Hi alake, I like your music player, but I think I may appreciate it more if it could have a UI more similar to iTunes and Banshee

Not much happened in this topic for a while.

We talked about this on Akademy 2015 and we are still unhappy that there is no modern music player for Plasma 5. And we want to change that.
I (for the moment) committed to try to kickstart this by trying to get together a team to implement this.

In the meantime we should flesh out the use cases. I think with Plasma Mobile another important use case would be to have a third UI (that can be added later) esp. for use on phones.

I'll try to make a blog post about it, atm if you want to help just answer in this thread or write me a PM.

Stefan

Count me in Horrendus!

Hi,
it would be really cool if this player is being implemented (or Amarok will be adopted in this way ).
If this new music player is "created for Plasma", I think the most important part (besides playing music ) is that it integrates well.

- Tags and ratings should be managed by baloo (extended file attributes), so if one rates a song with dolphin, the same rating should be used in the music player and vice versa
- It should be MPRIS2 compatible, so that existing plasmoids and kde connect can control the player
- Maybe a "recent music" section like "recent applications" or "recent documents"

A really nice feature from Amarok is statistics sync with Last.fm: it is possible to "backup" play counts and ratings, so if one has more than 1 machine or gets a new one or reinstalls the os, the statistics are not gone.

Dynamic playlists based on ratings and some network capabilites would also be cool (upnp, mpd, ampache, etc)

Hi,

konradrenner wrote:it would be really cool if this player is being implemented (or Amarok will be adopted in this way ).
If this new music player is "created for Plasma", I think the most important part (besides playing music ) is that it integrates well.

- Tags and ratings should be managed by baloo (extended file attributes), so if one rates a song with dolphin, the same rating should be used in the music player and vice versa
- It should be MPRIS2 compatible, so that existing plasmoids and kde connect can control the player
- Maybe a "recent music" section like "recent applications" or "recent documents"

These features sound reasonable.

konradrenner wrote:Dynamic playlists based on ratings and some network capabilites would also be cool (upnp, mpd, ampache, etc)

[/quote]

These features are what did lead to the current situation: A lot of unmaintained code in Amarok, which doesn't make it easier to change the UI.

The vision here is to make a small player without many features. User that need dynamic playlists, upnp, mpd or ampache should use one of the other existing players. Also on my "list" of features that probably shouldn't be supported: Podcasts, Copying/Transcoding files to device, Lyrics support, Moodbar, different DB backends, scripting support (no idea if it is good to define what it should not be able to do )

Stefan

Horrendus wrote:Hi,

These features are what did lead to the current situation: A lot of unmaintained code in Amarok, which doesn't make it easier to change the UI.

The vision here is to make a small player without many features. User that need dynamic playlists, upnp, mpd or ampache should use one of the other existing players. Also on my "list" of features that probably shouldn't be supported: Podcasts, Copying/Transcoding files to device, Lyrics support, Moodbar, different DB backends, scripting support (no idea if it is good to define what it should not be able to do )

Stefan

Yep, this features are not so important for a "Plasma music player", they would be cool, but I think there a tons of players which already support such functions. The operative point is, that there is no player which is tightly integrated into Plasma and uses its features (Amarok had a Nepomuk backend, whiched worked more or less, but everything KDE/Plasma specific was optional and so not really well integrated...).

Thanks to everyone who (via mail or here) helped until now, got more positive feedback than expected

I think this thread and the wiki is a good place to discuss & flesh out the design and the features that such a player should have.

If you want to help with the implementation (coding, software architecture, testing, ...) please subscribe to the KDE Multimedia Mailingliste: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-multimedia and/or join the #kde-multimedia IRC channel

Stefan

alake wrote:A couple updates based in part on the feedback I've received so far.

I started working on a design for search.

I think that you shouldn't have to go in a tab to search something. I may make some people groan, but I think that looking at software like iTunes can help to think a "good UI". For instance, the search bar is very, very well placed. IMO you could add this near the Menu button or instead of the volume switch.

People are really in found of the apple things those days, and I think should also keep this in mind an try to use their ideas and enhance those.

Hello,

@VDG: if from a technical point of view it would work out to share backend code with Plasma Media Center, would it make sense to create one application for playing audio & video? Or do you think seperate applications make more sense?

Stefan

Hey everyone interested in Music Players,

on the mailinglists there was an interesting point brought up and sebas & me discussed it a little bit during breakfast today:

"Integration of online services" - Already many people listen to more music online, than on their harddisk. For new users it's maybe even easier to listen to music from e.g. Spotify than to rip their existing CDs. And if this new music player would be finished for users in around 1.5 years (probably more, not less) ... how will the important use cases for players look by then, so that this thing isn't a "player from the past". Of course integrating those services properly is very hard ... but can we really ignore them and be sure that local music still exists in 2 years?

Really hard questions ... maybe someone has ideas about this or has some answers.

Stefan

Horrendus wrote:Hey everyone interested in Music Players,
Of course integrating those services properly is very hard ... but can we really ignore them and be sure that local music still exists in 2 years?
Stefan

are you aware of tomahawk (tomahawk-player.org)? its written in Qt5 and has great support of dozens of online services (spotify, google music, beats, soundcloud, deezer, owncloud, ampache, beets etc.). IMHO the best music player around.

While their goals are probably different to those of a potential Plasma music player, their integration of external resources in implemented as javascript programs that are executed by Qt's js engine. These programs, called "resolvers" reside in an externel repo (https://github.com/tomahawk-player/tomahawk-resolvers) and get updated frequently. Maybe they are interested in a cooperation?

kilianl wrote: are you aware of tomahawk (tomahawk-player.org)? its written in Qt5 and has great support of dozens of online services (spotify, google music, beats, soundcloud, deezer, owncloud, ampache, beets etc.). IMHO the best music player around.

Of course I know tomahawk, I use it mostly and also did some contributions there and in related libraries. Cooperation is always good (if we decide online music IS a very important use case). But this is not about what other players exist and what they can do and what we can reuse, this is about the design vision of a (music)player for Plasma 5. When we are sure what we want, we can have a deeper look at existing players to see how they would fit to our use cases.

Stefan

I wish I had known about this at akademy so I could have worked with you on it andrew (I'm Aaron from the High Contrast theme) I really do think Plasma 5 deserves a music player to fit in with the rest of the new UI elements.

The online vs offline question is a very important one.

Personally, I get almost all of my music fix from net-labels like Jamendo, Ektoplazm, Laridae and Aaah-records – whether streamed or downloaded. What I’m looking for in a music player (and haven’t found it yet) is easy search and discover(!) for new music online and to easily donate to the artist/label. But if you’ve seen my desktop, you know I’m not your average user and such a player might be overkill for a default tool.

Maybe this is where we should start thinking through Personas again. I have a hunch that very entry-level Personas are the target group here.

I play my local music very rarely and use online services like Spotify, Google Play Music and such as well.