Clementine

Clementine is what happened when Linux users refused to let Amarok 1.4 die. When Amarok 2 took a different direction in 2008, this Qt rewrite kept the old recipe: a fast music player with a real library, smart playlists and none of the clutter. It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, it is free and open source under the GPL-3.0, and after years of slow development the 1.4.x series brought it back to life - version 1.4.3 shipped on October 26, 2026, with a 104.1MB Windows installer.

The library side covers the essentials well. Clementine indexes your local folders, fills in missing tags and cover art from MusicBrainz, and builds smart playlists from rules - most played, never played, dynamic random mixes. Tabbed playlists let you keep several queues open at once, and global hotkeys plus a system tray icon keep playback out of your way.

The details around playback are equally complete. A ten-band equalizer with ReplayGain support evens out volume across a mixed collection. Song info panels pull lyrics, artist biographies and photos, and similar-artist suggestions while a track plays. The format list covers everything common - MP3, FLAC, OGG Vorbis and Opus, AAC, WAV - and a queue manager lets you stack up what plays next without touching your playlists. Search works across the whole library instantly, including fields like composer or year.

Where Clementine still surprises is how much it plays. Beyond local files it reads music stored in Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive and Box, streams internet radio and podcasts, rips audio CDs, and transcodes files to MP3, OGG, FLAC and friends when copying to a device. An Android remote app turns your phone into a controller for the desktop player, and projectM visualizations are there for the nostalgic.

The honest limits come with the territory. The interface is functional but clearly from another era, and there is no mobile player - only that Android remote. Some online services integrated over the years have shut down or been dropped, Spotify among them, so the internet panel is less busy than it once was. And development, while alive again, moves at a hobby project's pace.

For managing a local collection with playlists that think for themselves, Clementine remains a light, free classic that earned its loyal following. If you want the same idea with faster development, its fork Strawberry Music Player is worth a look - but Clementine itself is once again shipping releases.