Some ideas to improve Elisa

Brainstorm
1

I’m using Elisa as my default music player for some time now, and I’m really, really liking it.

It strikes the right balance between being simple and useful for a somewhat big library, it is intuitive and visually pleasing. It basically just works fine, which is probably the best thing that software can do.

Elisa Screenshot
Elisa Screenshot2041×1456 178 KB

I have some suggestions to further improve it, as it can even be better than it is right now (and yes, I really love listening to soundtracks :smiley: ):

  • The size of the covers in the grid view should allow the user to set a size for the “tiles”. This can be useful when titles are a bit long, like in my current example, or just to display the cover more prominently. Dolphin already allows doing something similar for file browsing, this is the same exact idea.
  • About long titles, maybe the titles could use two lines if needed? Some views already do this (i.e. the Artists and Files tabs, but not the Albums tab), this seems a bit inconsistent.
  • The left panel, besides listing Artists, should also have an entry for Album Artists. It is not that uncommon to have tracks with featured Artists, and this unnecessarily takes space and attention in the Artists panel, where I may only want to see “main” ones. Adding an Album Artist tab would solve this, after all, the metadata is already in the files, and the app should allow me to use this information if needed. The same panel would also benefit from having some other metadata, like, for example, sample rate, file format, audio codec, etc…
  • Speaking of the left panel, especially if more entries are to be added, what about letting the user customize it and choose what entries are to be displayed? For example, not everyone might need an Album Artist view, and I am not using the Radio Stations, so the ideal solution would be to let the user choose rather than forcing some defaults.
  • It is not possible to select multiple items at once in the main view or the playlist view, and right-click in any item to perform quick actions (i.e., opening with an external app, adding/removing from playlist, etc.), or to drag and drop. All these operations are available in other KDE apps like Dolphin, and as a user is a bit unexpected to have a UI that is visually basically the same, but that behaves so differently.

All these points more or less fall inside a more general consideration: Elisa is doing an excellent job at respecting the “Simple by default” part of the KDE philosophy, but right now is falling a bit short on the “Powerful when needed” part. I’m not sure if this is a design choice, or if Elisa is still in a “getting there” phase, I hope it is the latter :smiley:

(As a side note, as you can see from my screenshot I have an issue with covers not being displayed, I opened a bug some time ago reporting this, here https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=520868 )

2

one problem media players face is that you can’t just start off with a “assuming perfect metadata.” Like I’d say it’d make sense for Artist tab to just show album artists itself if we lived in that world, but we don’t. I’m not sure how useful an album artist feature is in general bc of that.

Multi-artist albums and how to deal with them is the bane of music players lol. The “Various Artists” tag is a comment concept developed by the evil or deranged.

3

For what it’s worth / for tracking, feature requests for several of these items exist in the KDE Bugtracking System, and just need someone with the time, ability and interest to jump in and figure out how to implement :slight_smile: