Repro shutdown announcement

The Repro iOS app and website will go offline next week.

It’s been an interesting project. I built it from scratch and learned a lot making it. Wrote an iOS app, handled user feedback and went through several updates, later I also built and maintained a server backend API and an accompanying public website. Overall, I still like the idea but the thing is that I like some other ideas even more and need more space to pursue those.

Bye, Repro!

Tiny Player for Mac 1.2.8

Tiny Player for Mac version 1.2.8 is out now. This update brings the following improvements:

  • Volume control in status bar
  • Show # and duration of selected tracks
  • Add option to export playlist with selected tracks only
  • Scroll to last played song on launch

Gogs

As I lean towards self-hosted software, I recently switched from Bitbucket to Gogs.

Gogs turned out to be one of the best web-apps I have used in a long time. It’s easy to install and maintain, with a simple and fast interface.

The issue tracking and wiki are quite minimal but work well. I do miss an equivalent of Github’s “gists” to hold small snippets of code independent of any repository.

Running on a standalone $5 Digital Ocean VPS.

UPDATE: After using Gogs for a while on a small VPS, I ran into problems with RAM consumption for larger repositories/commits when doing git pull. This fixed it:


git config --global core.packedGitWindowSize 16m
git config --global core.packedGitLimit 64m
git config --global pack.windowMemory 64m
git config --global pack.packSizeLimit 64m
git config --global pack.thread 1
git config --global pack.deltaCacheSize 1m

Rant: fman criticisms

On this reddit thread a bunch of people criticized / made fun of the fman file manager and how the author had spent over 3000 hours making it.

Some argued that making a general file manager application was “easy” and the author of fman had spent way too much time making such a simple app.

I think PapaOscar90 is wrong. Anyone who goes to make a tool as general and versatile as a file manager deserves huge respect.

Doing a UI prototype for two pane file list that lets you browse files is EASY. Making a file manager that actually helps you manage files is HARD.

Let’s see what needs to be considered when we try to COPY A FILE:

  • Cross-platform
  • All filesystems
  • All OS versions
  • Network volumes
  • Filename length limits
  • Case sensitivity
  • Special character encoding
  • Handle and report errors
  • Detailed progress indicator
  • Estimate remaining time
  • Pause/resume
  • Interactive options to overwrite/skip/ duplicates
  • Symlinks
  • Hard links
  • Correctly copy attributes, even when support varies between src/destination
  • Sparse files
  • Special files such as /dev/zero
  • Block size (20 byte file can use 4KB of disk space)
  • Quotas
  • Channels
  • Compression
  • Encryption
  • Optimize for SSD/HDD
  • Optimize for same-volume and cross-volume, cross-device copies
  • Sandboxing
All this must work 100% of the time, on 100% systems, otherwise someone is going to lose their data.

I don’t even know if fman actually takes care of all that, but my point is that I can imagine one could easily spend a good portion of development making JUST THIS and I would consider it a great achievement if it actually worked.

See also: The Door Problem

Tiny Player for Mac 1.2.7

Tiny Player for Mac version 1.2.7 is out now. It adds support for macOS Mojave’s Dark Mode:

[twenty20 img1=“1320” img2=“1319” offset=“0.5” before=“Light” after=“Dark”]

Tiny Player 1.1

Tiny Player version 1.1 is out now. This update brings the following improvements:

  • New layout for player controls
  • Variable playback rate from 1.0× to 1.4×
  • Basic accessibility support

Tiny Player for Mac 1.2.6

Tiny Player for Mac version 1.2.6 is out now. This update brings the following improvements:

  • Better handling of M3U files (CRLF line endings)
  • Added backwards compatibility for macOS 10.10
 

Tiny Player for Mac 1.2.4

Tiny Player for Mac version 1.2.4 is out now. This update brings the following improvements:

  • Playback → Always enqueue new files (don’t clear playlist)
  • Playback → Go to current track
  • Fix zero padding of track number for current track
  • Fix ⌘L shortcut for changing playback mode
  • Remember playback mode after restart
UPDATE: 1.2.5 is out now to fix a problem with saving the Playback mode.

Alternative music players for Mac

Note: From time to time I add newly found players to this page. If you have a suggestion, please let me know.

Tiny Player for Mac

  • First and obvious choice
  • Free

Vox

  • Subscription based, from $4.99 / month
  • Cloud storage service

Swinsian

  • $19.95

Tomahawk

  • Hub for online sources

Audio Playr

  • $8.99

Cog

  • Open source

VLC

  • Primarily a video player, but has a playlist and handles audio as well

Bahamut

  • Open source

jmc

  • Open source, media manager

Plexamp

Webamp

Nighthawk

  • Electron based
  • Open source
  • Drag & drop breaks it

foobar2000 for Mac

Doppler

  • iPhone and Mac apps
  • Sync support
  • Artwork search
  • Organization helpers
  • One time purchase

Petrichor

  • wide variety of audio file formats
  • library view
  • lyrics, playlists
  • free

Radiccio

  • multiple sources, including local files, Apple Music, Plex, and Jellyfin
  • paid subscription called Radiccio Plus!
  • "librarian" feature for larger collections
  • pins, favorites, auto skip, journal
  • available on Mac App Store

Tiny Player for Mac 1.2.3

Tiny Player for Mac version 1.2.3 is out now. This update brings the following improvements:

  • Fix file associations
  • Add new playback mode: single track
  • Press ⌘L to cycle playback modes
  • Press ⇧⌘← and → to seek within current track by +/- 15 seconds
  • Basic accessibility labels
  • Ignore keyboard shortcuts when window is out of focus