Out of all the great music players out the Clementine is a personal favorite. On Linux we have quite a few options for a top notch music player and library manager, there is Banshee which is written with mono which is a cross-platform programming language that takes minimal code changes to target multiple platforms. While Banshee used to be the default on some systems it isn't the default on many nowadays as allot of the Linux distros have have decided to shy away from packaging the mono framework with their installation. Instead you'll most likely be Rythmbox if you using a GNOME based install or Amarok if your using a KDE base install. All of the music players with the exception of Rythmbox can be installed on Winows as well. If I wasn't using Clementine I'd definitely be using Amarok, there are a ton of cool features that aren't necessary but really nice, like the wikipedia article about the track that's playing for example.
That's enough about the other players this post is about Clementine, it is fast lightweight and has a good feature list. One of the best things about clementine is the presentation. The theme matches what you color scheme of you desktop is, and that feature is part of Clementine not something that the distro maintainer had done. Had noticed after changing my desktop them and starting Clementine to see it had changed without having to tell it to do so. Not only that but the layout is nice to.
While Clementine is a good at playing music stored on the hard-drive, that's not really a compelling reason to switch music players. However if your music collection spans 300,000+ songs the way Clementine can access songs might interest you. Clementine uses a sqllite to store the music tag information, as well the playlists and known devices such as androids, ipods(only classic on Linux) and other mp3 players, it is extremely fast as well as easier to maintain the a full blown database installation. The DB is stored in the users home directory, so on Linux it would be in ~/.config/Clementine/clementine.db
Clementine also has pretty good support for all the device that someone would want to connect to it by supporting mass storage as well as MTP. It will also automatically transcode the music to a format the device can recognize.
The option menu in Clementine will let you tweak things like cross-fade, notifications, appearance, and login to your favorite online music player. I personally use Clementine strictly for listening to SomaFM Groove Salad, there is a ton of internet radio station to choose from without having to sign into on of the accounts from the options screen. A cool feature that I haven't got to use yet is controlling the player from a wiimote, which sounds really cool and would probably use the wiimote for allot more then just Clementine.
Back to the visuals Clementine looks as good as it runs, really like the slim navigation bar on the left and the analyzer on the bottom is nicer then most other players.
One thing that really sets it aside from the other music player, aside from XBMC which a whole other story is the inclusion of ProjectM which is the open source reimplementation of the famous Milkdrop in OpenGL.
This screen capture came in funny it looked fine while running though, must have been because of the terminal being on top.
The last 2 where a little better, still not the same as seeing it in motion though. Have been a fan of Milkdrop for a while and have a large collection of over 8,000 presets I'm gonna share here. Had acquired them while running XBMC on an orignal xbox (with 64MB or RAM)
What's really cool is being able to enable and disable certain presets.
Here is the Milkdrop preset pack
ProjectM MegaPack. Extract it to /usr/share/projectM/presetsDownload for Linux, Mac & Windows: Clementine Download Page
Check out the Source Code For Clementine: git clone https://code.google.com/p/clementine-player/
Don't Forget the Android Remote App to Control Clementine
Google Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.qspool.clementineremoteClementine Remote Source Code: https://code.google.com/p/clementine-remote-android/
Updated the ProjectM MegaPack link.
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