Zina is not Andromeda – a fork
One of the more pleasant discoveries I did in the land of free¹ software, is a web application called Zina. Zina is a recursive acronym, that stands for ‘Zina is not Andromeda’.
Zina is basically a web front-end to your music collection, but it is more than that. It has many features, including a flash player for playing songs locally, a playlist manager, a ratings system, and much more. Once, I created my own application for this purpose, but after getting acquainted with Zina, I dropped my own ‘mp3front’, and decided to stick with Zina.
Now, as we all know, no single piece of software is perfect, and neither is Zina. The biggest drawback is, that it seems to have been abandonned by its author. The latest news posting on the homepage says:
2010 Nov: Zina is on hiatus. Author got married and bought a house.
This means that any improvents that the software might need, we will have to make ourselves.
For my own convenience, but also to open up collaboration with other interested developers, I imported Zina version 2.0b22 into a repository on Github. There, you can browse the source code, including my modifications and download the package. If you are interested in contributing, please let me know. Leave a comment here (registration required) or find me on Twitter.
From the old Help forum on Sourceforge, I understand that Zina doesn’t work with the latest Joomla releases. Since I don’t use Joomla, that would be the perfect thing for you to pick up 🙂
Let’s see where this will go!
¹ Released under GPL v2
