Elisa 0.4 Beta Release and More New Features

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 and part 2 of this series, I have talked about some new features that landed in Elisa from several contributors.

Today, I would like to introduce the beta release of the 0.4 version and more features that will be in this version.

Android Support for Music Discovery

It is a goal to have a first class support of Android in Elisa. Currently, the only thing really done is the support for discovering your music on Android.

Android provides a service a little bit similar to Baloo allowing an application to query all the music files on a device. Elisa is supporting that and a very simple interface allow to see that.

In order to have a true support, two steps need to be done:

• Elisa should have an user interface usable on small screens (possibly leveraging Kirigami2 much more than currently) ;
• Elisa should be separated to allow your music to continue once your device is no longer displaying the application (related to the Android services).

Help is very much welcome on this project given I currently miss enough time to make progress on this.

Support for Embedded Cover Images

The music cover images can be embedded in the metadata of a music file. Elisa is now showing them.

Same music in Elisa and in Dolphin showing embedded cover

I would like to thank Alexander Stippich who added support for that in KFileMetaData and made it so easy to add support in Elisa. It would probably be a good idea for anybody needing to query metadata for files in a Qt based application to have a look at KFileMetaData.

Easy Navigation to Album or Artist of the Currently Playing Track

In the header bar, it is now possible to navigate to the album or artist of the playing track by clicking on it (contributed by Diego Gangl). The mouse nicely changes to indicate that.

Navigating to the artist of the playing track

Beta Release

We are preparing for the next stable release. As such, there is a feature freeze and an ongoing effort to squash as many bugs as possible.

We really appreciate any feedback on the current state via bugs.kde.org. We welcome bug report or feature suggestions.

You can get the next release by building from source. The windows installer is not included because the current ones are not in a releasable state (there are some platform specific code not in good shape).

For flatpak, some really nice additions to flathub has made it easy to provide builds for beta releases. The simplest way to install it is via this command:

$ flatpak install https://flathub.org/beta-repo/appstream/org.kde.elisa.flatpakref

How You Can Help

Elisa is a project that welcomes new contributors and feedback.

There are currently quite a few reported feature requests that may have to wait for a long time except if a new contributor shows up. It is really a good opportunity to contribute to a free open source project in the KDE community.

The KDE community is really a nice place to work on free and open source code.