8 ms·

Clementine: modern music player and library organizer

105 points by based2 11y ago

Programmatic 11y ago
I really like Clementine as a streaming music player and use it quite extensively for playing and discovering Digitally Imported's streams without having to browse through the site. I really like DI's downtempo station for work, and I like that Clementine is cross-platform so I can use the same player on my work and home systems. Kudos to the team for having such a broad and deep selection of streaming providers integrated into it. My one complaint is that the music library paradigm in Clementine doesn't feel cohesive, so unfortunately it is relegated to streaming music for me. I really don't like that I can't play music directly from the library and have to make a playlist: it feels very cluttering. This is even (or especially) true for streaming stations, in order to try a new one out it must be added to a playlist. If I could change one thing about Clementine, it would be to allow playing of music directly from the library.
- loudandskittish 11y ago
  Unfortunately, for fans of Amarok 1.4, that's a feature, not a bug.
  - Programmatic 11y ago
    I'm not familiar with the exact history leading to the fork of Amarok. Did the 2.0 version make a change to that effect, or was it just seen as going in a different direction overall than the userbase behind the 1.4 fork liked?
    - ultramancool 11y ago
      Amarok 2 made major UI changes which many users didn't like, the whole thing just felt more heavy and complex. Clementine is a fairly faithful reproduction of the original Amarok line. For comparison, look at Clementine screenshots vs this: https://amarok.kde.org/en/screenshots https://amarok.kde.org/en/screenshots
- michaelmrose 11y ago
  It seems super likely that you don't want to click on each track as the prior one finishes so a queue is needed. It would seem then that playing directly from the library would be functionally identifical to adding everything you click on to a transitory playlist. In fact you can more or less use it like this with a single playlist that you either clear or just keep adding to. Seems like that would work better if there was an option to start with a blank playlist or trim the playlist automatically so that only the last x tracks were shown. What is the difference if any between playing as you say directly from the library and a single transitory playlist.
  - Programmatic 11y ago
    >What is the difference if any between playing as you say directly from the library and a single transitory playlist. I don't like having a transitory playlist, I find it to be cluttering. It should play the next track in the library (or shuffle). If I make a playlist, it's to group similar music together. I would like to be able to double-click on a track in my library and then tune out again until I don't like the music it's playing, rather than managing an interim playlist and having to intentionally add the album I want to listen to into it.
    - c22 11y ago
      I love the "playlists" though I rarely save them. In my preferences I have double clicking from the library add to a new playlist. Usually I just double click a whole album, it immediately starts playing in a new playlist and I can shuffle it or loop it as I see fit. That one song on the album I don't like? I just right click and "remove from playlist", now I don't hear it. Sometimes I'll search for a keyword or artist and select all now I have a playlist with everything that artist worked on. Maybe if I've been adding and removing stuff from the queue and I like the way it's feeling I'll save it for later, or just leave its tab there for a couple months till I'm bored with it. I always keep a "dynamic" playlist tab open for when I just want a shuffle across my whole library. If I see something coming up I don't want to hear I just delete it (or reshuffle the whole thing which doesn't affect the currently playing song).
- ultramancool 11y ago
  Clementine was originally created as a fork of Amarok 1.4 series and this very layout was my absolute favorite feature of it. I've never felt comfortable in a media player without it. It also has dynamic playlist for people who are more into that. That library and playlist system is the entire purpose of Clementine and the reason it was created.
- chriswarbo 11y ago
  > I really don't like that I can't play music directly from the library and have to make a playlist: it feels very cluttering. > If I could change one thing about Clementine, it would be to allow playing of music directly from the library. I've always used Clementine (and Amarok before it) with the whole library selected and shuffle enabled. To browse, I can use the search bar; to force a song to play, I can double-click it; but mostly I'd right-click -> add to queue. I've never had to add items to a playlist. Maybe the whole library view is buried under a "dynamic playlist" menu or something, but once it's been selected it'll appear by default whenever the player is opened.
