am with a new release that fixes the problem and adds a few features. Thanks to Mike Holenderski for emailing me details about the YouTube changes that broke Minitube.
Besides watching videos again, you can now drag’n’drop YouTube links from your browser to the Minitube window. Also, Minitube is now more tolerant about which URLs are actually YouTube URLs. New translations are included thanks to the great people contributing on Transifex.
UPDATE: Minitube 1.5 has been published on the Mac App Store (11 days after its submission). Anyone who bought it there can update via the App Store
So I submitted Minitunes to the Mac App Store and got rejected because of the app name. I tried to argue with the reviewer but he wouldn’t reply to my arguments. He just told me I can “appeal” the decision. I thought long about what to do and decided not to appeal. Even if Minitunes is accepted, it could always be rejected on future updates. Keeping the name means being vulnerable. Please no “Apple sucks” comments, we all know many of their policies should be outlawed. Now let’s try to be constructive.
Do you have an idea for the new name? It could be just a name or combination of name and icon concept. I’d like to keep the name about music. No animal names and such.
If we don’t come out with anything interesting, I may try to appeal the decision and stick with Minitunes. But I highly doubt it will work.
It has been a long time since the last Minitunes release. I’m happy to announce the availability of version 1.0. I decided to skip 0.x numbers as it seems many users outside the Free Software circles would consider the software as beta or alpha, which is not.
This version brings search to Minitunes, which was sorely missing. I tried to whip up a better icon as the previous one was a bit dull, hope you like it. Also two patches by Daniele S. allow the playlist to be restored across sessions and add a useful “Drop items here” message to the playlist when empty. More then 10 translations are included in this release. Thanks to all the people who worked to them on Transifex.
Minitunes has been recently included in Debian unstable and made its way to Ubuntu Oneiric. On the Mac side, I’m waiting for approval on the Mac App Store, which could be an opportunity to make this project sustainable. A Windows version will arrive soon.
Enjoy Minitunes!