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

Compiling from source in Debian Squeeze Beta 2 could have been a real pain, but thanks to the apt-get build-dep command (and a few other dependencies) the compilation process went quite smooth. Before proceeding to the review, let me list some of the new features which come with this release:

• transcoding files when copying them to the local collection
• iPod Touch 3G support
• completely rewritten collection scanner
• show/hide menu bar (using Ctrl+M or from the Settings menu)
• map and calendar view for the upcoming events applet
• new applet for guitar and bass tab information
• write cover and statistics directly to files (checkbox accessible in the Configure Collection dialog)
• configurable font size for OSD
• default moodbar style uses system colors
  

Along with these, this release also comes with a whole bunch of changes and bug fixes. Here’s how it looks by default:

The new applet for guitar and bass tab information:

The upcoming events applet:

Configurable font size for the OSD:

The new transcode feature when copying files to local collection:

Amarok took about 3 minutes to scan a collection of ~6500 Ogg Vorbis songs on my Intel Core 2 1.8 GHz. I don’t know exactly if this is a big improvement or not over the last versions, but it’s definitely not a regression.

This release, although a beta, seems to have improved a lot regarding stability too. I encountered no crashes nor unexpected behavior during the time I tested it. A plus for this one too.

I haven’t tried Amarok in a while (still using the old 1.4), so I don’t know if this is a feature specific to 2.4, but I was very nicely impressed to see that the Previous and Next buttons are now back in the tag editor. Not in the playlist though, only in the local collection tab to the left. This is a feature which I intensely use.

I believe Amarok has got to the point where it offers almost all the features which made it so popular in the 1.4 days, and more. On top of the new ones, here is a (endless?) list of features: Powerful collection manager and playlist (with configurable playlist layouts), file browser, cover manager, cover fetching (local files or from the Internet), powerful scripting support with QtScript, useful applets (like lyrics fetching, upcoming events, Wikipedia info, the already mentioned guitar tab applet, videoclip or photos), main or slim toolbar, replay gain, equalizer, bookmark manager, OSD, Last.fm song submission, fadeout on stop, external MySQL database support, podcasts and Internet services support, ratings, play count statistics, moodbar, system tray integration (with controls on right-click), keyboard shortcuts. No crossfading yet.

The interface can be configured to show or hide the Media Sources view, Context view or Playlist view, which is a great thing since while some liked the original design, others will probably enjoy only a simple playlist view with no other elements to stay in the way.

All in all, this release could just be one of the most exceptional releases in a long time, and it’s only a beta yet.