FOSSPicks

Music Radar

Even though we're used to the idea of a tool that can listen to music and identify it, especially on a smartphone, the reality is often different from the idea. Background noise, poor recording quality, and limited access to the clip you want to identify all inhibit the ability of these tools to do their job. As a result, there was a genuine "jaw-dropping" moment when we first tested out Music Radar on a piece of music. The piece was a rather obscure ambient track from 2020 by the artist Helios entitled "One And The Same." It has no drums, no melody, no repeating sections, no verse, and no chorus. It consists mainly of textured soft clusters of droning synthesizer chords and, at times, sounds almost identical to Brian Eno's 1983 classic, "Deep Blue Day." Music Radar listened to about seven seconds of "One And The Same" and perfectly identified it, proudly presenting the result with a thumbnail of the album cover, the title, artist, and year, along with links to search YouTube, play it on Spotify, and play a preview – seriously impressive.

This power has a price, though. The analysis and results come via API access to audd.io, which permits only a few requests per day. Music Radar isn't affiliated with this service, but you can create a token for yourself by creating an account and pasting the key into the Settings pane. This window also allows you to set the default recording time and which theme to use. Thanks to some clever choices, the application's main functionality couldn't be easier to use. There are two options for sourcing the audio: a connected microphone or whatever you're using to listen to music, such as a speaker. A speaker allows Music Radar to capture the audio at the highest quality, unaffected by external noise or microphone input, and surprisingly requires no messing around with PulseAudio. However it does this, regardless of the online AI magic it must perform, it just works.

Project Website

https://github.com/keshavbhatt/music-radar

Music Radar is brilliant if you listen to Internet radio and need to identify a track.

Git GUI

GitAhead

Most of us agree that Git is wonderful, and it's now being used everywhere, even in places not routinely handling code. Documentation, design, and even configuration files can often benefit from using Git, which can create a problem when non-technical people need to wrestle with some of Git's more esoteric features. This is where a graphical interface can help by promoting best practices, safe-guarding from mistakes, and by simply visualizing normally abstract commands. The problem is, we've yet to find a Git GUI that's able to do all of this without becoming more complex than the git command itself. But GitAhead is a very strong contender, especially in one area of Git's functionality: commit history. Understanding and visualizing a Git repository's commit history can help you to understand exactly what's happening when you later create and merge pull requests, or release branches, or even resolve conflicts with the git command itself.

GitAhead excels at this. It will connect directly with remote repositories on GitHub, Bitbucket, Beanstalk, and GitLab or access local repositories directly. These are saved into a quick access panel on the left and, by default, the last commit is shown in the main view when a repository is selected. The main view shows either an inline diff of the changes between this version and the previous, or a tree view of the file structure holding those changes. In all views, a middle pane displays a navigable log of the commit history. Each commit is clearly shown along a colored timeline for each branch, making it easy to see what came from where. You can also create a new branch, squash, merge, stash, checkout, and rebase from the menu system. It works brilliantly, takes much of the guesswork out of managing a Git repository, and is also a beautiful example of interface design.

Project Website

https://gitahead.github.io/gitahead.com/

Visualize branches and commits easily, as well as pull, merge, and rebase, with the easy-to-use GitAhead Git client.

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