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.
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.
mgallien 
Great! Is there any plan for remote control, such as webgui and Android apps etc?
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There are no plans for a dedicated remote application. We plan to improve the dbus api to allow remote control through Mycroft AI.
For Android, you should ask the kdeconnect team if they plan to support more parts of the mpris2 interface. If they do, it would also work for other players like Amarok. Would you want to work on this ?
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Any chance of vgmstream being incorporated into this?
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Before integrating this, we have a lot of work to do. The only chance of seeing this quickly is a new contributor doing it.
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Nice app. I haven’t had time to test is very profoundly, but so far I love its clean interface.
Nevertheless, I find a bit strange that right clic doesn’t have any function. Is this is something planned or it’s just due to the early development status?
Also, do you plan to add podcast support in the future?
A third issue: the file info window is too small and the window isn’t resizable, so one can’t read the entire path of the audio files.
4th: Do you plan to make Elisa able to do music collection management? It seems that it’s not possible to delete tracks from the disk nor edit its tags. I don’t say that Elisa shoud include a full featured tag editor, but could be, perhaps “connect” (excuse me if that isn’t the correct technical word, I’m a regular user, no expert at all) to Kid3 vía some button or menu entry (in a popup menu shown with a right clic, for instance), which could be installed as an optional dependence.
5th. What about lyrics and Wikipedia support?
Thanks for your nice work.
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Thanks for your comment.
You have valid reports about improvements. Could you please submit them to bugs.kde.org ? That would be very nice.
We do not intend to turn Elisa in a full collection manager. We still plan to allow editing of tags directly from it.
With regard to fetching data from external services (Wikpedia, lyrics, …), we have it on the roadmap but with our limited available time, it could take quite some time before it is implemented.
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I’m not registered in bugs.kde.org, but mostly, I download lots of podcasts from which I usually keep less than 10% of them. Also download lots of music most of which, as is usual in entertainment music, only 2 or 3 songs in an album, some times even less, are worth to be kept in my “discotheque”. Thus I “need” a player that permits some basic collection management like delete, move and copy tracks among folders. You said that Elisa’s goals don’t include collection management features. Of course I respect your decissions, but since Elisa isn’t going to fit my needs, I’m not going to use it nor spending time in submitting questions, reporting bugs, etc. I hope you understand.
Nevetheless, I suppose that you can include the ideas you consider interesting in you team’s development tasks for Elisa, withoug needing me to submit them, right?
Cheers.
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I do not really care if you want to use Elisa or not.
One last point, I had always planned to develop a dedicated collection manager application. Given that I lack the time, I keep using Picard that is really fine for me.
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And you do well, since from your words this seems a personal project done for you, for your needs, not for a broad range of users. Thus, you should not care about onyone’s preferences but yours.
But then you understand that users don’t care if we could contribute to a “made-for-one-man” app.
I was using the good old Amarok, but I’ll try Picard. Thanks for the recommendation, and good luck for your project.
Cheers.
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