Clementine
Version: 1.3.1-97 Web: http://bit.ly/ClementinePlayer
The last time we picked Clementine [in HotPicks, LXF145], it was in the days when the dust had not settled after Amarok had completely changed its look and feel after upgrading from version 1.4 to 2.0. Clementine used to be – and continues to be – the clone of old Amarok1.4, but in recent years it has gained more features and more polish. Nowadays, regardless of your attitude to Amarok, you can use Clementine as your default Qt5- based audio player and enjoy very fast library surfing and lots of online music services that are tightly integrated into the player. That said, even if your ~/Music directory is completely empty, you can still populate your playlist with tracks of any genre by searching through music services, such as Magnatune or Spotify. Clementine offers many ways to access music thanks to the very handy vertical menu along the left-hand side of the window. You can surf through a library of file tags, explore your albums via a built-in file manager or add music from remote devices (including your optical drive). The Tools menu has a lot of features that you’ll need to complement listening to you favourite tunes while the Extras menu has some funny items to fool around with.
Clementine has a lot of additional features that you should be aware of, such as Wii Remote support, web access (you can connect to your Clementine player from another machine), a file format transcoder and lyrics and cover art auto-fetching etc. The Clementine1.3 update also offers some extra goodies, including support for VK.com (the largest music library in the world, which recently resolved its licensing issues), a new ‘Rainbow Dash’ visual analyser, as well as a ‘Psychedelic Colour’ mode addition to all analysers (great for stressed out sysadmins), so we can safely say the new version is more colourful than ever before.
“Enjoy very fast library surfing and lots of online music services that are tightly integrated into the player.”