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 am happy to announce the release of 0.4.1 version of the Elisa music player.

The following fixes have been added to this release:

Much improved accessibility by providing more metadata to help screen readers do their job by Matthieu Gallien ;

Use full-height separators in ContentView to make Elisa more consistent with other KDE applications by Nate Graham ;

Make Playlist items span full width (Fix bug 408210) by Nate Graham ;

Improve focus handling by improving keyboard navigation and usage and improving focus indicators by Matthieu Gallien ;

Fix delegates in the file browser to have same look than other grid view delegates (Fix bug 407945) by Nate Graham ;

Improve build system to require only the minimum versions and to provide better feedback (Fix bug 407790 and 407799) by Matthieu Gallien.

More fixes will probably land in the stable branch and one more bugfix release will be done.

The work on the improved accessibility is very important and more fixes need to be done in the master branch (require breaking string freeze). Elisa was not doing a good job here and that was in fact preventing a lot of people to use it. This is a real shame.

One more thing inspired me to eventually improve the accessibility by reading this old interview by the current Debian Project Leader Sam Hartman.

I have the feeling that Elisa is really making progress as you can see with this screenshot of the bugfix release:

Getting Involved

I would like to thank everyone who contributed to the development of Elisa, including code contributions, testing, and bug reporting and triaging. Without all of you, I would have stopped working on this project.

New features and fixes are already being worked on. If you enjoy using Elisa, please consider becoming a contributor yourself. We are happy to get any kind of contributions!

We have some tasks that would be perfect junior jobs. They are a perfect way to start contributing to Elisa. There are more not yet reported here but reported in bugs.kde.org.

The flathub Elisa package allows an easy way to test this new release.

Elisa source code tarball is available here. There is no Windows setup. There is currently a blocking problem with it (no icons) that is being investigated. I hope to be able to provide installers for later bugfix versions.

The phone/tablet port project could easily use some help to build an optimized interface on top of Kirigami. It remains to be seen how to handle this related to the current desktop UI. This is something very important if we want to also support free software on mobile platforms.