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:
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
- cleanup of src directory by Alexander Stippich
mgallien 
Thanks for the much-appreciated update ! Personally, I’m kinda waiting for it to be present in Neon’s repos… Unless you need much “joe users” to test it ? 🙂
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(English mistake : replace much by regular “joe users” 🙂
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It is already packaged by Neon. I am not sure in which edition it is currently available.
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Thanks for your reply 🙂 It must indeed be present in the developer edition ; it’s not in the regular user one. Would be especially to have access to beta versions through a flatpack repos so that regular users can test it 🙂
Really enthusiastic about your project, thanks for sharing your daily progress, I’m sure this is very important to get other people onboard.
BTW, do you have long term plans for podcasts or radios or even moodbar support ? I’m a big fan of clementine, but it seems kinda abandonned…
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I think this is an awesome project, just one question though, are there any plans for transcoding so I can plug my phoneor an SD card in, transfer the music and convert to a format it can play for example? Others do it but most are fixed to VBR mp3 which my car headunit cant play 😦
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This is currently not planned. We are focused on playing music. Out of curiosity, what music organizers did you look at ? I am needing one and Elisa definitely is not one.
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I found Sayonara probably did the best job but its horrible to use, other than than its between Amarok and Clementine (unfortunately Celementine did not Play nice on KDE Neon for me thou)
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Hi Nate ! What are your issues with Clementine ? There was no official update for a long time, but at least its ppa contains a newer versions (git I guess) with some fixes…
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Hi Mahen, For me it does not show up devices that have been connected for some reason. I google-d it and its seems a common issue. The problem I have with Amarok is when transferring music to a device I want to transcode to MP3 from FLAC but it will only make VBR files which my car headunit refuses to play. There seems to be no option to convert the CBR
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You wrote that “this project started as a pure UPnP/DLNA client”. Does Elisa work as a upnp control point now?
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It was able to browse MediaServer and play music from them. This support was then modified to insert all content in the music database. Support for that is currently broken. I plan to first bring back basic browsing. I cannot promise any timeline. The next step will be to add support for external MediaRenderer.
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OK, I finally decided to build the GIT version 🙂 It works, I’ll spend quite some time to find bugs 🙂 BTW I noticed that on the terminal, it complains about being unable to open a couple of files. For instance .flac files from the Project Sidologie. And also some .wav files. Do you want me to share them with you to pinpoint the issue ? (same issue with the first alpha or the GIT version)
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BTW, I’m so happy to see the perfect integration with the filesystem / baloo & metadatas. Changing the rating of a file in Dolphin is instantly reflected in Elisa. Great ! Is the ID3 rating tag also updated ? Also, the rating cannot be edited directly from Elisa yet ? Great work 🙂
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Thanks for your comment. The rating is currently only the one managed by Baloo and other KDE applications through the dedicated library. In order to add support for rating stored in ID3 tags, an evolution of the KDE Frameworks dedicated library is needed.
The rating cannot yet be modified from Elisa. This is one feature that we need to add. Are you interested in trying to add it yourself ?
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Matthieu : I would have loved to contribute ; unfortunately, I haven’t written any single line of code in the past 10 years and it got very difficult for me due to eye-strain issues.
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Thanks for your reply. Hope things will go well for you.
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Yes, please open a bug report and we can search a solution. Your help is very much appreciated.
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Hmm, it seems the incriminates FLAC files are not added because no tag was filled at all for them. So I guess it’s not up to Elisa to work around this by setting some arbitrary fields !
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OK, this is one of the weak points. I have already got multiple times the feedback about the lack of file system explorer in Elisa. That would help understanding this kind of issues.
Eventually I will have enough time to add one. Not yet clear if that will be soon or later.
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Hi again ! Just wanted to show you the current CPU usage on my setup (Pentium G4620 3.7 GHz ; equivalent to a 7th gen i3). When playing a regular 16 bits FLAC it’s eating more than 10% of my CPU ; when pausing, much less but still a little.
Have a look at the following picture : http://nuage.tallur.net/index.php/s/peS3OzYMRiCAA7R
It’s kinda similar to Clementine BTW. I especially wonder why this is the case when both apps are idle.
Cheers ! 🙂
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Hi Matthieu ! Sorry for adding some more noise here ! I couldn’t find the bugtracker here https://github.com/KDE/elisa
Just wanted to share with you this : I find it quite difficult to use the track progress slider, because the active area in quite thin. I’m pretty sure you’re already aware of this, though 🙂
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Elisa is using the KDE infrastructure. It means that the bug tracker is bugs.kde.org .
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