Help wanted to evolve KDEs music players

[Myriam Schweingruber]

Wow, go for a short one-week holiday and the world explodes....

On Thu, Jul 30, 2015 at 1:30 PM, Teo Mrnjavac <teo at kde.org> wrote:
> 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.

I answer here as it would be a tad tedious to respond to all individually:

Amarok is NOT unmaintained, we just had some difficulties with a very
resistant release-blocker, and sadly the key devs who were supposed to
do the release just disappeared into oblivion. So much for "I have
time at my new job to work on Amarok, I will do the release soon, I do
merge the GSoC work,etc". Sorry if I sound a tad pissed, because I
have heard a lot of these and since that person had time to attend
Akademy, he could also have finished the work he promised...

Currently a 2.9 beta tarball is ready, I just need some help to do the
release text and other stuff, as I too have a job that takes on my
time.

Also, we have started the Qt5 port of Amarok (current WIP as a GSoC
task), and Mark also has some ideas on how to make Amarok a tad
leaner. If you did follow planetkde you would all know about, btw...

So please do not jump to conclusions just because we didn't have many
commits lately.

FWIW: the current git status is +595 from the last release, and AFAICS
there is quite some unfinished work from the previous GSoC students
that is just waiting to be merged (CD stack, for instance, which the
GSoC mentor told me he would merge). There is only so much I can do,
and I am NOT a developer, and Mark has a full-time job that doesn't
leave much time

And YES, we could need some help for the Qt5 port, as it is a lot of
work for just 2 devs.


Regards, Myriam
-- 
Proud member of the Amarok and KDE Community
Protect your freedom and join the Fellowship of FSFE:
http://www.fsfe.org
Please don't send me proprietary file formats,
use ISO standard ODF instead (ISO/IEC 26300)

>> Visit http://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-devel#unsub to unsubscribe <<