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.
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 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.
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 ;
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.
We have released the version 0.1 alpha 2 last week.
Elisa with Breeze Dark color theme
Now is really a good time to join the Elisa team. Alexander did quite a lot of changes to lower the barrier to entry. He is actively maintaining the community Elisa wiki page. We have plenty of small tasks open in Elisa workboard.
We also welcome other kind of contributions like design, graphics, promo, etc.
The project is trying to stay agile and to give users an easy way to follow our work by supporting distributions channels like binary-factory or the flatpak build of KDE applications. There are also some distributions with ways to build latest code as a package (Arch AUR).
The following things have been integrated in Elisa git repository:
Remove duplicated property in AbstractMediaProxyModel by Matthieu Gallien ;
Makes AllAlbumsModel use a thread for long operations in order to not block the UI by Matthieu Gallien ;
Reorder methods in mediaplaylist by Alexander Stippich ;
Fix comment about license of the documentation to match the one in kdoctools by Matthieu Gallien ;
Always explain that support for UPnP is currently broken by Matthieu Gallien ;
Add missing runtime dependencies to README.packagers by Matthieu Gallien ;
Add one missing dependency for packagers by Matthieu Gallien ;
Move application menu to own file by Alexander Stippich ;
Fix artist name in album view by Alexander Stippich ;
Use clearPlayList instead of extra code in qml by Alexander Stippich ;
Add dependency to readme and fix link by Alexander Stippich ;
Implement a filter view and play buttons for all views by Alexander Stippich ;
Remove duplicate MimeType entry in the desktop file by Robert-André Mauchin ;
Fixes warnings reported by clazy checker tool by Matthieu Gallien ;
Fix installation of elisa qml package for the configuration dialog by Matthieu Gallien ;
Small tweak to the qmlpackage for the elisa configuration module by Matthieu Gallien ;
Avoid crashing when invoked from dbus without a valid list of files to open by Matthieu Gallien ;
Unbreak the ability to configure shortcuts by Matthieu Gallien ;
Fix restore of playlist position on start by Matthieu Gallien ;
Elisa has moved to kdereview. The feedback from the different releases has motivated this move in order to be able to (if Elisa is accepted by the KDE community) make regular releases to allow user to give feedback.
The Elisa team is happy to announce the second alpha release of the Elisa music player.
When building this release we have worked on our vision for the 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.
We also want to align with the KDE wide goals that have been chosen by the whole community. Since the last release we updated our community wiki page and cleaned some cruft accumulated from the very early time of the development to lower the barrier for new people willing to join the development.
The user interface was further tuned for a smooth experience. Several issues with dark themes were fixed and the appearance of the buttons and sliders were slightly altered to improve their readability.
Elisa with Breeze Dark color theme
We also worked on improving the performance with a focus on the Elisa files indexer. We still recommend to use baloo when possible because the experience is better.
We added the possibility to directly open a music track from a file browser in Elisa or by specifying files as command line options. This is the first step to add support for browsing your music directories directly from Elisa.
Support for reading and writing m3u playlist has been added. There is one know issue when opening playlist with track file names including non ascii characters.
Finally, Elisa is know able to show you the metadata of your tracks and extending the set of supported metadata is an ongoing work.
We hope you will enjoy this release as much as we enjoyed building it.
There are binary packages available from Neon, arch and Fedora Linux distributions. KDE provides automatic builds of flatpak packages for Elisa (it may not be always up to date). You can follow KDE wide documentation (the package name is org.kde.elisa) . A Windows setup is also provided from the Craft and binary-factory teams (binary-factory).
Elisa is a music player designed to be simple and nice to use. It allows to browse music by album, artist or all tracks. You can build and play your own playlist. We aim to build a fluid interface that is easy to use.
Alexander did several changes to ease on boarding for new developers. For example, he renamed files that have difficult to understand names (this project started as a pure UPnP/DLNA client). This is really important if we want to be able to grow the number of developers working on Elisa. Kudos to him.
Alexander is working on a quite big feature. It will add “enqueue” and “replace and play” buttons to all views. Here is a preview of that feature:
New view header with the extra buttonsNew header of view with filter visible
The new buttons will add all music currently shown by the view. It means that one can directly adds the result of a search. This is a big improvement in productivity.
The following things have been integrated in Elisa git repository:
Optimize files indexing by doing more stuff in pure c++ instead of mixing c++ and qml in inefficient ways by Matthieu Gallien
use ModelTest from Qt to better test all models by Matthieu Gallien
fix import tracks count being wrong when not built with Baloo by Matthieu Gallien
add elisaImport executable to perform benchmarks by Matthieu Gallien
unbreak qml automatic tests by Matthieu Gallien
use qrc url instead of relative path by Alexander Stippich
query all metadata and make them available by Alexander Stippich
fix keyboard focus problem in GridBrowserDelegate with an automatic qml test by Matthieu Gallien
move qml files to subfolder by Alexander Stippich
Disable track number for songs that don’t have it by Diego Gangl
fix missing argument by Alexander Stippich
rename main elisa files by Alexander Stippich
Change color of elapsed time in seek/volume bars by Diego Gangl
Fix minor typo by Yuri Chornoivan
improve the documentation to match the current state by Matthieu Gallien
harmonize handling for all content delegates by Alexander Stippich
use PropertyAction by Alexander Stippich
use real instead of var by Alexander Stippich
implement a metadata view for tracks by Alexander Stippich
change contrast in player controls by Alexander Stippich
replace default background for HeaderBar by a wallpaper from Breeze by Matthieu Gallien
introduce GridBrowserView and GridBrowserDelegate for generic grid view by Matthieu Gallien
Elisa is a music player designed to be simple and nice to use. It allows to browse music by album, artist or all tracks. You can build and play your own playlist. We aim to build a fluid interface that is easy to use.
