0.1 Release of Elisa

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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.
Screenshot_20180412_224656
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 source code tarball is available here.

Published by mgallien

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

Published

42 thoughts on “0.1 Release of Elisa”

  1. Congrats, I’ve been reading about Elisa for a while and I’m kinda hyped about it.
    I have two questions though (and these are just curiosities of mine):
    – how fast do you think various distros will pick this up?
    – do you have support for Spotify, Google Play Music or something on your (probably not immediate) roadmap?

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    1. Thanks for your comment.
      I believe quite a few distribution now have packages (Fedore via a copr repository, Neon, Arch, OpenSuse, …). More distributions will have packages. There is for example an ITP for Debian.

      I fear that adding proper support for online music services will take quite some time given that a lot of them require to use their web interface for desktop clients. They removed the ability to embed their services in clients alternative to their own one (when there is one).

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      1. Nice, I already got it for Arch (but then again, Arch rarely lags at packaging something).

        And bummer to hear about online services. It’s precisely because their own (web)apps suck that I was asking.
        Oh well, I imagine you have your hands full even without addind support for online service, so keep it up 😉

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      1. Thanks for your comment.

        I have removed the blink play indicator for a static icon and fixed a problem that sometime was generating a constant loop of refresh even of nothing had changed. The CPU usage should be OK now.

        Please open a bug report if you notice a problem and we will look at it.

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    1. Thanks for your report.

      I hope to be able to implement such a feature for the next version. As usual, during the development of the next version, we will continue to keep people informed of the added features.

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    1. I plan to ask for inclusion of the stable release in flathub repository like for example Krita. If this succeeds, this should take a couple days. I will announce it here.

      I am really a fan of the service provided by KDE as it allows to get fresh build of the branch where we are adding the new features. This should allow testers to have an easy way to participate.

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    1. Oops, I once again forgot to send a release mail to kde-announce-apps.
      Here is the info:

      Public key: Fingerprint=267B F70F 7905 C272 3B02 4326 7D0F 74F0 5C22 F553
      (Matthieu Gallien)

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  9. Do you have a place where you outline future planned features. I’ve noticed the following before I stopped testing…

    1. There really are no settings, except for choosing the music directory
    2. The library is completely scanned and rebuilt each time the application is launched – which may be OK for a small library, but if you have a large directory structure of music – it’s not usable.
    3. Appears you don’t support folder.jpg for album art within the directory structure – which is supported by amarok, rhythmbox, qmmp, audacious, etc.

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    2. I was stumped bit by #1, too. But then I figured, I can configure everything about sound in the KDE settings anyway. Probably not optimal for some that don’t want to set system wide configurations just to play music, but ok for nearly everybody else. And for the player itself, there’s not much to configure at this point anyway.
      #2 My music collection is just symlinked on a Windows drive. Although the player shows “no track have (sic!) been found” and keeps displaying the progress bar/circle, it won’t find the collection if I mount that partition after I start the player.

      Now, the small bug that is “a bit” annoying is that whatever I try to play, I just get a “Error when playing %1(I18N_ARGUMENT_MISSING)”, the track is shown in the “Now playing” pane, but both “play” and “info” buttons are greyed out. I suspect this is a packaging thing or something.

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  11. Hello, please, what about an output? I cannot find any mention about it (maybe I’m searching wrong way :-)). I think it’s most crucial attribute of music player so I thought I find it as first information on the web 🙂 Is it possible to bypass Pulseaudio crap and play through plain Alsa? Is it possible to set some parameters for playback like to not resample anything and send stream from wav or decoded flac directly to the sound card in the original bit depth and sample rate?

    Thank you
    Radek

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    1. I believe output is controlled through KDE’s control panel for the time being.
      Also, if you hate pulseaudio, I would expect you don’t install it at all. Installing ujst to find ways to bypass it seems a little counterproductive.

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      1. Yes, we only depend on Qt Multimedia module that depends on GStreamer. We do not depend in anyway on pulseaudio. You should be able to configure your gstreamer installation to not go to pulseaudio.

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    1. In fact, there is currently a lot of work going on in Baloo and KFileMetaData. Some of this work will bring more metadata and metadata where lists are true lists (multiple artists, …).

      Editing metadata from Elisa is not yet started. If we have enough time, this will be in the next release but we cannot promise it.

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      3. Of course more than just your work should be acknowledged, but since this is your blog, I am thanking you directly. I’m really grateful that all this amazing work is being done on free software.

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    1. I am working to bring the stable releases of Elisa to Flathub (Flathub – A build and distribution service for Flatpak applications) https://flathub.org/home .
      As soon as it is OK, I will write about it.
      The flatpak nightly builds from KDE should follow the master branch that will be the next version.

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  14. Very simple UI I like that it’s familiar to Amarok. Amarok is what I use so if Amarok is going bye-bye I will definitely be using Elisa however as a user I do have some complaints lol I love the fact that Amarok displays lyrics and I could not find a search function in Elisa I understand that it is 0.1 however great work look forward to more releases. By the way, heard this on Late Night Linux Podcast.

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