In late 2014 IWF1 have reported that KDE is looking into creating a successor for Amarok music player. Yesterday, April 4th – 2017, that endeavor has finally took shape.
Elisa is Gorgeous
Following the awesome design guidelines laid by KDE’s VDG (Visual Design Group), a developer named Matthieu Gallien (mgallien) has created this beautiful music player and named it Elisa.
As you can see, it came out very close to the original design.
KDE’s VDG design of a new music player
Currently, aside from playing a selected song, the slick design of Elisa lets you browse music by albums or artists. It has a maximized mode which displays extra information related to the current playing track, and in any mode, the playlist is always visible to allow feedback when inserting tracks.
According to mgallien, Elisa makes extensive use of KDE’s file indexing tool called Baloo, therefore, it is not clear at this point whether and how would Elisa work on other desktop environments or platforms. Although, one of Elisa’s stated goals mentions targeting “other Linux desktop environments, Android and Windows”.
Music Player, Not Collection Manager
At the moment, Elisa is mostly focusing on being a music player and doing that job in the best way possible. Hence, according to mgallien, “managing your music collection is not a development priority”.
So users who are looking for a player that fulfills both needs, might not be fully satisfied with the current offerings of Elisa.
Other goals Elisa is geared towards include:
- Ease of setting up.
- Supporting online services.
- Providing fully workable offline mode.
- Supporting streaming between different devices (UPnP DLNA).
- Stability (will be prioritized in contrast to adding features).
- Meeting users needs.
Elisa music player – playlist is always visible
Users who are eager to try Elisa will be a bit disappointed to hear that although most of the basic functionalities have already been implemented, a stable release is not yet ready.
According to mgallien, there is still “at least one problem that need to be fixed before a release”. Therefore, one can at least take comfort in the fact that after more than two years of waiting, Elisa is now very close to being available for the broad public.
With that said, there are still some points needed to be discussed and mgallien mentions that all kinds of feedback are welcomed. So go ahead and visit his blog to do so.
