Help wanted to evolve KDEs music players

[Martin Steigerwald]

Am Donnerstag, 30. Juli 2015, 13:30:00 schrieb 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 features are either poorly designed, broken or outdated.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.

Wow, it seems we thought similar things at the same time. See my other post.

However what ever the approach is: Rewrite and replace some existing or reuse 
and adapt it. Make it as robust and reliable as you can. Make it just work. 
100% of the time (or at least 99,99%), like my CD player, like my Rockbox 
based Sansa e260. When I want to enjoy multimedia, I am absolutely not in the 
mood to discuss with unfinished and buggy software. Or to get a diploma about 
how the Linux audio stack works in order to find out what the issue is this 
time.

Thanks,
-- 
Martin