Help wanted to evolve KDEs music players

[John Layt]

On 30 July 2015 at 11:42, Stefan Derkits <stefan at derkits.at> wrote:

> 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.

Personally, I've been thinking most of kdemultimedia needs to die in
the KF5 era, people are no longer interested in maintaining the code,
much functionality is close to obsolete, and far bigger, better
standalone projects have media playing well covered. Then again, a
very simple default audio player is something that is attractive in
the desktop, I know it's all I want which is why I use juk.

My simple advice: merge, juk, kscd, kaudiocreator and add some
internet radio stream playing (a lot of the code is in shared
libraries already) and launch it as a new application in Extragear.
Then we retire kdemultimedia as a module. Target the simplest possible
feature set for playing/ripping the most common audio only.
Personally, I think a CD/MP3 player/manager/ripper and an online radio
stream player/manager is all we need in a simple default audio player.
Adding streaming music services like Spotify or whatever greatly
complicates matters, if you support a couple of online services, then
people ask why you don't support the one they use, you end up at
Amarok, or with lots of unmaintained or broken plugins that you can't
support. Same for video.

Something to be very wary of is the fate of Dragon Player: it was only
intended as a very basic player for quickly viewing files, almost a
test-bed for Phonon video, but people misunderstood it, expected it to
do more, and came away disappointed and judgemental. We would almost
have been better not shipping it as an app I think and only a
plugin/kpart.

For video playing, VLC is miles ahead, we should work with them
instead to integrate into KDE better. For a full media player/manager
combining them all, leave that to PMC. But remember the KDE way: make
lots of reusable libraries for each function, design a plugin
infrastructure that suits different scenarios, reuse as much as
possible and don't try reinvent what others have already done. Think
Kipi or similar.

> [0] https://community.kde.org/KDE_Visual_Design_Group/Music_Player

Nice designs, wrap those around juk's well-tested backend and we're done!

John.