0.3 Release of Elisa Music Player

Elisa is a music player developed by the KDE community that strives to be simple and nice to use. We also recognize that we need a flexible product to account for the different workflows and use-cases of our users.

We focus on a very good integration with the Plasma desktop of the KDE community without compromising the support for other platforms (other Linux desktop environments, Windows and Android).

We are creating a reliable product that is a joy to use and respects our users privacy. As such, we will prefer to support online services where users are in control of their data.

New Features

The post about the beta release summarizes all the new features in the 0.3 release.

New minimal mode

Fixes

The following bugs have been worked on or fixed since the beta:

• Bug 397446 – Scrolling in the Album, Artist, etc. and Now Playing views is much too fast ;
• Bug 398924 – Status box is too small ;
• Bug 387437 – Elisa unaware of Baloo if it starts after Elisa ;
• Bug 398718 – User should be able to start typing to search after pressing Ctrl+F ;
• Bug 396840 – Elisa – High memory usage (improvements have landed in 0.3.0 release and more will come to 0.3.1) ;
• Bug 392778 – Elisa should better handle being scaled down to a small size (not yet finished but some improvements are in 0.3.0 release) ;

Getting Involved

The team would like to thank everyone who contributed to the development of Elisa, including code contributions, testing, and bug reporting.

We are already working on new features for the next release. If you enjoy using Elisa, please consider becoming a contributor yourself. We are happy for any contribution!

We have tagged some tasks as junior jobs. They are a perfect way to start contributing to Elisa.

The flathub Elisa package allows an easy way to test this new release.

Elisa source code tarball is available here. There is also a Windows setup at the same location (thanks to the Craft and binary-factory teams).

 

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0.3 Beta Release of Elisa Music Player

Elisa is a music player developed by the KDE community that strives to be simple and nice to use. We also recognize that we need a flexible product to account for the different workflows and use-cases of our users.

We focus on a very good integration with the Plasma desktop of the KDE community without compromising the support for other platforms (other Linux desktop environments, Windows and Android).

We are creating a reliable product that is a joy to use and respects our users privacy. As such, we will prefer to support online services where users are in control of their data.

New Features and Improvements

The main improvements are the following:

• Hide stars when there is no rating by Diego Gangl ;

• Various fixes for the Windows support by Matthieu Gallien ;
• Implement interface of Baloo to watch renamed files by Matthieu Gallien ;
• Upgrade some code using deprecated features in KDeclarative framework by Alexander Stippich ;
• Align the action buttons with the big icon in the views header by Diego Gangl ;
• Allow the playlist to be hidden when browsing your music by Diego Gangl ;

• Always display the title of the playlist entries by Matthieu Gallien ;
  

• Internal improvements to various non graphical components to allow future improvements to the header bar by Matthieu Gallien ;
• Resize track metadata view dynamically by Alexander Stippich ;
• Improvements to the header of the play list by Diego Gangl ;
• Add a mode where Elisa can show only the header but in the full window by Carl Schwan. Welcome to the project. This was a junior task identified in the Elisa workboard ;
• Optimize the data methods of model and use QAbstractItemModelTester (see the blog from Giuseppe D’Angelo) by Matthieu Gallien ;
• Makes KIO and KFileMetaData be optional dependencies by Matthieu Gallien. This a preliminary step to allow building Elisa for Android with as few dependencies as possible.

New Mode with only the Player Header Visible

This feature improves two different cases. The first is to allow usage of Elisa with a small window. In this case, only minimal information is shown in a possibly small window. The second is to implement the “party” mode that was originally designed by Andrew Lake.

Other Improvements to the Interface

As already said, there have been various improvements to the interface.

How You Can Help

We are preparing for the next stable release. As such, there is a feature freeze and an ongoing effort to squash as many bugs as possible.

We really appreciate any feedback on the current state via bugs.kde.org. We welcome bug report or feature suggestions.

You can get the next release by building from source or by using the flatpak package provided by KDE. The windows installer is also available here (thanks a lot to the Craft and binary-factory teams).

0.2.1 Release of Elisa

The Elisa team is happy to announce our new bugfix release, version 0.2.1.

