Clementine is feature-rich music player that offers most everything you’ve come to expect from a modern player, such as smart and dynamic playlists, automatic tagging via MusicBrainz, lyrics and artist info downloads, album cover art downloads via Last.fm, and audio player support including iPod and iPhone.
But Clementine also lefs you listen to music sharing sites such as Spotify, Grooveshark, Last.fm, Magnatune, Digitally Imported and Jamendo, as well as internet radio such as SomaFM, SKY.fm, Digitally Imported, and Icecast – although you will need a paid subscription to many of these to use them in Clementine.
Clementine is open source and multiplatform (Windows, Mac, Linux).
PROS: five things I like about this software:
1. It searches and plays tracks from your local music library AND from music sharing sites. Although there is a downside to this in that you will have to have a paid subscription to most services before connecting with Clementine (see CONS section below).
Nonethelss, for whatever music sharing services you enable, the search box will search both
2. It connects to MusicBrainz, in order to find the tags for unknown tracks via digital thumbprinting. MusicBrainz will not find everything necessarily, but is one of the best resources for audio file tagging, and can identify tracks that are not labeled in any way.
3. Finds and downloads cover art (from last FM)
4. Downloads track information and lyrics (via Last.FM), and can download artist information and suggest similar artists, information which it gets from numerous online sources (see screenshot below)
5. Can interface with iPhone/iPod as well as other players. I couldn’t test the iOS support, though, as I’ve recently switched to Android.
CONS: things that can be improved to make this software even better
1. I was disappointed to find that in order to connect with Grooveshark, Spotify, or play Last.fm playlists, you need to have a PAID subscription to these. Not sure if it has to be this way, as I have seen Grooveshark and Last.fm desktop clients which, if I recall correctly, worked with the free accounts (though I am not 100% sure)
2. No thumbnail view for playlists. Although you can see thumbnails in the sidebar, from your music library.
3. Visualizations are supported via the open source projectM, except there does not seem to be a Windows version of this.
The verdict
This is not the most stylish looking audio player, but is terrific in almost every other respect. I was in the market for a good music player, having recently moved on from iTunes (at long last), and I must say I am loving Clementine. Give it a try, you will like it as well.
Get Clementine here (Windows, Linux, Mac).