dreamofkoholint 11y ago
In terms of library management, I think Beets is pretty hard to beat! I also like the UNIX philosophy, which this seems to violate. I yearn for the ability to use a Beets library as a source for streaming, along with the ability to combine with other sources (e.g. Amazon, Pandora) The closest to this I've seen is mopidy-beets, but it is now unmaintained and doesn't seem to have the ability to manage playlists from multiple sources.
- Veratyr 11y ago
  Seconded. There's nothing that even comes close to Beets in terms of metadata management. Thanks to MusicBrainz, not only does it get metadata right most of the time, it keeps it right by syncing from MusicBrainz to the tags when you tell it to (mbsync). Plus it'll (reliably) find and embed album art and do transcodes if you want it to. > I yearn for the ability to use a Beets library as a source for streaming Beets + MadSonic [0] blows everything else out of the water for me. I use DSub on Android and the web UI on desktop (although JamStash and Polysonic are good too). This doesn't meet your "combine with other sources" requirement though. For that you'd need Tomahawk (which supports Beets and Amazon but not Pandora) [1]. [0]: http://madsonic.org http://madsonic.org [1]: https://www.tomahawk-player.org https://www.tomahawk-player.org And EDIT: You can actually use Clementine with Beets through Subsonic/Madsonic as well.
  - unhammer 11y ago
    I tried DSub the other day as an alternative to the standard Subsonic player on Android since it can play podcasts. I set it to wifi only streaming, but it still somehow managed to use 1.5G of my 300M data plan even though I only played a single 60M track with it; so caveat emptor … I like Tomahawk so far for the "other sources" part (also I find the UI easy on the eyes compared to … just about anything else out there), but of course I can't get it to stream from my Subsonic collection :-/ Why do you use Madsonic instead of plain Subsonic? (Does it work with Tomahawk?)
    - Veratyr 11y ago
      > I set it to wifi only streaming, but it still somehow managed to use 1.5G of my 300M data plan even though I only played a single 60M track with it; so caveat emptor … That's really odd. Perhaps it was precaching extra tracks? I haven't had any issues with it, certainly not 1.5GB of data (although I have unlimited so likely wouldn't notice anyway). > Why do you use Madsonic instead of plain Subsonic? (Does it work with Tomahawk?) I found that regular Subsonic just wasn't moving much at all. Madsonic seemed to have active development. I haven't tried regular Subsonic with Tomahawk but Madsonic certainly works for me. I also hooked it into a Beets server without any issues.
cormacrelf 11y ago
I will happily continue using iTunes over anything that uses a slice of citrus as the volume slider.
- chriswarbo 11y ago
  iTunes isn't an option for those on Linux, or who don't use proprietary software. I tend to control volume using the system's volume slider, the media keys on my keyboard and the hardware knob on my speakers. If I want per-application volume control, I can do that for all applications with pulseaudio. Clementine's volume control UI is very low in my application-choosing decision tree.
- brusch64 11y ago
  ..and I will happily not use iTunes at all. A music player unable to play FLAC (a free codec) that was released 14 years ago. A nice operating system with a bad media player.
  - throwanem 11y ago
    Not only a bad media player, but one which the OS ties so tightly to the keyboard's media control functions that there seems no reliable way of prying them loose. Not my biggest OS X annoyance, but easily in the top five.
santa_boy 11y ago
The "features" section on right of homepage says: "Copy music to your iPod, iPhone, MTP or mass-storage USB player" The [Github Page](https://github.com/clementine-player/Clementine/wiki/Portable-Devices#introduction https://github.com/clementine-player/Clementine/wiki/Portabl...) says "iOS (iPod touch, iPhone & iPad)" is unsupported. Is there any programmatic interface to write tunes to my iPhone and also atleast read (metadata) and delete songs off my iPhone?
- ZenPsycho 11y ago
  Because it's a proprietary undocumented interface we are limited to reverse engineering, but efforts do exist: https://www.theiphonewiki.com/wiki/MobileDevice_Library https://www.theiphonewiki.com/wiki/MobileDevice_Library
corybrown 11y ago
How is performance these days? Last time I tried it, the app felt quite sluggish.
arvinsim 11y ago
Is it just me or is there no way to delete all your playlists all at once?
- knightbat 11y ago
  playlist -> clear all, something like that