Elisa is a music player developed by the KDE community that strives to be simple and nice to use. We also recognize that we need a flexible product to account for the different workflows and use-cases of our users.

We focus on a very good integration with the Plasma desktop of the KDE community without compromising the support for other platforms (other Linux desktop environments, Windows and Android).

We are creating a reliable product that is a joy to use and respects our users privacy. As such, we will prefer to support online services where users are in control of their data.

In parallel to the development of the next stable release, we have been pushing a few fixes to the current stable version.

0.2.1 version of Elisa

We have fixed the layout of the playlist in Windows build. They should now be identical to the Linux builds. Here we are using the ability to tune some parts of the interface by providing specific qml components for a given platform.

We fixed issues that could lead to wrong data shown for albums with multiple discs.

The buttons in the header on top of the views are now aligned with the top and bottom of the big icon.

Improvements in the views header

We will continue to fix issues in the stable version for some weeks and may produce a second bugfix release in one month.

Get Involved

The team would like to thank everyone who contributed to the development of Elisa, including code contributions, testing, and bug reporting.

We are already working on new features for the next release. If you enjoy using Elisa, please consider becoming a contributor yourself. We are happy for any contribution!

We have tagged some tasks as junior jobs. They are a perfect way to start contributing to Elisa (Elisa Workboard)

The flathub Elisa package allows an easy way to test this new release.

Elisa source code tarball is available here.

0.2.1 release tarball

A Windows installer is also available thanks to Craft and binary-factory teams.

0.2 Release of Elisa

The Elisa team is happy to announce our new release, version 0.2.0.

Elisa is a music player developed by the KDE community that strives to be simple and nice to use. We also recognize that we need a flexible product to account for the different workflows and use-cases of our users.

We focus on a very good integration with the Plasma desktop of the KDE community without compromising the support for other platforms (other Linux desktop environments, Windows and Android).

We are creating a reliable product that is a joy to use and respects our users privacy. As such, we will prefer to support online services where users are in control of their data.

Since the first release of Elisa, we have been busy improving it. We added new music browsing views (home directory browser and a genre browser). We have improved the interface and general performance. A lot of smaller item have also been done (full change log 0.2.0 change log).

New interface of 0.2.0 Elisa

Browsing Views

All views are now sorted in ascending order by default. There’s also a button to toggle between ascending and descending.

A new view allows you to browse your home directory. Only music files and directories are shown. This way, tracks with missing music tags can easily be played.

A new view allows you to browse by going from genres to artists, their albums and its tracks.

We plan to further improve this by letting users choose the way they browse their music.

Interface

Elisa now has a proper icon. Thanks a lot to Paul Lesur who contributed it.

The player bar is now featuring all playback controls. The look of the playlist view and the views selector have been refreshed and improved.

We now use the new icons from Breeze to differentiate between actions (play, pause, etc) and states (playing, paused, etc).

Performance

To avoid scanning files for changes at the start, Elisa now keeps the last modified time of files. Users not relying on Baloo should see a huge improvement in starting times.

The browsing views are now only loaded when shown. This is a first step to reduce the memory usage. It should also speed up application start.

Miscellaneous

Elisa is now finding more cover images and most common cases should work.

There have been a few fixes to Mpris2 support.

There have been various fixes to the internal tracks database.

Get Involved

The team would like to thank everyone who contributed to the development of Elisa, including code contributions, testing, and bug reporting.

We are already working on new features for the next release. If you enjoy using Elisa, please consider becoming a contributor yourself. We are happy for any contribution!

We have tagged some tasks as junior jobs. They are a perfect way to start contributing to Elisa (https://phabricator.kde.org/project/board/193/)

The flathub Elisa package allows an easy way to test this new release.

Elisa source code tarball is available here.

https://download.kde.org/stable/elisa/0.2.0/elisa-0.2.0.tar.xz

A Windows installer is also available thanks to Craft and binary-factory teams.

0.2 Beta 1 Release of Elisa Music Player

0.2 Beta Release of Elisa Music Player

Elisa is a music player developed by the KDE community that strives to be simple and nice to use. We also recognize that we need a flexible product to account for the different workflows and use-cases of our users.

