THE BEST NEW OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE ON THE PLANET

Cozy >> Etherpad-Lite >> Macchina >> OCRmyPDF >> KOReader >> PDF Arranger >> Editly >> OpenTTD >> Picmi >> Albert >> Variety

Mayank Sharma isn’t much of a gardener in the real world, but comes into his own when it’s time to pick the best FOSS the world has to offer.

AUDIOBOOK PLAYER

Cozy

Version: 1.2.1

Web: https://cozy.sh

A good story makes the world go around. If you’re not too fond or have lost the habit of reading, perhaps audio might ease you back into the world of wisdom, wonder and storytelling.

Cozy is a nifty little audiobook player for Linux. If you already have a collection of audiobooks, you can import them into your Cozy library, which makes it easy to browse through the different files. It also lets you control playback speed, remember the playback position, so you can resume listening to books, and search for specific files through the library. More importantly, it supports a variety of formats, such as MP3, FLAC, OGG and so on.

Many distros offer Cozy in their software repos, but the version is quite old in a few. You can opt for the Flatpak package if you’re interested in a distro-neutral installation methodology.

If you already have Flatpak configured on your system, you can run the flatpak install flathub com. github.geigi.cozy command to install Cozy. Next, run the flatpak run com.github.geigi.cozy command to launch the audiobook player.

You can set up an audiobook directory or drag and drop files into Cozy to populate your library. The interface is rather minimalist, which is understandable considering the app’s limited feature set. You can switch to a dark mode, if you dislike the large white spaces littering the interface, and make other tweaks under Preferences. Click the Playback Speed button, bottom-right, to speed up or slow down the playback.

There are various sources for free audiobooks, which mostly comprise books in the public domain. Head over to https://librivox.org if you want a neatly catalogued list, or to www.digitalbook.io for public domain books and audiobooks. If you’ve never downloaded audiobooks before, their size can vary from anywhere around 200MB to about 1GB, depending on the length of the source material and the audio encoding used to record the audiobook.

Cozy looks through author names and book titles and displays all the matching results for your search keywords.

LET’S EXPLORE COZY...

1 Quick access tabs

Quickly access the recently played files or view files by their author or narrator.

2 Current chapter

Details about the chapter currently playing, together with controls to pause and resume the playback.

3 Chapter list

A list of all the chapters in the currently selected audiobook, along with their respective playback duration.

4 Playback controls

In addition to the basic controls to pause and resume playback, you can also increase or decrease the playback speed.

COLLABORATIVE EDITOR

Etherpad-lite

Version: 1.8.18

Web: https://github.com/ether/etherpad-lite

Whether it’s code, prose or even a menu for a night out with friends, almost everything is a product of collaboration between a group of people. With the soaring popularity of Google Docs, standalone editors have given way to collaborative ones that make it easy for geographically separated folks to work together. If you appreciate the thought of working with a browser-based collaborative editor that assigns different colours to contributions by different users, but are wary of using proprietary solutions such as Google Docs, Etherpad-Lite might interest you.