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.

Improved party mode

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

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.