We focus on a very good integration with the Plasma desktop of the KDE community without compromising the support for other platforms (other Linux desktop environments, Windows and Android).

We are creating a reliable product that is a joy to use and respects our users privacy. As such, we will prefer to support online services where users are in control of their data.

New Features and Improvements

The main area of improvements are the following:

• We have been fixing problems related to music import (different albums being merged, …) and general handling of music metadata ;
• Improve cover images discovery (should fix most common cases) ;
• Improve performance of the internal music database ;
• Improve build time by factoring most c++ code in a dedicated library ;
• Improvement of the player control bar with most controls related to playback being located here ;
• Only load a music browsing view when it is used (faster and lighter on memory usage) ;
• Add a browsing view by genres ;
• Add a browsing view for the filesystem.

Current Elisa Interface

Test of the future 0.2 version

The release is available from elisa-0.1.80.tar.xz and also in the form of a Windows setup (generated using Craft and binary-factory.kde.org). You can also test by using the nightly flatpak builds from KDE.

Please report any issues to the KDE bugtracker.

News about Elisa

Elisa is a music player developed by the KDE community that strives to be simple and nice to use. We also recognize that we need a flexible product to account for the different workflows and use-cases of our users.

We focus on a very good integration with the Plasma desktop of the KDE community without compromising the support for other platforms (other Linux desktop environments, Windows and Android).

We are creating a reliable product that is a joy to use and respects our users privacy. As such, we will prefer to support online services where users are in control of their data.

 Improvements of Elisa Interface

We have got a new application icon from Paul Lesur. Thanks for the help.

New Elisa Application Icon

Diego Gangl has been working on improving the design of the interface. Among the changes some where suggested quite some time ago by the KDE VDG.

The main controls of playback are now all on the same horizontal bar. This way, it should be much easier to locate them.

The view selector list has also a new simpler and cleaner look. I especially appreciate the removal of the not quite working color animations of the current item indicator.

Alexander Stippich added a small button that allows to sort the views in ascending or descending order. They are now sorted by default. The data comes from the tracks database in sorted order (done by Kevin Ottens). The case is ignored.

Current Interface with Many Improvements

Many Improvements on Tracks Properties

A lot of work has recently went into Baloo and KFileMetaData frameworks. While this is not strictly related to the Elisa project, it is a huge improvement.

Elisa got hugely improved support for discovering existing image files with a cover. This work has been done by Kevin Ottens and Alexander Stippich. There are still cases where the cover might not be found if for example the cover file name has spaces. We may also want to be able to select the best one among many.

Elisa got fixes to better support track properties with multiple values. The current state is still not able to fully support authors list for example but we will eventually get there.

Performance Improvements when Checking Existing Music at Start

Elisa stores your discovered music in a small database to allow a quick start. Due to that, it needs to check if known tracks have changed or have been moved or removed. It also has to check if new music has been added.

This had been quite fast when using the Baloo support but was really slow for big music collections indexed by the Elisa specific indexer.

It is now storing the latest modification time of the files (possible by requiring Qt 5.10) and will only parse the properties of a track if needed. I did tests with a collection of around 4000 tracks and the improvement is really noticeable.

Please if you still notice problems, send us your feedback.

Ongoing work

Alexander Stippich is working on file system browsing from inside Elisa.

This work will be especially useful for playing tracks with no or bad properties.

It will also benefits everybody because when doing this work it has resulted in fixes for shared code like falling back to file name when no title property is there.

I am working to allow to browse the music by genre. This has led to many improvements to the automatic tests and the tracks database.

Work In Progress: Browsing by Genre

One of the interesting side improvements is that now the only view that is visible is loaded in the interface. This should improve startup time and resource consumption.

Next Steps

We have decided to modify a little bit our release schedule to have two months before the feature freeze and only one more month before the release of the next stable release (i.e. the 0.2 version). The next step is the 2nd of June.

We Need your Help

There are quite some small tasks that are open in the Elisa workboard. They are a really good opportunity to join the project. Everybody will be happy to help and guide you. We will identify some junior jobs (I borrowed the idea from a recent blog post from KDE Connect team).

