Remember Clementine music player? Well, it appears to be back – some 8 years after its last stable release.
If Clementine feels like it’s slipped out of public consciousness it’s understandable: the last stable release was in 2016 (v1.3.1).
Yet behind the scenes development continued and an awful lot of preview builds issued – indeed, the v1.4.0 release candidate has long been carried in the repositories of most major Linux distributions, including Ubuntu.
But this weekend something changed.
The Clementine GitHub tagged its first non-RC build, v1.4.1, in forever. It’s not listed as a stable release, instead marked as a ‘rolling release’, but as the first non-RC build it feels a notable milestone all the same, hence this post.
The catch? No official announcement has (so far) been made. No official change-log or summary of new features available. Neither the Clementine website or social media accounts have been updated to reference the release.
Looking at some of the accepted merge requests, commits, and closed issues reveals a handful of notable changes, but all of these (and plenty more besides) have been in the 1.4.0 RC builds for years – and that build has been in the Ubuntu repos since 2018.
- Defunct/deprecated web service integrations removed
- Block Analyzer rewritten to improve performance
- Updated Wikipedia plugin
- Search filter added to playlist page
- Icon sidebar is now scrollable with mouse wheel
- Sidebar can be hidden via setting in Tools menu
- Library now defaults to Album artist/Album
Plus, a lot of behind-the-scenes goodies which come from Clementine’s port to Qt 5.
To install Clementine 1.4.1 on Ubuntu you can download the DEB installer from the Clementine Github release page (DEBs for 20.04, 22.04, and 24.04 are being the ‘assets’ label).
You can read about the history of Clementine on Wikipedia if you’re interested in learning more about its features, creation, its relationship to Amarok – also recently revived – and its legacy within the wider Linux scene.