Clementine is an attractively simple music player and organizer

I only ever used iTunes once, just after I bought my second-generation iPod. I still remember the day that Apple ported iTunes to Windows. The world was giddy with excitement -- and, as I plugged in that FireWire cable... I admit, I was giddy too.

Christ was that excitement short lived though. iTunes was a steaming hunk of bloated slowness. It might be better today, but truth be told I haven't used it since -- in fact, my early experience with iTunes scared me away from music organizers entirely. I had a brief flirtation with Winamp but quickly settled on Foobar2000, by far the best music player available. Eight years have pleasantly passed without me looking at another girl -- but then, today, I tried Clementine.

Clementine is actually a port of Amarok, one of the better music organizers for KDE and Linux. It's still early days -- they just released version 0.3 -- but a core set of features and no bloat is what makes Clementine appealing! It plays music, it organizes music and it streams radio. That's it! Sure, it also lets you scrobble to Last.fm and, yes, you download missing album art too -- but these things happen in the background. It still remains a simple program with just a handful of precious, useful settings that can be changed.

If you're bored of how sluggish iTunes is, or you want a bit more functionality than Foobar provides, you really should check out Clementine. It's fully open-source and cross-platform compatible, y'know.

[thanks to Yansky for the tip!]

Tags: amarok, audio, clementine, itunes, kde, library, music, opensource, organizer, qt4