Clementine gains more and more popularity with its port to KDE4 based upon the Amarok 1.4 player, and the latest version bundles a fair amount of new features. In case you didn’t try it yet, Clementine is a free, cross-platform music player available for Linux, Windows and Mac. Before proceeding let me say that this is a really, really improved release which shows a good amount of work has be put into it.

Let me proceed and list some of the most important new features in this version, put up a few days ago, on December 11:

• new song info tab which contains lyrics fetching from 17 different websites, Last.fm info, Last.fm wiki info
• new artist tab with photos, biographies from various websites and similar artists
• smart and dynamic playlists
• ratings, play counts and skip counts
• Icecast radio stations under Internet tab
• Jamendo support under Internet tab
• redesigned the aspect of the sidebar

These are not all though. In addition to these, there are also many bug fixes. Clementine already has a lot of features, but first let me show the ones visible in this release.

The new artist tab with photos and biographies from various websites:

The new song info tab with lyrics fetching and Last.fm info:

Smart and dynamic playlists:

Jamendo and Icecast in the Internet tab:

Features already present in Clementine include: media library, cover manager, Last.fm song submission, queue manager, equalizer, visualizations, analyzers, sortable playlists (by various info), system tray integration, notifications (OSD or desktop environment specific notification, or even system tray popup), file manager, fadeout, the same (very) useful crossfading method that Amarok 1.4 had (crossfade on manual change only or on automatic track change), replay gain, start with main window hidden/shown, configurable font size for the song info tab, global shortcuts, background streams. Again, no scripting support yet.

Clementine still lacks the next and previous buttons in the tag editor window, a feature which (although probably useless to some) is pretty important to me for editing entire tags which are the same for a whole album.

I liked the installation support offered by Clementine. The official website contains builds for various Linux distributions, including Debian Squeeze, Ubuntu Maverick and Lucid and Fedora. There are also two PPAs for Ubuntu, for the stable and development version of Clementine, here and here. To install from it from the PPA, type the following commands in a terminal:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:me-davidsansome/clementine

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install clementine

Official website

Download Clementine for various Linux distributions