
Clementine: modern music player and library organizer - based2
https://www.clementine-player.org/en
======
liotier
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
> I know no other player that lets me search a big heap of files that fast.

foobar2000?

~~~
brulard
foobar is only for windows..

~~~
yoodenvranx
It runs perfectly fine in wine, I am doing this for years.

~~~
throwanem
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
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.

~~~
throwanem
Well, yes, I'm not completely ignorant of how TLS works, so that was of course
my first thought on discovering fb2k lacked any interface by which I could
tell it to trust my server cert. That's why, in the process of investigating
the issue, I added the root CA cert I'd created, and used to sign the server
cert, to the Windows certificate store.

That was enough to stop applications using the Windows TLS stack, such as
Internet Explorer, from complaining any longer about being unable to verify
the certificate. It didn't change anything about fb2k's behavior, though,
which led me to surmise that fb2k was doing something wonky in its TLS
implementation.

On the other hand, there's a forum thread from late last year [1] in which the
fb2k developer appears to have addressed the issue at least in part, by making
it possible to whitelist hosts and thus bypass certificate validity checking.
That's...hardly ideal, but it would probably have solved my problem, if it
existed four years ago when I last tried to get this working.

The same thread includes more information on the same kind of problem I was
having; from it I can surmise that if I'd created an empty CRL and had my root
CA cert point to it, I probably would've been able to get it working. Would've
been nice to know _that_ four years ago, too. But it looks like I'd have
needed to hook the process with a debugger and monitor system calls to find
out about it, and I wanted to listen to music more than I wanted to use
unfamiliar tools to debug unfamiliar API calls made by an opaque binary blob.

In any case, if I'd gotten fb2k working four years ago, I probably wouldn't
have been motivated to keep hunting for a solution until I found Subsonic,
which serves my remote-streaming purposes better than fb2k ever will. So
however frustrating it was at the time, it's been all to the good in the long
run.

[1]
[https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,110065.0.html](https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,110065.0.html)

------
dreamofkoholint
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
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
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
> 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.

------
Programmatic
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.

~~~
michaelmrose
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
>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
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).

------
phatbyte
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

~~~
chriswarbo
Arguably, Clementine is a counterexample to your argument.

Many years ago, the Amarok music player was very popular on Linux; I used it
extensively, as did many people I know, even though none of us used KDE (the
desktop environment on which it was built).

Then, the Amarok developers decided to revamp the project for version 2; using
newer technologies, removing bit-rotten code (apparently, due to the large
userbase, there were many "drive-by patches" from one-time contributors, who
were never heard from again) and, most significantly, completely rethinking
the UI.

If you dig around a little, you can find a lot of documents following this
process, e.g. from the (now defunct) Amarok blog
[https://amarok.kde.org/blog](https://amarok.kde.org/blog)

The result? The snazzy, powerful new music player known as Amarok 2
[https://amarok.kde.org](https://amarok.kde.org)

Yet, a huge number (most?) users abandoned it, the Amarok 1 codebase was
forked and renamed to Clementine, and years later this "horrible" music player
is still going strong; so much that it appears on the front page of Hacker
News.

Personally, I tried Amarok 2 for a while, but never really liked it. These
days I use cmus ( [https://cmus.github.io](https://cmus.github.io) ) but my
non-technical partner prefers Clementine. The only problem we've had with it
is trying to use a RaspberryPi as a file server; building the player's
database over a networked filesystem is painfully slow. It would be nice if
there were some way to create the DB on the RaspberryPi and send it over to
the machine running Clementine; but I've since been looking into Beets and
MPD.

~~~
majewsky
I used Amarok 2 for a while, but I was outraged by its ridiculously high
memory usage (nearly 100 MiB for a library of ~3000 songs at the time). I
moved to MPD shortly after.

------
oxplot
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/)

------
anexprogrammer
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!

------
santa_boy
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/Portabl...](https://github.com/clementine-
player/Clementine/wiki/Portable-Devices#introduction)) 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
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)

------
bananaoomarang
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.

------
bigp3t3
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/)

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

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

~~~
knightbat
playlist -> clear all, something like that

~~~
arvinsim
Unfortunately, that option is not there.

------
offbyone
Ctrl-F "Match" No results found.

Still not usable, sadly.

------
mp3geek
Pity, no support for Google Music.

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

~~~
brusch64
..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
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.

