KDE's Elisa Music Player Reaches Its Second Alpha

[phoronix]

Phoronix: KDE's Elisa Music Player Reaches Its Second Alpha

There is no shortage of different KDE music/media player projects over the years but one of the most promising in recent times is Elisa. This week marks the second alpha release for the Elisa music player...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=KDE-Elisa-Alpha-2

[Charlie68]

Elisa player I'm using it in Tumbleweed and it works quite well, I like the interface.

[zanny]

Man I want to like Elisa since Amarok and Clementine are pretty much dead (not activity dead, but leadership dead - nobody is pushing releases or organizing efforts to fix and modernize them). But as a Clementine user and slight contributor I go from this on my high dpi screen with the latest qt5 branch build:


This is on a 150 DPI screen, so you can see how many elements don't scale - the search bar buttons, the pause / play control bar. The volume % is embedded into a static widget element that doesn't scale. Mostly everything else does, though. And it has been usable for a year since I got this new screen.

Here is this Elisa alpha:


Here is the trick - Clementine is entirely Widgets based. It is not only Qt Widgets based, its a fork of the old Amarok UI dating back to Qt2. It is ancient as hell, yet the parts that don't scale are isolated from parts that do and can at least handle its age with grace.

Elisa, despite being built on QML, is completely broken. I LOVE how it integrates with Baloo to find music. It automagically finds tracks is a very neat way. And I am a huge fan of QML - it is practically the only way I am willing to write UI anymore since it spoils you with the easiest transform and transition effects ever. And I read the weekly Elisa update blogs and try it out every other month. But when the program built in the latest UI tech has worse high DPI support than one with a UI dating back to the early 2000s you have a LOT of work to do.

And as an aside, I'm a bit sad Elisa doesn't use Kirigami. Its an experimental design space music player for the most part - it is semi-usable on 100 DPI screens, and I'm not sure how well it works on Wayland either (my Wayland session is currently broken to try it), but the authors still call it an alpha. I really loved the idea of a unified KDE design language and Discover contrasts in my mind completely with Elisa - it scales perfectly to high DPI, has fluid motions, and the only real problem I have with it is how it goes out of its way to waste screen space on empty blue squares or coffee banners.

That being said, Elisa is currently the only really actively developed Qt music player with direction. I hope for its best.

[grok]

Elisa player I'm using it in Tumbleweed and it works quite well, I like the interface.

Why do you say that?

What does make you believe you like the interface?

Did you always like to use Elisa player in Tumbleweed and it works quite well?

I understand.

Can you elaborate on that?

[torturedutopian]

What sets it apart too is that it uses Baloo if available. (so no double-indexing)

[Charlie68]

Why do you say that?

What does make you believe you like the interface?

Did you always like to use Elisa player in Tumbleweed and it works quite well?

I understand.

Can you elaborate on that?

I activated the opensuseitalia d repository in Tumbleweed which offers the possibility to install it easily.