Music Playing
My latest “musical experiment” is with Clementine, which was recently added to Debian.
I should note things that I have used in the past, and some areas of past pain:
- XMMS
- Which has often been nice enough, but which has grown long in the tooth.
- XMMS2
- Which takes the desirable step of being a client/server system which admits the availability of a bunch of backends. I have, when using it, tended to prefer the shell backend.
- Amarok
- An “all singing, all dancing” option…
- It uses KDE, which I’m historically not terribly keen on
- It has libraries that are evidently clever enough to pull music off my iPod Touch as long as it’s plugged into a USB dock
- It has the “KDE integration” that seems to want to have widgets integrating into some “KDE-compliant” window manager. I’m running StumpWM, which is decidedly not a KDE thing, so controlling Amarok always seems like a bit of a crapshoot…
- I have played a bit with the “playlist” functionality; it hasn’t yet agreed with me…
At any rate, I saw Clementine listed as “new in Debian,” so thought I’d take a peek. I’m liking what I see thus far:
- Onscreen widgets for all the sorts of things that need to be controlled, including
- Managing music library, so as to add things
- Like Amarok, it can see my iPod whenever it’s plugged in, and can play that music through the computer
- It easily grabbed album covers (I’m not sure what service it’s using) for most of my music
- Onscreen controls seem pretty reasonable, though I kind of wish the volume control was larger, as that’s something one wants most frequently to fiddle with.
- There’s a cool visualization widget (think “equalizer”)
Seems pretty likable thus far…