Clementine Rules

I have been using Rhythmbox and Banshee ever since I moved over to Gnome distros. They are both good (I prefer Banshee because it has a built-in equalizer). Of course, Banshee is written in a Microsoft language which sort of irks the FOSS purist in me.

However last night I was bored and decided to try out some other players. First I tried Audacious. It is great if all you need is to listen to your own music. However, it doesn't support radio streaming, which was a turn off. Other than that it is excellent and lightweight.

Then I tried Clementine. It is written in QT, so I didn't think it would play well with Unity/GTK. I was wrong. It is lightweight, full featured and highly stable/fast. Not to mention it is very aesthetically pleasing. It is an Amar0k 1.4 clone, much like Exaile. Its cover fetcher is top notch. Its music info section is great (fetches lyrics, album and artist info with no delay or errors). It also comes with ProjectM visualizations built-in and they just work. It comes with a built-in full featured EQ (a must have for me). Supports crossfade, gapless playback, etc.

I will now use it from now on and not look back.

 

It's also got a Windows version!

Funny, one of the things I've noticed about FOSS is that the best of it is almost invariably cross-platform.

 

It's because whenever some FOSS developers make an app that becomes popular on Linux/BSD, they always get big heads and decide to target Windows too. I can think of a number of projects that started on Linux and then later ported to Windows. VLC is one. The Nmap port scanner is another.

Another thing is that many of these apps are written in high-level languages (often interpreted languages) which makes porting them extremely simple. if they are written in C, it takes more work.

 

I like it. Much smaller than Amarok, and faster. Plus it's cross-platform. I just really dislike the appearance and wish it could be customized on Windows.

 

It's a keeper for me