Clementine – get your old school but not old school Amarok fix!

Looking for a new music player/manager but the latest Amarok is just too bloated or “busy” for you? Then I’d highly recommend looking at Clementine.

It’s a fork of Amarok 1.4, a version many people loved, but brought up to date. Best of all? It’s cross platform! I even use it when I’m in Windows, that’s how much I’ve come to like this player.

It features a lot of the bells and whistles without being excessive, such as internet radio (Last FM, Magnatune, Jamendo etc), visualizations, automatic album and tag fetching, inbuilt music transcoding, support for most codecs, dynamic playlists, Wii Remote (never used this but anyway ;p), native desktop notifications support for either of the OS’s (or an inbuilt one of your choosing) and lyrics and much more, all the while keeping out of your way.

I’m pretty impressed with Clementine’s clean looks and layout, it is indeed something I personally much prefer over Amarok’s latest interface. The latest version of Clementine is 0.7, so it’s not all that old but it is in my experience very stable and a real pleasure to use. Unlike some players, it’s also lightning fast to respond to my keyboard media controls, so stopping, resuming and changing songs is a breeze and very quick.

Unless you’re perfectly happy with something like Rhythmbox or Banshee already, give Clementine a go. It’s growing in popularity fairly quickly and I can see why, I think it’s a wonderful little player. Check it out!