A new version of cross-platform Amarok 1.4 inspired music player ‘Clementine‘ was released earlier today, adding a veritable crate-load of new features to already popular player.
Additions amongst them include Magnatune integration, tabbed playlists, audio transcoding & ReplayGain volume normalisation. UI changes include using native-system icons where possible, improvements to the tray icon, new ProjectM visualizations and a very nice ‘now playing’ widget that displays album art and track info.
As expected version 0.4 also sees a large number of bug fixes including improved library search times & notification fixes. A full list of new features and bug fixes can be found the change log.
Clementine developer zacH, who helped design and implement the ‘now playing’ widgets rocking out in this release, is very excited about the release, assuring us that 0.4 “…is a really, really mature release”. He did mention that a few people are experiencing higher CPU usage than normal but a for the few that this bug may affect a fix shall follow shortly.
So far, so good!
From the short hands-on I’ve had with 0.4 so far I’d have to agree that this release is great. Library times really are vastly superior in this release, the visual changes here and there are really helping to make the application feel more unified as a whole and, on a slightly more spurious note, I really am digging the ‘now playing’ widget that displays in-app during track playback.
There are a really hefty number of visualisations included and I do like the fact that the visualisation UI is somewhat separate to the application itself and able to run full screen. I’m not a massive visualisation fan but I can tell it will be one of the more popular visually identifiable changes in 0.4.
For someone seeking a break from the similar-UI setups of both Banshee and Ubuntu default Rhythmbox Clementine is an fresh alternative.
Download Clementine 0.4
Clementine 0.4 hasn’t been added to the Clementine PPA as of yet however .debs are already available from the project page.
- Clementine 0.4 x64 bit .deb
- Clementine 0.4 x32bit .deb
Many thanks to zacH