Elisa 0.0.80 Released

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The Elisa team is happy to release the first alpha release of a future 0.1 version of the Elisa music player.

Screenshot_20171207_231959

Elisa is a music player designed to be simple and nice to use.

Elisa allows to browse music by album, artist or all tracks. 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 much faster because Baloo is providing all needed data from its own database. You can build and play your own playlist.

It is available in source form only at https://download.kde.org/unstable/elisa/0.0.80/elisa-0.0.80.tar.xz. KDE also provides regular flatpak and windows builds. The windows builds are provided by binary-factory.kde.org and are using Craft. Thanks to the people in the flatpak and windows teams. A binary package is provided for Fedora thanks to Robert-André Mauchin. Other Linux distributions may provide binary packages from the git repository (as far as I know, there is an AUR package and a package for Neon).

The development is still continuing and we will regularly release an alpha version until we have completed review by other KDE developers. We plan to move to kdereview as soon as we have finished a few missing features.

For the curious reader, the phabricator workboard of Elisa is a good way to know what is happening (https://phabricator.kde.org/project/board/193/).

Any help is very much welcome. We have open tasks for code but also for design.

Published by mgallien

I am a software engineer passionate about what I am doing.

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14 thoughts on “Elisa 0.0.80 Released”

  1. I imagine this kind of FAQ, however I didn’t manage to find the answer: why to develop Elisa if we have already have Amarok? If there’s something missing, worth it perhaps adding to Amarok instead? E.g. if it have, I don’t know, an overloaded UI for certain purposes — maybe it’s a reason for just another UI skin?

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    1. The main reason for starting it was to work on a player having first class for UPnP/DLNA. I was looking around and found the design work from Andrew Lake (original author of Bangarang music player). I was impressed by its design and choose to base my work on it. Later on, I decided to work on local files support. Now the UPnP/DLNA support is not now the priority. You have the whole story.

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  2. I don’t get why all music players insist that the user has to maintain a playback queue all the time. Aren’t you, the authors, annoyed by this at all? Why does no player, except Juk, have an “All tracks” view where one can just hit the Play button and then play the entire library?

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    1. Thanks for your feedback.
      Elisa already provides a view of all tracks. The view can be filtered to select only parts of the tracks. From this view, when https://phabricator.kde.org/T6294 is done and with one button, you will be able to play everything. You will still have an explicit playlist but with the same usage pattern than in Juk. The priority of this feature is lower than the bugfix I done last months. This is the main reason why this has not been started.

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      2. @mgallien: Basically like Juk. Juk is mostly a clone of an iTunes version that predates the music store business of Apple.

        Considering that every other somewhat modern player revolves around managing the playback queue, there is little practical difference between Elisa and, say, Clementine.

        The problem with Juk is that it carries lots of legacy technologies that makes it hard to use these days. The file index breaks all the time (and reindexing many files takes time) and the GUI behaves weird (probably QWidgets’ fault).

        Quite frankly, the hassle of managing playback queues all the time in modern players is the reason I migrated to Deezer, a streaming service. I either play my “Flow” (an endless stream of music) or some premade playlist. Queues are great for social occasions like parties where attendants can add the music they like but when I’m just by myself on headphones I have other things to do than switching to the player to decide on songs because the queue ran out.

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  4. I’ve seen lots of replies here (and in other sites), that question the need for another music player. I wonder why linux users are clamoring for comformity when the greatest asset we have is diversity. With that kind of mentality, we wouldn’t have multiple desktop enviroments that fits each and individual needs (like KDE, GNOME, Mate, Xfce, etc), and probably not many distros would still be alive.

    I just wanted to express that I really like the work you are doing, and I think the community will also thankful, specially when the 1.0 version releases. Keep up the good work!

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    2. > I wonder why linux users are clamoring for comformity when the greatest asset we have is diversity.

      That is a simple perspective. Reality is more complex. While diversity is a strength of the FOSS world, it’s also a liability. We solve problems by standing on the shoulders of giants, not by leaping back into the crab bucket.

      There is a balance to be achieved between reimplementing what already exists and building on what exists. There are already innumerable FOSS music players. This project appears to offer nothing new nor superior to other music players. Its stated goals of being easy to use and supporting DLNA could be implemented as improvements to existing players and thereby benefit from the foundations they have laid. Users could then use one of them and benefit from the work, rather than having yet another choice to compare and contrast. Choice-overload is a real problem, even though it’s preferable to the opposite.

      Of course the developer can spend his time how he wishes, and will undoubtedly learn from working on this project. But if one’s goal is to create lasting solutions to unsolved (or poorly solved) problems, starting from scratch should be avoided when possible, and there appears to be no rationale given for starting a new project. The mockups by the Bangarang dev don’t require a new project to implement, and besides, they are inferior to existing Uis in other players.

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    3. I am also glad to see another music player. Yes we have quite a few, but most don’t cover the way I listen well. I am keen to see where this one goes.

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  5. Thank you very much for developing this. I hope Elisa will continue adding more features such as own-tab for Lyrics.
    I am KDE Neon user and have always been stuck with Amarok, but Amarok apparently using ~50% of CPU usage on i5-6200U for audio playback and looking not very well on HiDPI screen, but Elisa is cool.

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