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Comment by Programmatic | Hacker News Reader

I really like Clementine as a streaming music player and use it quite extensively for playing and discovering Digitally Imported's streams without having to browse through the site. I really like DI's downtempo station for work, and I like that Clementine is cross-platform so I can use the same player on my work and home systems. Kudos to the team for having such a broad and deep selection of streaming providers integrated into it.

My one complaint is that the music library paradigm in Clementine doesn't feel cohesive, so unfortunately it is relegated to streaming music for me. I really don't like that I can't play music directly from the library and have to make a playlist: it feels very cluttering. This is even (or especially) true for streaming stations, in order to try a new one out it must be added to a playlist. If I could change one thing about Clementine, it would be to allow playing of music directly from the library.

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Clementine was originally created as a fork of Amarok 1.4 series and this very layout was my absolute favorite feature of it. I've never felt comfortable in a media player without it. It also has dynamic playlist for people who are more into that. That library and playlist system is the entire purpose of Clementine and the reason it was created.

> I really don't like that I can't play music directly from the library and have to make a playlist: it feels very cluttering.

> If I could change one thing about Clementine, it would be to allow playing of music directly from the library.

I've always used Clementine (and Amarok before it) with the whole library selected and shuffle enabled. To browse, I can use the search bar; to force a song to play, I can double-click it; but mostly I'd right-click -> add to queue. I've never had to add items to a playlist.

Maybe the whole library view is buried under a "dynamic playlist" menu or something, but once it's been selected it'll appear by default whenever the player is opened.

It seems super likely that you don't want to click on each track as the prior one finishes so a queue is needed.

It would seem then that playing directly from the library would be functionally identifical to adding everything you click on to a transitory playlist.

In fact you can more or less use it like this with a single playlist that you either clear or just keep adding to.

Seems like that would work better if there was an option to start with a blank playlist or trim the playlist automatically so that only the last x tracks were shown.

What is the difference if any between playing as you say directly from the library and a single transitory playlist.

>What is the difference if any between playing as you say directly from the library and a single transitory playlist.

I don't like having a transitory playlist, I find it to be cluttering. It should play the next track in the library (or shuffle). If I make a playlist, it's to group similar music together.

I would like to be able to double-click on a track in my library and then tune out again until I don't like the music it's playing, rather than managing an interim playlist and having to intentionally add the album I want to listen to into it.

I love the "playlists" though I rarely save them. In my preferences I have double clicking from the library add to a new playlist. Usually I just double click a whole album, it immediately starts playing in a new playlist and I can shuffle it or loop it as I see fit. That one song on the album I don't like? I just right click and "remove from playlist", now I don't hear it. Sometimes I'll search for a keyword or artist and select all now I have a playlist with everything that artist worked on. Maybe if I've been adding and removing stuff from the queue and I like the way it's feeling I'll save it for later, or just leave its tab there for a couple months till I'm bored with it. I always keep a "dynamic" playlist tab open for when I just want a shuffle across my whole library. If I see something coming up I don't want to hear I just delete it (or reshuffle the whole thing which doesn't affect the currently playing song).

Unfortunately, for fans of Amarok 1.4, that's a feature, not a bug.

I'm not familiar with the exact history leading to the fork of Amarok. Did the 2.0 version make a change to that effect, or was it just seen as going in a different direction overall than the userbase behind the 1.4 fork liked?

Amarok 2 made major UI changes which many users didn't like, the whole thing just felt more heavy and complex. Clementine is a fairly faithful reproduction of the original Amarok line.

For comparison, look at Clementine screenshots vs this:

https://amarok.kde.org/en/screenshots

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