Version 1.0 of the Clementine music player arrives (The H) [LWN.net]

The H covers the release of version 1.0 of the Clementine music player. "The major update adds support for the Spotify and Grooveshark music streaming services. A Global Search feature has been added that allows users to find music on their local system or on the internet. Other changes include audio CD support, and improvements to the settings dialog and album cover searches, as well as the addition of more transcoder options. A number of bugs found in the previous versions have also been fixed." A brief announcement can be found on the project's website. See the changelog for more detailed information.

Version 1.0 of the Clementine music player arrives (The H)

Posted Jan 4, 2012 13:40 UTC (Wed) by bald (guest, #80816) [Link]

Absolutely fantastic!
Spotify integration, plays all music containers/codecs I have.
It also, naturally, integrates very well into KDE.

Version 1.0 of the Clementine music player arrives (The H)

Posted Jan 4, 2012 13:42 UTC (Wed) by njwhite (guest, #51848) [Link] (7 responses)

Looks like some nice and interesting features.

Can anyone tell me why they forked Amarok rather than just contributed to it?

Version 1.0 of the Clementine music player arrives (The H)

Posted Jan 4, 2012 13:58 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Easy. Amarok is borked.

I switched to Clementine (I run gentoo, by the way), because Amarok and postfix kept breaking each other - they needed incompatible build options, then it got fixed, then it got broken again ...

Clementine is nice, and it *just* *works*. Much better than discovering that it's just broken postfix and your wife is bashing you over the head because your mail doesn't work, or postfix has broken Amarok and your wife is bashing you over the head because she has no music player.

Cheers,
Wol

Version 1.0 of the Clementine music player arrives (The H)

Posted Jan 4, 2012 14:22 UTC (Wed) by Richard_J_Neill (subscriber, #23093) [Link] (4 responses)

> Can anyone tell me why they forked Amarok rather than just
> contributed to it?

Amarok's GUI has radically changed in a way some people dislike, and (imho mistakenly), the Amarok devs didn't make it possible to configure it back again. Also, in the move to 2.x, they made the KDE4/GNOME3 mistake of releasing the new version before it was ready, with a new GUI, and with missing-features.

Clementine aims to be simple, fast, and just let the user play music. Amarok is far more complicated (and feature-filled), but cannot be configured for a basic display of just: library,playlist,current-track,controls. Amarok has all the "music-experience" stuff - like integration with Wikipedia for embedding Artist Biographies, and automatically fetching the Lyrics. This is wonderful if you want it, but takes up 30% of the screen-space.

Version 1.0 of the Clementine music player arrives (The H)

Posted Jan 4, 2012 14:36 UTC (Wed) by Sho (guest, #8956) [Link] (3 responses)

> Amarok's GUI has radically changed in a way some people dislike, and (imho mistakenly), the Amarok devs didn't make it possible to configure it back again.

That's hogwash. It's true that Amarok 2.0 was a radical departure from the UI of Amarok 1.x, mainly due to a new three-column layout and a rather different playlist appearance. It's also true that this couldn't be changed originally.

However, subsequent releases made the UI configurable, and actually considerably more configurable than it ever was in Amarok 1.x. The colums can be rearranged and hidden today, and there is a sophisticated editor for the apperance of playlist items. It's possible to recreate the Amarok 1.x layout and create various new layouts that weren't possible in Amarok 1.x.

> Amarok is far more complicated (and feature-filled), but cannot be configured for a basic display of just: library,playlist,current-track,controls.

Here you go, thrown together in two minutes: http://wstaw.org/m/2012/01/04/plasma-desktopy32272.png

You don't have to like it - I have my own issues with the UI in places - but faulting it for low configurability doesn't really fly.

(Disclaimer: I'm a KDE developer, but not involved with Amarok development.)

Version 1.0 of the Clementine music player arrives (The H)

Posted Jan 5, 2012 17:05 UTC (Thu) by globalnamespace (guest, #65377) [Link] (2 responses)

My biggest problems were that it was unbearably slow with my 60,000 song collection, broke podcast support (either didn't recognize my already configured podcasts or deleted them, don't recall) and it couldn't sync with my ipod anymore.

On the face of it several features were ignored, removed or forgotten about in the 2.0 release.

Version 1.0 of the Clementine music player arrives (The H)

Posted Jan 6, 2012 11:43 UTC (Fri) by Sho (guest, #8956) [Link] (1 responses)

Let's keep in mind that porting from Qt 3 to Qt 4 and from the KDE 3 libraries to the KDE 4 libraries implied large-scale rewriting for many applications, which many teams also used as an opportunity to rearchitect, so in some sense the 2.0 release of Amarok was a new application.

Feature regressions sadly do happen with generational changes like this - there are numerous examples both commercially and FOSS. I'd expect a technical audience to be aware and understanding of this and revisit the app in later releases. Amarok 1.4 was not a first release. Amarok 2.0 in many ways was, and the Amarok developers were at least partially forced into that by outside influence.

Version 1.0 of the Clementine music player arrives (The H)

Posted Jan 6, 2012 18:06 UTC (Fri) by globalnamespace (guest, #65377) [Link]

If I had to assign blame it would be more with how it is packaged (Fedora in my case) rather than the Amarok team particularly. I would have liked to have both Amarok and Amarok2 be separate packages/applications so that both could be installed. I ended up using a 3rd party packaged 1.4 version before abandoning it completely when Clementine became available.

Version 1.0 of the Clementine music player arrives (The H)

Posted Jan 5, 2012 9:42 UTC (Thu) by Priscus (guest, #72409) [Link]

As far as I know, Clementine is a clone of Amarok 1.4, not a fork.
Its main feature, now that Amarok 2 has much improved over its 2.0 experience, is the lighter dependency set: Amarok needs a lot of KDE infrastructure, while Clementine is happy with Qt.
I started using Clementine on Xfce because its performance was much beyond the lighter Gtk music managers I knew, but it would also make a great companion to Razor-Qt.

Version 1.0 of the Clementine music player arrives (The H)

Posted Jan 7, 2012 0:44 UTC (Sat) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link]

Seems to be completely unusable on OS X for me. It has crashed at least 10 times today, usually failing to play more than about 5 seconds of music before segfault, and rarely even finishes the library scan.

Back to songbird/nightingale/whatever.