  - arvinsim 11y ago
    Unfortunately, that option is not there.
liotier 11y ago
Clementine: all the good bits from Amarok before it began to degenerate. I love it just for the indexed metadata searching of my local library... I know no other player that lets me search a big heap of files that fast. While listening to music, it usually give me ideas about further music I want to listen to... The playlist in right pane and search-instant filtered library in the left one is exactly the interface that suits that. Also, the context panes with lyrics and band's Wikipedia page automatically loaded during play are nice.
- yoodenvranx 11y ago
  > I know no other player that lets me search a big heap of files that fast. foobar2000?
  - brulard 11y ago
    foobar is only for windows..
    - yoodenvranx 11y ago
      It runs perfectly fine in wine, I am doing this for years.
      - throwanem 11y ago
        I've done the same, on OS X yet, and had no trouble. Unfortunately, fb2k ended up being unsuitable for my purposes for other reasons - namely, that it can't handle self-signed TLS certificates, and probably never will be able to because the developer doesn't care about that use case. I still use it at home, but for remote streaming I've found Subsonic to be an amazingly effective solution, not least thanks to the excellent iSub app.
        cptskippy 11y ago
        Supporting self-signed certs is typically done by ignoring cert chain and trust issues which is a major component of TLS. A better option is for you to explicitly trust the authority that signed the cert.
phatbyte 11y ago
This UI is horrible IMO. Open Source projects could really start to embrace UX designers instead of 100% programmers. A slice of orange has a slider...really? :P
- darkclarity 11y ago
  Clementine comes from an place where software is aimed at all levels of user - without sacrificing expert features. If your idea of UI and UX (I don't know) is the modern trend of hiding features to make software into toys then that won't go well with its users.
  - phatbyte 11y ago
    I know a lot of expert tools with complex features and with beautiful design/nice to use design. One thing is not a trade-off of the other. That's a fallacy that doesn't help the stigma that OSS tools should continue to do IMO.
- dsr_ 11y ago
  Do you know any UX designers who want to volunteer for such a thing? I'll bet you a shiny nickel that the Clementine people would be happy to accept contributions in the form of graphics and patches. But because they are an all volunteer project, they probably can't accept sketches, wireframes, and color swatches as useful contributions, because you then need to organize people to implement these things. The gap between "do this, it will work better" and "here's my pull requests" is large.
  - jamesrcole 11y ago
    Yes, but there's also a difference between UX expertise and simple poor taste. And the "A slice of orange as a slider" the grandparent comment refers to should not require UX designers to avoid.
- adimitrov 11y ago
  Try lollypop for a modern player with a very good UI. It's still in early development, and pretty fluid, but I'm using it as my day-to-day. I particularly enjoy its focus on albums as elemental units of playback, as opposed to songs. https://gnumdk.github.io/lollypop-web/ https://gnumdk.github.io/lollypop-web/
bananaoomarang 11y ago
The most irritating thing about Clementine (I assume its the same for other players too), aside from its visual ugliness, is that if you play song from Spotify you can't scrub, just play and pause. Other than that it's still probably the best GUI music manager/player on Linux.
oxplot 11y ago
I've gone through every music program on linux (including Celementine) and found the only one possessing sanity across the board to be QuodLibet [1]. Everything is simple, customizable and no behavior is forced on the user. I used to use rhythmbox before it was dumbed down for Gnome 3's sake. [1]: https://quodlibet.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ https://quodlibet.readthedocs.org/en/latest/
bigp3t3 11y ago
I still haven't found a suitable MusicBee [0] alternative for Linux. It's the only thing preventing me from switching. [0]: http://getmusicbee.com/ http://getmusicbee.com/
mp3geek 11y ago
Pity, no support for Google Music.
offbyone 11y ago
Ctrl-F "Match" No results found. Still not usable, sadly.
anexprogrammer 11y ago
When I ended up back on Windows for work related reasons a few years back I tried a ludicrous amount of music players. Not much was better than Winamp, even after all these years, until I found MusicBee. Nothing else comes close. Clementine was OK, but clunky. When I replace the laptop, at some point this year, and go back to a Mac, I have no idea what I'll use for music. It won't be itunes. I need an OSX Musicbee port!

