Fresh from the Labs

This is a lovely little application that gives you very little grief. Think halfway between Amarok and Kaboodle, and you'll get the idea. For those of you who just want to play a few files at a time and hate fancy music players with more features than you could ever want, Minirok is for you. The player is minimalistic and dressed-down, but it still allows for features, such as playlists, skinning, Last.fm support, keybindings and DCOP support for KDE integration. According to Minirok's Web site:

Figure 1. For those sick of do-it-all players, here's the wonderfully simple Minirok.

Installation

If you head to the Minirok Web site, both tarballs and .debs are available (the Debian packages are a little bit older than the source tarballs). As far as dependencies go, aside from PyQt and PyKDE, the only dependency that's relatively obscure is python-mutagen—a Python module that handles audio metadata. Apt users should be able to install the module via the following:

# apt-get install python-mutagen

After this command, the .deb should install, and the tarball should build with no trouble. To install the .deb package, open a terminal to the directory the .deb sits in, and use the command:

# dpkg -i minirok_0.7-1_all.deb

To install via source, download and extract the tarball. Open a terminal in the new directory, and enter the command:

# ./setup.sh install

Usage

Minirok should be in your menu under Multimedia. If not, simply run the command minirok. Once you're in, just click and drag a folder or MP3 into the window pane on the right. As far as controls go, the button on the bottom right that looks like a window clears the playlist, so if you've made everything cluttered and want to start fresh, there's your button. Otherwise, it's a simple case of skip forward or back a track, stop, play/pause and a slider bar. On the left are two buttons: the first, a downward-pointing arrow, is for repeat, and the second, a right-pointing arrow, is for randomizing. And, that's about it—really nice and minimal!

For the moment, things are fairly stable due to a minimal interface, with only the occasional bug. I found that it didn't like some kinds of MP3s, and sometimes it doesn't lead onto the next track on a playlist, but those issues seemed to be fixed in the latest tarball. Overall, this project's been my favourite this month. It fills a niche and doesn't give you all that installation grief.

If you're looking for a good tool for finding duplicate files, this is it. I've been researching these tools for a while, but I didn't trust any to touch my filesystem, as many of my duplicate files are there on purpose. Perfect Match (or pmatch for short) is non-destructive. Using the default options simply prints out a list of what files are duplicated and lets you decide for yourself which ones you'd like to remove.

As for goals and aspirations, according to author Tomasz Muras' Web site:

Installation

For the moment, there is no installer available for pmatch, so you'll have to take a few steps here and there, but thankfully, not too many, as it's a small project. The main dependency is Ruby, and a subproject called RubyGems—a system for managing Ruby software libraries. Chances are that RubyGems already is in your distribution's repository, so doing a simple:

# apt-get install rubygems