Most of you probably haven't heard about Clementine before. But every linux music enthusiast must be aware of Amarok 1.4, which for many like me, was the best open source music player for Linux. Even though it was KDE app, I used it as my default music player in Ubuntu Gnome. It was that good. But everything changed once KDE developers decided to rewrite Amarok.
So, What is Clementine?
Clementine is a music player based on old Amarok 1.4. Starting from Amarok 2.0, developers started completely rewriting the Amarok code for better integration with KDE 4.0. I totally understand the logic behind such a drastic step. Although, in the process, Amarok lost a lot if its charm. And a lot of Amarok 1.4 addicts like me had no other option but to do the difficult switch. (Update: Read the clarification by Jeff Mitchell for rewriting Amarok from scratch in the comments section below post)
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| Clementine's Covert Art Manager |
But hey, Amarok 1.4 was open source to start with and in theory an open source app never really dies. Clementine was born from the ashes of Amarok 1.4. Clementine is actually a port of Amarok 1.4, with some features rewritten to take advantage of Qt4.
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| Preferences Menu |
After giving Clementine a spin for an hour or so I have to say I was deeply impressed. This is my old Amarok 1.4, its even better. And it is undergoing rapid development. Clementine is still a KDE app though and have a number of KDE dependencies as well.
The default Files/Radio/Library menu tree is simple and works great. And yes, Clementine does have Last.fm scrobbling support as well.
What's New In Clementine 0.4?
- Support for multiple, tabbed playlists.
- Support for loading and saving XSPF, M3U, PLS and ASX playlists.
- Fullscreen visualisation support using projectM.
- Magnatune integration - search, stream and download from Magnatune's collection.
- Music transcoder that can convert your music to mp3, ogg, flac, spx, 3gp or m4a from any format that's supported by Clementine.
- ReplayGain support for volume normalisation.
- Use icons from the desktop icon theme where possible.
- Full Changelog here.
Please note that, the latest Clementine 0.4 in not yet available in PPA yet. But it soon will be. Following steps will fetch you Clementine 0.3Edit: Clementine 0.6 is released and you can install it in Ubuntu Maverick, Lucid by doing the following in Terminal.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:me-davidsansome/clementine sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install clementine
- Done.
- You can alternatively download latest Clementine 0.4 directly in .deb format.
clementine_0.3_amd64.deb
- Simply double click on the downloaded deb file to install Clementine 0.4 in Ubuntu.
- Here is another good review of Clementine 0.4 by briancarper.
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