Hi, I was wodering why KDE has two music players?
It appears to me that Elisa is younger, so why was it created in the first place despite Amarok already being around?
Could ressources be used more efficiently if only one was continued, or if they were merged? As far as I see, Amarok is de-facto abandonned right now anyway. But I think that Amarok has some features that I like and seems to be running more stable.
Various reasons, e.g. different use cases and user preferences.
There might even be more than two 
Amarok had become ādormantā (or development had slowed down considerable) at some point.
I think there are even at least two forks due to that (Clementine and Strawberry, if I remember correctly).
Then there is user preferences for āsimpleā that has grown in recent years due to changes in use cases.
For example if you are mostly streaming music (or listening to Internet radio) your needs are different then when you have a huge collection of digital music files.
In a away Amarok is more a personal music manager that includes a player than just a player.
A bit like DigiKam being a digital image manager that includes an image viewer vs Gwenview which is primarily an image viewer.
Not necessarily.
If the two teams are distinct enough, potentially not even sharing members, then one team halting development does not automatically translate into the other team getting bigger.
It has seen a lot of activity over the last couple of months.
Iād vote for Elisa if they were the only choicesā¦
Youād do better to mention actually what āsome features that I likeā actually areā¦ but Iād say Elisa is designed to be a relatively simple (and KDE needs a good, simple, reliable option) choiceā¦ but I always found Amarok to be a complicated mess and found it hard to actually find how to make it do things I wanted it to do.
I donāt think itās abandoned though - it was dormant for a long time, and then it was revived from the ashes with a flurry of activity - so it might be worth watching.
Past that, Iād look elsewhere - I think Strawberry is great, as Audacious has some issues with some of the files on my system (canāt remember now - sometimes mono tracks, sound effects/notification sounds throw up errors but play perfectly everywhere elseā¦).
However, I very much doubt that they could be merged in any way - the best option is to request functions and/or enhancements.
Also, take a good hard look at Strawberry 
JuK is rather upset that it has been overlooked, again 
Is this one still the āofficialā KDE music player, or do we even have one?
With open source projects and groups like KDE, people work on things that they want to and like. To merge these would take agreement amongst both sets of developers. Also note that Amarok I believe is still an independent project with its own release and development cycles.
Do remember that Amarok was not only dormant, it was very much hibernating for ~15 years, and definitely since 2018, until someone decided to revitalize it in 2024 and finally ported it from KDE 4/Qt4 to KF5/Qt5, with the most current release finally on KF6/Qt6.
Amarok was the shizz in KDE3, with Clementine, then Strawberry forking from it after KDE 4ās version wasā¦not the shizz.
Amarok is de-facto abandonned right now
6 releases + 3 beta releases in last 12 months, soā¦ Nope.
Could ressources be used more efficiently if only one was continued
I wouldnāt work on anything else, so thereād be just less resources available.
or if they were merged
Merging two different applications together is not like merging two decks of cards. Itās more like merging a cat and a dog. You probably end up with something hideous with a lot of stitches & itāll be dead.
It appears to me that Elisa is younger, so why was it created in the first place despite Amarok already being around?
People also make new music, although thereās plenty of music already around.
Thanks for your feedback, Iāll try to summarize the different inputs:
Hm, I see management features in Elisa that Amarok doesnāt have, for example the list of genres in the side panel, which elliminates one level of the tree structure of the library (artistāalbumāsong instead of genreāartistāalbumāsong).
So thereās no overlying strategy with distinct use cases for Amarok, Elisa and JuK? Instead the developers just implement what they (or the withlist) wants?
Essentially yes.
Some teams are doing some coordination, some share code, others work more independently.