Cross-platform music player Clementine now with Google Drive support

Martin Brinkmann
Nov 6, 2012
Updated • Jan 16, 2013
Music, Music and Video
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5

A new version of the cross-platform music player Clementine Player has been released recently introducing support for several online services including Google Drive support to play music stored on Google Drive directly from the player. Clementine, which is based on Amarok, has a lot to offer in terms of functionality making it more of an iTunes alternative than an alternative for music players such as AIMP3 or Winamp.

Clementine is not only a music player but also a program that you can use to organize your music library.While you can use it to play Internet radio or local files exclusively and without adding them to the library, you can also add your local music collection to the program to benefit from a number of features including automatic or manual tag editing, lyrics, cover art downloads and more.

clementine music player

Instead of going through all the program's features, I'd like to mention several that I like the most. One of the things that Clementine offers is to tap right into Jamendo's catalog of music. This downloads Jamendo's online catalog to the application so that all of the service's artists are listed afterwards in the music player. From here, it takes two clicks to play any artist hosting music on Jamendo. Note that this may take up 150 Megabyte of storage space on your hard drive and that actual tracks are streamed to the computer just like Internet radio is.

Clementine has support for Grooveshark, Spotify, and SoundCloud built-in which you can tune in if you are living in a country where those services are available. Add to that support for highly popular Internet Radio stations such as Digitally Imported, Sky.fm and SomaFM, the full Icecast directory, Last.fm, and your own personal collection of streams and you have a player that leaves little to be desired in this regard.

The latest version of Clementine comes with support for the gpodder podcast directory which you can use to add podcasts. That comes in addition to support for finding iTunes podcasts (even if iTunes is not installed on the computer), BBC podcasts, and podcasts urls that you can add manually.

Other features worth noting are support to copy music to your iPod, iPhone or mass-storage USB player directly from Clementine, integration of artist biographies, lyrics and photos during playback, smart and dynamic playlist support, music conversion and playlist import and export.

There is one downside which needs to be addressed. Clementine is quite resource hungry memory-wise. On a 64-bit Windows 7 test system, it used about 250 Megabyte of RAM, which is a lot more than music players such as AIMP3 use. If RAM is not of an issue, or if you are looking for an iTunes replacement, then Clementine may be the tool that you are looking for. (discovered via Instant Fundas)

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Comments

  1. webfork said on June 9, 2015 at 9:04 pm
    Reply

    On the RAM usage issue: I’m using version 1.2.3-1154 and it’s come down to 52 megs of RAM on my Win7x64 machine. Oddly, there are multiple clementine-tagreader.exe processes running:

    http://i.imgur.com/BxqjVmx.png

    I’ll contact the devs about this soon. Still, great program and love it on both my Mac and PC.

  2. Jay said on December 7, 2012 at 9:01 am
    Reply

    I find Clementine to be resource efficient—but I use a 32-bit machine. Maybe it’s a 64-bit-only problem?

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