We also need help with every other tasks like: triaging bugs, working on code, improving the design and helping with the promo.

0.1.1 Release of Elisa

The Elisa team is happy to announce the first bug fix release for the 0.1 version.

The following changes have been integrated:

• c5bc988 search for more cover names in directory by Alexander Stippich (Fix bug 392843);
• 5113d00 remove the huge playlist icon by Alexander Stippich (Fix bug 392782).

One important note, Elisa is now available from flathub. Only the stable releases will be distributed through flathub.

Flathub Elisa page

This release also has a windows setup at the time of release. Thanks a lot to the help from the Craft and binary-factory teams. Without them, I would not be able to do it.

Elisa source code tarball is available here. The Windows installer is also available from this place.

0.1 Release of Elisa

The Elisa team is happy to announce our first release, version 0.1.

Elisa is a music player developed by the KDE community that strives to be simple and nice to use. We also recognize that we need a flexible product to account for the different workflows and use-cases of our users.

We focus on a very good integration with the Plasma desktop of the KDE community without compromising the support for other platforms (other Linux desktop environments, Windows and Android).

We are creating a reliable product that is a joy to use and respects our users privacy. As such, we will prefer to support online services where users are in control of their data.

Since this is the very first release of Elisa, the number of features is not as extensive as in other mature music players. We aim to provide a solid foundation for new features to be added in the following releases.

Elisa lets you browse music by album, artist or all tracks.  Songs can be searched and added to the playlist easily and it is also possible to inspect your music’s metadata.

The music is indexed using either a private indexer or an indexer using Baloo. The private one can be configured to scan music on chosen paths. The Baloo one is faster because Baloo is providing all needed data from its own database. You can build and play your own playlists. HiDPI monitors are supported.

The team would like to thank everyone who contributed to the development of Elisa, including code contributions, testing, and bug reporting.

We would also like to thank the people who wrote articles about Elisa. We have already received very helpful feedback from several publications like lwn.net and Linux Format.

We are already working on new features for the next releases, which include under-the-hood changes for better performance and better metadata support. If you enjoy using Elisa, please consider becoming a contributor yourself. We are happy for any support!

Elisa source code tarball is available here.

Last Weeks Activity in Elisa and Release Schedule

Elisa is a music player developed by the KDE community that strives to be simple and nice to use. We also recognize that we need a flexible product to account for the different workflows and use-cases of our users.

We focus on a very good integration with the Plasma desktop of the KDE community without compromising the support for other platforms (other Linux desktop environments, Windows and Android).

We are creating a reliable product that is a joy to use and respects our users privacy. As such, we will prefer to support online services where users are in control of their data.

Release Schedule

We are preparing the 0.1 release of Elisa. A stable branch has been created and translations set up for the stable branch.

We plan to have a string freeze starting 24th March.

The release will be tagged on 7th April with the release happening shortly after.

We are also continuing development of what will become the 0.2 release. We plan to make a release each 3 months and to support the stable release with a few bug fix releases. We have summarized the schedule for the next releases in the KDE community wiki.

Now is really a good time to join the Elisa team. You will be able to work on code that will soon reach potential users. You will not have to wait for a long time given that we will soon release.

Activities

Since the last blog posts, quite some changes went into Elisa. Most notably is the partial migration to raw Qt Quick Controls v2 and all the fixes for HighDPI support. Alexander is also looking at opportunities to leverage Kirigami.

Current Elisa interface

Here is the raw git changelog:

