Finding good music players on Linux is not that difficult. There are many great options, like Rhythmbox, VLC, Amberol, Audacious, cmus, and more that usually fit most people's use cases and preferences.
Even with the rise of music streaming services, offline-first apps like these are a great reminder of the past, when you could physically own media without the fear of losing access to it because a publisher went bankrupt.
Now, it seems Clementine Music Player, a well-known name in the FOSS player space, has come back from the dead, just before Día de Muertos, to show that it is not going anywhere.
I spotted this thanks to Joey, who noticed there was a new non-RC release for it after over 8 years (the last one was in April 2016).
So, let's check it out! 😃
Clementine Music Player Returns
Clementine Music Player is a C++-based open-source music player that takes inspiration from Amarok, another popular FOSS offering. With the new 1.4.1 release, Clementine has broken its very long streak of pushing out RC releases.
Interestingly, the changelog for this release says, “Rolling releases”, which means that this is still not a new stable release; however, it is not a preview release either and features some important fixes.
There are tweaks like the Wikipedia plugin being updated, an option to hide the sidebar, a new search filter for the playlist page, the library showing Album Artist/Album by default, and the block analyzer being revamped to boost performance.
Even though these changes were a part of earlier preview builds (RC), they are still worth noting. You should also know that Clementine has been ported to Qt 5.
Get Clementine Music Player
You can get the latest release from the GitHub releases section of the project's repo. If you are interested in contributing or just want to build from source, then the source code is freely available under GPL 3.0.
💬 Are you excited for Clementine Music Player's quiet return? Add your thoughts below!
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