0.2 Release of Elisa

The Elisa team is happy to announce our new release, version 0.2.0.

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.

Since the first release of Elisa, we have been busy improving it. We added new music browsing views (home directory browser and a genre browser). We have improved the interface and general performance. A lot of smaller item have also been done (full change log 0.2.0 change log).

Screenshot_20180704_174656
New interface of 0.2.0 Elisa

Browsing Views

All views are now sorted in ascending order by default. There’s also a button to toggle between ascending and descending.Screenshot_20180704_174743

A new view allows you to browse your home directory. Only music files and directories are shown. This way, tracks with missing music tags can easily be played.

Screenshot_20180704_175743

A new view allows you to browse by going from genres to artists, their albums and its tracks.

Screenshot_20180704_175216

We plan to further improve this by letting users choose the way they browse their music.

Interface

Elisa now has a proper icon. Thanks a lot to Paul Lesur who contributed it.

The player bar is now featuring all playback controls. The look of the playlist view and the views selector have been refreshed and improved.

Screenshot_20180704_174806

We now use the new icons from Breeze to differentiate between actions (play, pause, etc) and states (playing, paused, etc).

Performance

To avoid scanning files for changes at the start, Elisa now keeps the last modified time of files. Users not relying on Baloo should see a huge improvement in starting times.

The browsing views are now only loaded when shown. This is a first step to reduce the memory usage. It should also speed up application start.

Miscellaneous

Elisa is now finding more cover images and most common cases should work.

There have been a few fixes to Mpris2 support.

There have been various fixes to the internal tracks database.

Get Involved

The team would like to thank everyone who contributed to the development of Elisa, including code contributions, testing, and bug reporting.

We are already working on new features for the next release. If you enjoy using Elisa, please consider becoming a contributor yourself. We are happy for any contribution!

We have tagged some tasks as junior jobs. They are a perfect way to start contributing to Elisa (https://phabricator.kde.org/project/board/193/)

The flathub Elisa package allows an easy way to test this new release.

Elisa source code tarball is available here.

https://download.kde.org/stable/elisa/0.2.0/elisa-0.2.0.tar.xz

A Windows installer is also available thanks to Craft and binary-factory teams.

4 thoughts on “0.2 Release of Elisa

  1. Hello,
    Love the interface, feels clean and nice 🙂 running smooth with minor issues. Volume slider still does not work (there is open bug report on KDE bugtracker), got a crash when I added my Music directory (I think it’s because I had baloo disabled when doing this), and I don’t get Album covers. My album covers are embedded into .ogg files 🙂 anyway, love this music player! I see bright future for it 😉

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    1. Thanks for your comment.
      There is an ongoing work to add support for embedded cover images in the music tracks.
      If you are able to reproduce the crash when adding your music, please open a new bug report ?
      I thought that the volume slider bug was already fixed in 0.2.0 release. Could you add a note in the bug report ?

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    1. Unfortunately, I have not enough available time to do that. I already maintain builds for flatpak and Windows. Would you be interested in adding this support yourself ? We will be able to help and support you in doing so.

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