Do you recall Clementine music player? It seems to have made a comeback – approximately 8 years after its last official version was launched.
The fact that Clementine may have faded from public attention is not surprising: the last stable version was released in 2016 (v1.3.1).
Nevertheless, development has been ongoing in the background, with a significant number of preview builds being released – in fact, the v1.4.0 release candidate has been available in the repositories of most prominent Linux distributions, including Ubuntu.
However, this weekend marked a change.
The Clementine project has tagged its first non-RC build, v1.4.1, after quite a while. While it isn’t categorized as a stable release but rather a ‘rolling release’, this milestone is significant as it marks the first non-RC version, thus prompting this post.
The interesting part? An official announcement regarding this release has yet to materialize. There is no official changelog or summary of new features available, and neither the Clementine website nor its social media platforms have been updated to acknowledge this release.
By examining some of the accepted merge requests, commits, and closed issues, we can see a handful of noteworthy changes. However, many of these improvements have been present in the 1.4.0 RC builds for quite some time, and that version has been included in the Ubuntu repositories since 2018.
- Removed defunct/deprecated web service integrations
- Rewritten Block Analyzer for enhanced performance
- Updated Wikipedia plugin
- Added search filter to the playlist page
- Icon sidebar is now scrollable using the mouse wheel
- Sidebar can be hidden through a setting in the Tools menu
- Library now defaults to Album artist/Album
Additionally, there are plenty of behind-the-scenes features resulting from Clementine’s migration to Qt 5.
To get Clementine 1.4.1 on Ubuntu, you can obtain the DEB installer from the Clementine Github release page (look for DEBs for 20.04, 22.04, and 24.04 under the ‘assets’ section).
If you want to delve deeper into its background, you can explore Clementine on Wikipedia to discover more about its features, development, its ties to Amarok – which has also seen a revival – and its impact within the broader Linux community.