The stylish forthcoming music app ‘Minitunes’ is ‘pretty close to release’ according to its developer Falvio Tordini. Falvio is now calling for some last minute testing of the media player before a formal first release is made.
Yet Another Music Player? Oh, but this one does it so much better…
First up MiniTunes isn’t about shoehorning every feature under the moon into the app; it’s small, simple and straightforward. This is a large boon when trying to differentiate it from the competition. Although it has a simple premise it doesn’t sacrifice style
or user-friendliness one iota. Not only does it look gorgeous, handles well and feels fresh but also proves that ‘basic’ media players needn’t be ugly.
Navigation is done visually via the Artists or Albums or Folders tabs. Whole albums or specific tracks within albums can be added to the main ‘playlist’, the approach that the application uses to manage playback.
Music playback is also augmented with an insanely well thought out contextual info, pulling in data from Last.FM and the web including artwork, band info, album info and lyrics. It is easily the most comfortable feeling integration of web-data I’ve seen in a media player to date. No annoying toggle-panes or add-ons to install it’s is just there and auto-updates.
A 32bit-friendly binary of this “pesudo-release candidate” is below, x64 bit users will need to build from source (Which I can attest installs fine).
Download (extract > double click on ‘minitunes’ inside to run)
Installing from Source
To install the app ‘properly; (not really advised for an application not yet stable) download the source (here) extract and then run: –
- cd minitunes
- qmake
- make
- sudo make install
About the PPA
Whilst there is a
Minitunes PPA out there in the ether it does NOT contain this the most recent build.
