Clementine: modern music player and library organizer
clementine-player.org
clementine-player.org
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.
foobar2000?
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.
A better option is for you to explicitly trust the authority that signed the cert.
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.
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
[1]: https://www.tomahawk-player.org
And EDIT: You can actually use Clementine with Beets through Subsonic/Madsonic as well.
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?)
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.
And a changelog here: http://beta.madsonic.org/pages/changelog.jsp
If you're anything to do with Madsonic development, you might think about making that comparison page a lot easier to find. It doesn't seem to be linked anywhere very much.
I'm also uncertain how "optional video player" isn't listed as a Subsonic feature, when 5.x (and I think later 4.x as well) can stream video. I mean, I've actually streamed video from my Subsonic 5 instance, so...
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.
For comparison, look at Clementine screenshots vs this:
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I particularly enjoy its focus on albums as elemental units of playback, as opposed to songs.
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
The result? The snazzy, powerful new music player known as Amarok 2 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 ) 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.
Edit: the thing it seems they don't understand is:
Firefox: the people who prefer Chrome already use Chrome or Chromium. We use FF because for some reason or another we don't like Chrome. (For me, that is extensions.)
Ubuntu: lots of us used Ubuntu because we really liked it, not because we couldn't afford anything else.
But as others have pointed out, music players are a highly subjective territory. I for one liked iTunes a lot better before Apple unleashed designers on it and made this new color-adaptive, web-like mess out of it. I like data tables.
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!
The [Github Page](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?
Other than that it's still probably the best GUI music manager/player on Linux.
Still not usable, sadly.
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.
A nice operating system with a bad media player.
Not my biggest OS X annoyance, but easily in the top five.