105 points by based2 11y ago

I really like Clementine as a streaming music player and use it quite extensively for playing and discovering Digitally Imported's streams without having to browse through the site. I really like DI's downtempo station for work, and I like that Clementine is cross-platform so I can use the same player on my work and home systems. Kudos to the team for having such a broad and deep selection of streaming providers integrated into it. My one complaint is that the music library paradigm in Clementine doesn't feel cohesive, so unfortunately it is relegated to streaming music for me. I really don't like that I can't play music directly from the library and have to make a playlist: it feels very cluttering. This is even (or especially) true for streaming stations, in order to try a new one out it must be added to a playlist. If I could change one thing about Clementine, it would be to allow playing of music directly from the library.

loudandskittish 11y ago
Unfortunately, for fans of Amarok 1.4, that's a feature, not a bug.
- Programmatic 11y ago
  I'm not familiar with the exact history leading to the fork of Amarok. Did the 2.0 version make a change to that effect, or was it just seen as going in a different direction overall than the userbase behind the 1.4 fork liked?
  - ultramancool 11y ago
    Amarok 2 made major UI changes which many users didn't like, the whole thing just felt more heavy and complex. Clementine is a fairly faithful reproduction of the original Amarok line. For comparison, look at Clementine screenshots vs this: https://amarok.kde.org/en/screenshots https://amarok.kde.org/en/screenshots
michaelmrose 11y ago
It seems super likely that you don't want to click on each track as the prior one finishes so a queue is needed. It would seem then that playing directly from the library would be functionally identifical to adding everything you click on to a transitory playlist. In fact you can more or less use it like this with a single playlist that you either clear or just keep adding to. Seems like that would work better if there was an option to start with a blank playlist or trim the playlist automatically so that only the last x tracks were shown. What is the difference if any between playing as you say directly from the library and a single transitory playlist.
- Programmatic 11y ago
  >What is the difference if any between playing as you say directly from the library and a single transitory playlist. I don't like having a transitory playlist, I find it to be cluttering. It should play the next track in the library (or shuffle). If I make a playlist, it's to group similar music together. I would like to be able to double-click on a track in my library and then tune out again until I don't like the music it's playing, rather than managing an interim playlist and having to intentionally add the album I want to listen to into it.
  - c22 11y ago
    I love the "playlists" though I rarely save them. In my preferences I have double clicking from the library add to a new playlist. Usually I just double click a whole album, it immediately starts playing in a new playlist and I can shuffle it or loop it as I see fit. That one song on the album I don't like? I just right click and "remove from playlist", now I don't hear it. Sometimes I'll search for a keyword or artist and select all now I have a playlist with everything that artist worked on. Maybe if I've been adding and removing stuff from the queue and I like the way it's feeling I'll save it for later, or just leave its tab there for a couple months till I'm bored with it. I always keep a "dynamic" playlist tab open for when I just want a shuffle across my whole library. If I see something coming up I don't want to hear I just delete it (or reshuffle the whole thing which doesn't affect the currently playing song).
ultramancool 11y ago
Clementine was originally created as a fork of Amarok 1.4 series and this very layout was my absolute favorite feature of it. I've never felt comfortable in a media player without it. It also has dynamic playlist for people who are more into that. That library and playlist system is the entire purpose of Clementine and the reason it was created.
chriswarbo 11y ago
> I really don't like that I can't play music directly from the library and have to make a playlist: it feels very cluttering. > If I could change one thing about Clementine, it would be to allow playing of music directly from the library. I've always used Clementine (and Amarok before it) with the whole library selected and shuffle enabled. To browse, I can use the search bar; to force a song to play, I can double-click it; but mostly I'd right-click -> add to queue. I've never had to add items to a playlist. Maybe the whole library view is buried under a "dynamic playlist" menu or something, but once it's been selected it'll appear by default whenever the player is opened.

dreamofkoholint 11y ago

In terms of library management, I think Beets is pretty hard to beat! I also like the UNIX philosophy, which this seems to violate. I yearn for the ability to use a Beets library as a source for streaming, along with the ability to combine with other sources (e.g. Amazon, Pandora) The closest to this I've seen is mopidy-beets, but it is now unmaintained and doesn't seem to have the ability to manage playlists from multiple sources.