• ddf1354 artist, album artist, genre composer and lyricist can be strings list: fix Elisa
• 184f15b Don’t rely on playPause for MPRIS pause
• 3a46c62 add tests for navigation bar
• b38c3de add top margin for album view and all tracks view
• f47cab3 ensure the busy indicator is not visible when not running
• 15339f8 fix double click for playlist
• 6b862b6 fix metadata view after merge of controls2 branch
• 115b9bc fix music not being stopped when clearing the play list
• d00c821 remove random generator setup from qml
• 617c81c pipe loading of album data through proxy model
• 9a798f8 Merge branch ‘controls2_rebase’
• c6e928f fix other small issues with enqueue methods of MediaPlayList
• d74f0a8 add missing explicit in front of some constructors thanks to ebn.kde.org
• f062fb1 enqueue an empty list of tracks ID is now doing nothing
• 8f534b2 fix a small error due to migration to object creation in c++
• 6e4f632 Fix MPRIS pause
• 7aceef7 fix several visual issues
• 7255eb7 convert metadata view to a controls v2 window
• f214758 Revert “ask Qt Quick Controls v2 style to be org.kde.desktop”
• 4f874dc ask Qt Quick Controls v2 style to be org.kde.desktop
• fef03db fix issues after controls2 port
• 3afca2d port to controls2
• 58647d0 connect to deleteLater to ensure that object is deleted
• b91a425 main: Use HighDpiPixmaps
• 6067340 qml: Use pointSize instead of pixelSize for HiDPI screens
• 3d221a5 use contains for membership test
• 7654591 fix all tracks view signals

The following authors have contributed to Elisa:

• Alexander Stippich
• Matthieu Gallien
• Andreas Schneider
• Fabian Kosmale
• Nicolas Fella

Thanks a lot for those contributions.

Testing Elisa

There are several way to test Elisa but the easiest one is using the flatpak package produced by KDE if you are running a system supporting flatpak. The flatpak service is back automatically building a package when changes are integrated in Elisa. This is the kind of services the awesome KDE community provides. You can easily contribute your energy or some money to help this to continue.

If you happen to use windows, there is also a setup built by binary-factory KDE service (Elisa is built with craft and craft makes it very easy to produce Windows setup).

There are also some packages built for your distributions from the git repository. This is a nice way to test Elisa. Thanks for the effort of the packagers.

Last Weeks Activity in Elisa

Elisa is a music player developed by the KDE community that strives to be simple and nice to use. We also recognize that we need a flexible product to account for the different workflows and use-cases of our users.

We focus on a very good integration with the Plasma desktop of the KDE community without compromising the support for other platforms (other Linux desktop environments, Windows and Android).

We are creating a reliable product that is a joy to use and respects our users privacy. As such, we will prefer to support online services where users are in control of their data.

Elisa has been accepted by the KDE community as an official project with its own release schedule and hosted in the Extragear – Multimedia section. We are preparing a release schedule  for our first stable release.

Now is really a good time to join the Elisa team. You will be able to work on code that will soon reach potential users. You will not have to wait for a long time given that we intend to release as soon as we can.

I would also like to thanks all people having offer their help on the HighDPI support. I dot yet own proper hardware to test that and people from the community stepped up to help. You are amazing. If any issues are still visible, please report them.

The following things have been integrated in Elisa git repository:

• Add a margin to the album grid by Diego Gangl ;
• add missing const ref in return of MusicAlbum::trackFromIndex by Matthieu Gallien ;
• include QtConcurrentRun instead of QtConcurrent in src/model/allalbumsmodel.cpp by Matthieu Gallien ;
• rename the include guard macro in singlealbumproxymodel.h (from ebn.kde.org) by Matthieu Gallien ;
• hopefully fix an ebn.kde.org include warning in autotests/elisaqmltests.cpp by Matthieu Gallien ;
• improve appdata file (improve homepage and add documentation) by Matthieu Gallien ;
• move MediaPlaylist to C++ by Alexander Stippich ;
• makes the filter part be invisible when not expanded by Matthieu Gallien ;
• Various general and RTL fixes by Safa AlFulaij ;
• To make theme size depend on DPI by Mykola Krachkovsky with contributions from Alexander Stippich, Andreas Schneider and maybe others I am missing ;
• lazy initialize as much as possible by Matthieu Gallien ;
• makes Baloo optional again by Matthieu Gallien ;
• improve adding tracks or albums from the proxy models (fast and not blocking) by Matthieu Gallien ;
• implement a trackdata helper to display more detailed track information by Alexander Stippich. One notable addition is the cover image being shown in the track information window ;
• fix windows support not picking up the specific qml files by Matthieu Gallien ;