New Features in Elisa: part 2

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.

In the part 1 of this series, I have talked about the following additions:

• libvlc as a music player alternative to QtMultimedia ;
• progress shown directly on the taskbar entry ;
• an improved party mode.

Today, I would like to introduce more features that will be in the future 0.4 stable version.

Undo Support when Playlist is Cleared

Elisa is currently a player with a strong focus on the current playlist. It is quite possible to have spent some time to compose a playlist. This is something valuable for the user.

What if suddenly, you hit the wrong button and lose all your work ?

A notification will be shown to undo this operation. This feature has been contributed by Jérôme Guidon. Thanks a lot for its first contribution !

Notification when the playlist is cleared

New Browsing Views

It is now possible to browse the most recently played tracks or the most frequently played ones.

The idea is to show the 50 last played tracks or the 50 most frequently played tracks.

The currently implemented browsing modes are the following:

It is planned to add more modes but that requires a way for the user to configure it to its liking before adding more.

A New Context View

Starting from a very good design work by Diego Gangl, the new context view is now able to show some of the metadata from the currently playing track like the composer, lyricist, play count, lyrics …

The current support for lyrics comes from a suggestion from Nate Graham. It is only supporting lyrics written in the track metadata. Support for online services will come in the next releases.

Optimizations And Reduced Memory Usage

Elisa is now loading the views fully on demand. It means that no memory or processing power is needed until one clicks on one of them. It also means that they no longer take resources when they are hidden.

One of the consequences is a better startup time and reduced memory usage. Another one is that when loading your music a busy indicator is shown to help understand what happen.

The model that is used to show your music is also now completely generic and should allow a much greater extensibility and customization.

One of my long term goal is to offer a way to fully customize the browsing of music to the user liking or type of music or …

Conclusion

Now is a very good time to get involved as the next version is being stabilized. You can help with code, bug reporting or triaging, documentation …

Thanks a lot to all contributors to this project be a feature, a fix, ideas, reported bugs …

Thanks a lot to the KDE community that is really providing very useful and powerful tools to project like this one.

The easiest way to do that is by using flatpak or Windows installers produced by the KDE continuous build servers. I now that some distributions also have package built on top of Git.

New features 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.

I have been quiet for some months but during those months, Elisa has seen many improvements by existing and new contributors and a new stable version is planned in the coming weeks.

I will publish some blog posts about the many new features implemented in the master branch.

Support for libVLC

Today, I would like to talk about the added support for playing audio through libVLC.

One of my goals had been to be able to offer the best possible first impression when starting Elisa. With the current stable version, flatpak builds and Windows builds are not able to support many audio formats. This is a pretty bad first experience.

The big advantage of using libVLC (except the API is nice and easy to use) is the ability to easily bundle the support for many audio formats. Thanks a lot to the VideoLAN project for their work.

Support for progress bar on Plasma Desktop taskbar entries

Elisa has long had support for showing track progress when playing on Windows platform.

The next stable version will also be able to show progress when running inside Plasma workspace.

Progress bar on Plasma workspace

Improved party mode

Elisa has been featuring a party mode since 0.3 release. It is now also featuring a simplified playlist view.

Improved party mode

In party mode, one is now able to switch to any track by just clicking on it. This is especially nice for laptops with touchscreen. Anybody can quickly switch to a specific track by a simple touch.

Conclusion

Quite some other features are already ready. They will be the subject of other posts.

There are still some features that are still under review for the next stable release. This is the main reason no firm date are currently set for the next release.

I would like to be able to make the best possible release. In order to do that, feedback would be very welcome.

The easiest way to do that is by using flatpak or Windows installers produced by the KDE continuous build servers. I now that some distributions also have package built on top of Git.