It has been just a bit more than two years since the last release of Euterpe. Throughout all of this time I’ve been (slowly) improving it and adding new features. But never felt comfortable creating a new release since many things were in progress and nothing quite ready. Well, this is still mostly the case. But I’ve been using the development version continuously and decided that enough is enough. Last few weeks were spent thoroughly testing the server and writing many new unit tests.

At least it was unexpected for me. Let me explain. Suppose you are using Go and want to embed some files into your program’s binary and then serve them over HTTP. This is something which Euterpe does too. In this scenario you will very likely arrive at the conclusion that using embed and http.FileServer will be the most straightforward solution. To the point where it is actually an example in the embed module.

Hosting a streaming server on your own is great and all. But it comes with a huge pain in the ass. You have to procure your music in a DRM-free format somehow. And this is the most annoying part of everything, I am pretty sure everyone doing will aggree here. So I’ve decided to write this article with my experience on the matter with the hopes it will help someone.

The convergent client is now at the point where if one is enthusiastic enough then they could use it day-to-day. Actually, I’ve been doing just that last few days. To celebrate that I requested for it to be added to Flathub. After some really helpful review process it was accepted and now one could find the Euterpe client there. So without further explanations Flathub Download Page For some reason this was really motivating.

For some time now I’ve been working on a GTK client for Euterpe. One meant to work on both mobile and desktop Linux. Think about phones such as PinePhone, Librem 5. But about your homey Linux on the desktop machine too. It is still a very early alpha and certainly misses almost all of the features one expects from a media player. But I’ve reached a state where one could actually use it to play music from their server, albeit by manually clicking on every song after one finishes.

I am a big believer in the “Show, Don’t Tell” doctrine. So this means I would’ve made everything in my power to make sure people would know what Euterpe looks like and how it feels to used it, right? Unfortunately, I didn’t live to this standard. Up to this point a person coming to the website would’ve been hard pressed to imagine what to expect from this magical and clearly superior music streaming service.

The time has come where “HTTPMS” is finally renamed to “Euterpe”. I’ve been thinking about a new name since the very beginning of the project. At the same time it seemed like too much bother so I was pushing it down the road. And enduring the bad name all along. It was looking too much like “HTTPS” so even I myself was constantly writing it wrong. Fortunately, to this day there is no https program or command on a standard Linux installation.

I’ve been using dark themes for quite some time now. For everything, from the terminal to the OS to the browser. But at the back of my mind was always this nagging voice. It always said some version of “But you haven’t done any dark versions of your own interfaces, why would you expect anyone else to do so?” Well, no more! I can safely say that this devil has been slain.

In the last decade people (in the western countries at least) are moving away from buying their music on physical medium. Instead they tend to subscribe to a streaming service such Spotify, Google Play Music (R.I.P.) and iTunes. Streaming is certainly more convenient. You don’t have to lug around real-world objects in order to listen to your music, you don’t have to decide which part of the music collection to actually cary with you and most importantly, you don’t have to change the vinyl, tape or CD every 40 minutes or so.