Veratyr 11y ago
Seconded. There's nothing that even comes close to Beets in terms of metadata management. Thanks to MusicBrainz, not only does it get metadata right most of the time, it keeps it right by syncing from MusicBrainz to the tags when you tell it to (mbsync). Plus it'll (reliably) find and embed album art and do transcodes if you want it to. > I yearn for the ability to use a Beets library as a source for streaming Beets + MadSonic [0] blows everything else out of the water for me. I use DSub on Android and the web UI on desktop (although JamStash and Polysonic are good too). This doesn't meet your "combine with other sources" requirement though. For that you'd need Tomahawk (which supports Beets and Amazon but not Pandora) [1]. [0]: http://madsonic.org http://madsonic.org [1]: https://www.tomahawk-player.org https://www.tomahawk-player.org And EDIT: You can actually use Clementine with Beets through Subsonic/Madsonic as well.
- unhammer 11y ago
  I tried DSub the other day as an alternative to the standard Subsonic player on Android since it can play podcasts. I set it to wifi only streaming, but it still somehow managed to use 1.5G of my 300M data plan even though I only played a single 60M track with it; so caveat emptor … I like Tomahawk so far for the "other sources" part (also I find the UI easy on the eyes compared to … just about anything else out there), but of course I can't get it to stream from my Subsonic collection :-/ Why do you use Madsonic instead of plain Subsonic? (Does it work with Tomahawk?)
  - Veratyr 11y ago
    > I set it to wifi only streaming, but it still somehow managed to use 1.5G of my 300M data plan even though I only played a single 60M track with it; so caveat emptor … That's really odd. Perhaps it was precaching extra tracks? I haven't had any issues with it, certainly not 1.5GB of data (although I have unlimited so likely wouldn't notice anyway). > Why do you use Madsonic instead of plain Subsonic? (Does it work with Tomahawk?) I found that regular Subsonic just wasn't moving much at all. Madsonic seemed to have active development. I haven't tried regular Subsonic with Tomahawk but Madsonic certainly works for me. I also hooked it into a Beets server without any issues.

cormacrelf 11y ago

I will happily continue using iTunes over anything that uses a slice of citrus as the volume slider.

chriswarbo 11y ago
iTunes isn't an option for those on Linux, or who don't use proprietary software. I tend to control volume using the system's volume slider, the media keys on my keyboard and the hardware knob on my speakers. If I want per-application volume control, I can do that for all applications with pulseaudio. Clementine's volume control UI is very low in my application-choosing decision tree.
brusch64 11y ago
..and I will happily not use iTunes at all. A music player unable to play FLAC (a free codec) that was released 14 years ago. A nice operating system with a bad media player.
- throwanem 11y ago
  Not only a bad media player, but one which the OS ties so tightly to the keyboard's media control functions that there seems no reliable way of prying them loose. Not my biggest OS X annoyance, but easily in the top five.

santa_boy 11y ago

The "features" section on right of homepage says: "Copy music to your iPod, iPhone, MTP or mass-storage USB player" The [Github Page](https://github.com/clementine-player/Clementine/wiki/Portable-Devices#introduction https://github.com/clementine-player/Clementine/wiki/Portabl...) says "iOS (iPod touch, iPhone & iPad)" is unsupported. Is there any programmatic interface to write tunes to my iPhone and also atleast read (metadata) and delete songs off my iPhone?