We are preparing for the next alpha release when the following features will be done. Alexander is working on a metadata view for tracks. I am working on cleaning the different grid views into a generic one.
Diego Gangl did several modifications of the interface as part of the interactions with KDE VDG.
All in all, Elisa now looks like that:
Snapshot of album view including the changed application menu
The following things have been integrated in Elisa git repository:
Fix modification of files with DatabaseInterface::modifyTracksList by Matthieu Gallien ;
This patch increases the blur in the headerbar background, increases contrast
between background and text, and brings the labels closer together by Diego Gangl ;
Tune appearance of all albums and all artists views by Matthieu Gallien ;
Fix wrong id reference in FilterBar by Matthieu Gallien ;
In all models, calls base class roleNames before adding new role names by Matthieu Gallien ;
Simplify the definition of custom roles in all models by Matthieu Gallien ;
Allow MusicArtist to be stored in a QVariant by Matthieu Gallien ;
Allow to enqueue artist in MediaPlayList by using MusicArtist objects by Matthieu Gallien ;
Change height of delegate in GridView by Matthieu Gallien ;
Fix a typo in the imported tracks notification by Diego Gangl ;
Make shadows centered and slightly larger. Fits better with other shadows in the
desktop (like dolphin and widgets), and it also aligns with the new shadows for
breeze (D9549) by Diego Gangl ;
Fixes key arrow navigation in list and gridviews and implements enter and return key actions for delegates by Alexander Stippich ;
Allow elisa to open any external files, scan them and enqueue them by Matthieu Gallien ;
Syncs the windows theme file with the current main theme file. Removes bundled icons for windows which are not needed as proven by ViewSelector.qml, but also tested on windows by Alexander Stippich ;
Make the delegates more appealing when using a dark theme also add hover animations while keeping the loader component by Alexander Stippich ;
Fix keyboard navigation for album artist view too by Alexander Stippich ;
Move all icon and image definitions to theme file and make some consistency fixes. In anticipation of a colorized version of the artist image, there are two definitions which currently hold the same icon. Also enables the display of a default cover in context view by Alexander Stippich ;
qml profiler shows a few percent of cpu time spent just for the creation for simple buttons for the delegates. cut this by loading on demand by Alexander Stippich ;
Try to find png files for covers if jpegs do not exist can probably be made a lot smarter than this, but kept it simple for now by Alexander Stippich ;
Try to fix build (as seen on binary-factory.kde.org) by Matthieu Gallien ;
Re-order menu items to fit better with the order used in other KDE applications by Diego Gangl.
Elisa is a music player designed to be simple and nice to use. It allows to browse music by album, artist or all tracks. You can build and play your own playlist. We aim to build a fluid interface that is easy to use.
I enjoy working on the elisa music player. I hope some people enjoy using it. All of this would not have been possible without the KDE community. There is an ongoing fundraising campaign. Please support it.
Not much have been done due to Christmas and end of year holidays.
The following things have been integrated in Elisa git repository:
Disable shadows when no artist image is present by Diego Gangl ;
Unify track delegate handling by Alexander Stippich ;
Fix missing assignment of music listener for MediaArtistAlbumView by Alexander Stippich ;
There are also some pending diff request in phabricator.
We have also some ongoing work to organize work with KDE VDG. Some future changes following their feedback is planned.
I am also driving an effort to more clearly communicate what elisa is about (inspired by the work on KDE goals and plasma vision). I hope to be able to also have a vision for elisa and to derive some goals aligned with those of the KDE community.
Elisa is a music player designed to be simple and nice to use. It allows to browse music by album, artist or all tracks. You can build and play your own playlist. We aim to build a fluid interface that is easy to use.
Alexander has made yet another round of improvements to the UI and especially improved a lot the playlist by making it more fluid. It really feels much better now (at least for me).
I have added the possibility to load or save playlists. It is currently restricted to tracks already known to Elisa. More work is needed to support any audio files.
Current state of the interface.
The following things have been integrated in Elisa git repository:
delete outdated todo list by Alexander Stippich ;
fix player being stuck when same track is played in random mode by Matthieu Gallien ;
enhance content view navigation by Alexander Stippich:
The backspace key is now also accepted for back navigation in e.g. the artist album view ;
A mouse area is added to MediaBrowser to allow back navigation with the mouse backbutton ;
Focus is forced on the stackview when arist or album is opened. Without this, the back key navigation is only working when it is actively focused by the user, e.g. by a mouse click ;
deduplicate code for the content view and adjust visual appearance by Alexander Stippich ;
merge MediaPlayList and PlayListControler to reduce size of code by Matthieu Gallien ;
make margins consistent and remove horizontal separator in playlist by Alexander Stippich ;
show passive notification when a track fail to play by Matthieu Gallien ;
remove context menus by Alexander Stippich ;
overhaul RatingStar by Alexander Stippich ;
add possibility to load and save a playlist at format m3u from two buttons at bottom of playlist by Matthieu Gallien ;
fix problems with dependencies and make some optional ones be required. Require all tier1 dependencies if they are also supported on Windows and
Android by Matthieu Gallien ;
more improvements to playlist by Alexander Stippich:
Some more improvements to the playlist. First of all, adds more animations and fixes T6295.
Fixes some scaling issues and makes Show Current Track also select the item to highlight it better.
Converts actions to use signals
shorten the play now and replace play list button text by Alexander Stippich;
add a readme for packagers following some feedback in #kde-devel by Matthieu Gallien ;
ay more detailed track information by Alexander Stippich. One notable addition is the cover image being shown in the track information window ;
