Month: January 2020

  • Dopamine Is A Donationware Audio Player

    Dopamine Is A Donationware Audio Player

    Dopamine v2.0 is now available and it is a simple and attractive audio player that has both dark and light modes. The former is the default look.

    The program supports wav, mp3, ogg, flac, wma, ape, opus and m4a/aac formats. Upon first install – using either the exe or portable formats – an initial set up is initiated. The program will ask for the root music folder, the aforementioned mode and colour preferences.

    The program will list the audio based on artist, album and song title alphabetically in three columns. Dopamine features tabs to change the view somewhat. For example the genre tab categorizes songs by their type. The playlist tab will show any playlists, if none exist the user can create or import ones to list and listen that way. The supported formats include m3u, zpl, wpl and dspl.

    Via its settings (top right hamburger menu) the program can recheck and reload album covers. Other settings control the program colours, visibility of ratings, system notifications, and other features like automatically checking and downloading lyrics from sources like google.

    Playing modes are supported and Dopamine also has a equalizer with 18 presets from its default manual controls to dance to full bass and more.

    Keyboard controls such +/- for increasing and decreasing volume and ->/<- for moving ahead and back in songs are very useful of course New v2.0 features like playlists, sorting (see top right of columns) have improved Dopamine to the point of it being a worthy default audio player.

    Newly released v2.01 adds support for m3u8 playlists

  • Microsoft Edge Chromium

    Microsoft Edge Chromium

    Microsoft Edge launched in 2015 as a replacement for the fading Internet Explorer. It initially used EdgeHTML which is a proprietary browser engine made by Microsoft. In 2019 the decision was made to the Blink engine which runs Chromium based browsers such as Chrome and Opera.

    The switch over of regular Windows 7 and above users to the new Chromium version will now happen as part of the January updates (due to happen on January 15). This new version will support Chrome extensions that are ported over to the Microsoft Store and have some features exclusive to Microsoft such as access to Microsoft account access built in and PDF notes within the browser, among others.