ZenPsycho 11y ago
Because it's a proprietary undocumented interface we are limited to reverse engineering, but efforts do exist: https://www.theiphonewiki.com/wiki/MobileDevice_Library https://www.theiphonewiki.com/wiki/MobileDevice_Library

corybrown 11y ago

How is performance these days? Last time I tried it, the app felt quite sluggish.

arvinsim 11y ago

Is it just me or is there no way to delete all your playlists all at once?

knightbat 11y ago
playlist -> clear all, something like that
- arvinsim 11y ago
  Unfortunately, that option is not there.

liotier 11y ago

Clementine: all the good bits from Amarok before it began to degenerate. I love it just for the indexed metadata searching of my local library... I know no other player that lets me search a big heap of files that fast. While listening to music, it usually give me ideas about further music I want to listen to... The playlist in right pane and search-instant filtered library in the left one is exactly the interface that suits that. Also, the context panes with lyrics and band's Wikipedia page automatically loaded during play are nice.

yoodenvranx 11y ago
> I know no other player that lets me search a big heap of files that fast. foobar2000?
- brulard 11y ago
  foobar is only for windows..
  - yoodenvranx 11y ago
    It runs perfectly fine in wine, I am doing this for years.
    - throwanem 11y ago
      I've done the same, on OS X yet, and had no trouble. Unfortunately, fb2k ended up being unsuitable for my purposes for other reasons - namely, that it can't handle self-signed TLS certificates, and probably never will be able to because the developer doesn't care about that use case. I still use it at home, but for remote streaming I've found Subsonic to be an amazingly effective solution, not least thanks to the excellent iSub app.
      - cptskippy 11y ago
        Supporting self-signed certs is typically done by ignoring cert chain and trust issues which is a major component of TLS. A better option is for you to explicitly trust the authority that signed the cert.

phatbyte 11y ago

This UI is horrible IMO. Open Source projects could really start to embrace UX designers instead of 100% programmers. A slice of orange has a slider...really? :P

darkclarity 11y ago
Clementine comes from an place where software is aimed at all levels of user - without sacrificing expert features. If your idea of UI and UX (I don't know) is the modern trend of hiding features to make software into toys then that won't go well with its users.
- phatbyte 11y ago
  I know a lot of expert tools with complex features and with beautiful design/nice to use design. One thing is not a trade-off of the other. That's a fallacy that doesn't help the stigma that OSS tools should continue to do IMO.
dsr_ 11y ago
Do you know any UX designers who want to volunteer for such a thing? I'll bet you a shiny nickel that the Clementine people would be happy to accept contributions in the form of graphics and patches. But because they are an all volunteer project, they probably can't accept sketches, wireframes, and color swatches as useful contributions, because you then need to organize people to implement these things. The gap between "do this, it will work better" and "here's my pull requests" is large.
- jamesrcole 11y ago
  Yes, but there's also a difference between UX expertise and simple poor taste. And the "A slice of orange as a slider" the grandparent comment refers to should not require UX designers to avoid.
adimitrov 11y ago
Try lollypop for a modern player with a very good UI. It's still in early development, and pretty fluid, but I'm using it as my day-to-day. I particularly enjoy its focus on albums as elemental units of playback, as opposed to songs. https://gnumdk.github.io/lollypop-web/ https://gnumdk.github.io/lollypop-web/

bananaoomarang 11y ago

The most irritating thing about Clementine (I assume its the same for other players too), aside from its visual ugliness, is that if you play song from Spotify you can't scrub, just play and pause. Other than that it's still probably the best GUI music manager/player on Linux.

oxplot 11y ago

I've gone through every music program on linux (including Celementine) and found the only one possessing sanity across the board to be QuodLibet [1]. Everything is simple, customizable and no behavior is forced on the user. I used to use rhythmbox before it was dumbed down for Gnome 3's sake. [1]: https://quodlibet.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ https://quodlibet.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

bigp3t3 11y ago

I still haven't found a suitable MusicBee [0] alternative for Linux. It's the only thing preventing me from switching. [0]: http://getmusicbee.com/ http://getmusicbee.com/

mp3geek 11y ago

Pity, no support for Google Music.

offbyone 11y ago

Ctrl-F "Match" No results found. Still not usable, sadly.

anexprogrammer 11y ago

When I ended up back on Windows for work related reasons a few years back I tried a ludicrous amount of music players. Not much was better than Winamp, even after all these years, until I found MusicBee. Nothing else comes close. Clementine was OK, but clunky. When I replace the laptop, at some point this year, and go back to a Mac, I have no idea what I'll use for music. It won't be itunes. I need an OSX Musicbee port!