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 ;

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.

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.

Elisa 0.0.81 Released

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.

This version is available from KDE servers.

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).