A New KDE Music Player: Elisa

[carewolf]

Note VLC is working closely together with KDE too these days. So it is also a Qt/KDE style media player. I use that for videos and Clementine for audio.

[M@GOid]

Amarok 2.8 is 3½ years old. That in itself isn't much of an issue, it still offers pretty much all I could ever wish for, but it will probably have to be ported to Qt5 and newer KDE libs at some point in order to continue working and I don't really see that happen. Not sure if that would even be possible without rewriting 90% of the code. The website hasn't been updated in years either.

Well, then you will be surprised to know that the integration to KDE5 already happened. I have seen some people say it compile and it works. But the actual developers said its is not heady yet, but things are happening. Slowly, but going forward.

https://community.kde.org/Amarok/Development/KF5port

Here you can see that people are working in it, several commits this year. Looks like the original head of development had move away, but there still people working on it:

https://cgit.kde.org/amarok.git?rev=kf5

[M@GOid]

A music player should play music files and not integrate with half of the internet, social media and all that crap. It should play music period. Do one thing and do it well!

If you are talking about Facebook and Twitter crap, I agree with you. But there are the music part of the internet that are important for a lot of people, like legal streaming of music by paid services, internet radios, podcasts and lyrics for the music.

[M@GOid]

Audacious is fairly okay. Though I had issues with the GTK3 version and the icons a few times and the Qt5 version didn't seem to offer all the features. I rarely use mpv for music, but it is very nice for videos. VLC can also be a solution. And I'll check out that qmms.


> uses Baloo for indexing of music

Not sure if this is good or rather bad.
KDE related stuff is generally not in a good shape lately, they should fix the bugs and get stuff ported but not create the 250th instance of the same program and still be in like alpha state. But that's the problem with FOSS development, sometimes the devs just do what they think is fancy, or they just think "but mine is better", but they don't really do what is neccessary and the nasty jobs like housekeeping or looking what whould be good for the users.

And sometimes, if something is already good - then there is change, just for the matter of change. So we can justify to release another version. So we take the interface, tear it apart and put it back together, again. :/ And not forget always make a completely new icon set so noboby will recognize anything and make the icons so vacuous that people won't be able to guess what it does.

Sorry for the rant but I'm dealing daily with KDE / plasma / frameworks 5. There are some nice new things but so much is not really ready yet - but KDE 4 was totally cut off.

Yeah, there is a lot of "not invented by me" attitude on some developers. They throw away old code and do not replace it with anything. "It is hard to maintain" is the more common excuse. Well, that may very well be the case, but the code works and people are using it. At last had the decency of replace the code but maintaining the functionality. I remember when they removed the dual panel function from Gnome Nautilus and it never got then back.

[RavFX]

For me Amarok died when they released KDE4, Using Clementine since then.

[VikingGe]

Well, then you will be surprised to know that the integration to KDE5 already happened. I have seen some people say it compile and it works. But the actual developers said its is not heady yet, but things are happening. Slowly, but going forward.

Thank you. I wasn't aware that Amarok actually had a page on the KDE website itself.

[bug77]

If you are talking about Facebook and Twitter crap, I agree with you. But there are the music part of the internet that are important for a lot of people, like legal streaming of music by paid services, internet radios, podcasts and lyrics for the music.

I wish there was some sort of "safe mode" for music players. Something that starts just the music playing bits when I don't need to touch the internet, similar to how Windows starts while loading just the bare minimum.
My problem is when the player supports everything and I don't use it, between one third and one half of the settings/menus are just getting in the way.


This whole "let's put everything together because it's all music" reminds me of an old discussion. When sports federations started to appear over here, some official raised the issue of martial arts federations: why do we need one federation for shotokan, another one for kyokushin, another one for wushu and so on? They're all martial arts!
And someone answered: why do we need different federations for football, volleyball, basketball and so on? Let's have a single federation for ball games!
So yeah, sometimes things work well together, but sometimes they don't.

[lunarcloud]

Music players stalled once Qt5 (and with it, KDE Frameworks 5) came along.
While that happened, a great number of users moved to online streaming services. It's the general trend, no matter how many of the folks in Linux forums may dislike them.
Devs didn't want to put in the great effort to basically rewrite their applications, sometimes *again* as they'd survived the transition from Qt3. Especially with smaller and smaller user-bases, and some of them themselves moving to streaming music.
Even clementine is still using Qt4. Personally, I think those who think clementine looks good are smoking something. It's as ugly as Amarok became (especially their weird moving-clementine progressbar on the android port).

I'm excited because this new player is using Qt5 / KF5 and they worked with the visual design team.

[lunarcloud]

Something that starts just the music playing bits when I don't need to touch the internet

Well, Amarok had most of that as plugins or widgets you could remove. I love lyrics, but you could absolutely disable the internet-using stuff I'm pretty sure.

[andreano]

For me Amarok died when they released KDE4, Using Clementine since then.

Me too. A music player is supposed to look like a spreadsheet.