Help wanted to evolve KDEs music players

[Teo Mrnjavac]

On Thursday, July 30, 2015 12:42:14 Stefan Derkits wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
> in discussions during Akademy 2015 we found out that while we have with
> Plasma 5 a Desktop that has a modern & consistent look, the state of
> some applications isn't that good. And we want to change that.
> 
> At the moment KDE has no up-to-date music player. JuK is very simple to
> use, but lacking a modern design. Amarok is and will stay the
> swiss-knife of KDE music players, but also lacking a modern design and
> may be too complicated for new users.
> 
> So let's make a new music player, a successor especially to JuK & Bangarang.
> A music player not for power users or music enthusiasts that want/need 100s
> of features in a player but a simple player designed & made for users of
> the Plasma 5 Desktop.
> 
> What do we already have:
> -) A design vision by the VDG including UI mockups & user stories [0]
> 
> What do we need:
> -) More People to discuss & flesh out the vision [1]
> -) A motivated team of designers, software architects, coders & testers,
> dedicated to creating a modern music player for our users
> 
> This music player should not replace Amarok or other great Qt-based
> music players like Tomahawk or Clementine, as their feature set is much
> bigger than this new music player should ever have.
> 
> So if you are interested, contact me either in person on Akademy, on IRC
> (HorusHorrendus @ freenode) or via mail (stefan [at] derkits.at)
> 

Excellent idea, a no-nonsense "thing that opens audio files" is much needed.

Have you thought about picking up and taking over Amarok? A quick look at the 
commit log for the past few months suggests that it's essentially 
unmaintained, so if it keeps this pace it's unlikely to stay the swiss-knife 
of music players as you suggest.

This stuff is hard and time consuming so I think it makes sense to reuse code.

While Amarok does have a sizeable feature set, a good portion of those 
features are either poorly designed, broken or outdated. Perhaps by taking 
over as maintainer, yanking out all the cruft and taking UX hints from the VDG 
you could get a modern and pretty music player up and running more quickly and 
easily than jumping into the umpteenth "magic rewrite that will fix all things 
forever". You could cut down on the feature set significantly, and present the 
features that you don't remove in a much better way.

Cheers,
-- 
Teo Mrnjavac
http://teom.org | teo at kde.org