VLC vs Clementine

VLC is licensed under the CC-SA v3.0+ and available on Windows, OSX, and Linux with source code available here.

VLC is an incredibly robust application but very simple on the surface. It makes playing music simple, yet still manages to give the user all the tools he/she wants in a music player.

Everything VLC needs to play media files is contained within which means no outside codecs are needed. This makes it one of the most hassle-free music players as it can play virtually anything as soon as it's installed.

Besides basic configurations, video player has an extensive amount of adjustable settings.

You organize your music into folders any way you want. Want to play an album? Drag and drop. No tags, no confusion, no fluff. Easy.

VLC includes keyboard shortcuts for most actions. The video player can be controlled with simple and customizable keyboard commands.

Yes. Lightest. Even better than the ones known to be light. Both when playing music, only a single song or when playing a video. Either in terms of Ram and Cpu. Compared with almost all, including the ones from Windows like mpc-hc .. or light ones from Linux like Alsa Player, Audacious, SmPlayer .

Blu-Ray playback support was added on July 13th, 2014. It allows playing back DRM-free Blu-Rays with the help of libbluray, libaacs and libbdplus.

Using sftp/ssh music (and videos) can be streamed from any server on the network to any device running VLC. VLC can also be used as a webcam for streaming and snapshots. Amazing all in one package

VLC has a large amount of extensions.

Clementine features competent tag managing for all music files, be it album art or just simple text entries.

Clementine is easy to get up and running with lyrics, equalizer, online info, etc., within minutes after installation.

A fork of the 1.X line of Amarok, Clementine favours usability over design trends.

Organizes your music folder based on the tags of your library.

There is a very good remote app for Android. The app lets you do a lot: from the usual volume controls to checking the lyrics on your phone. You can even download the songs from Clementine onto your phone.

Clementine includes support for services such as Ampache, Google Play Music, Spotify, and many internet radio stations such as Jamendo and Icecast. It's also possible to search all available sources (local and online) at once, as well as mixed content playlists.

There is a built-in equalizer with many presets from genre-specific rock, pop, and party, to experiences such as large hall and live. You can also tweak it yourself and name your own preset.

Clementine gathers the user's listening data to use for smart playlists. Clementine uses your listening history to play music similar to the music you play most - which typically is music you will like but maybe haven't discovered yet.

Users can format any of their music files to a different format with Clementine's built-in format conversion tool.

Fetches lyrics from several lyric providers.

Unlike some other players in this list, Clementine doesn't seem to go unresponsive in the Ubuntu 16.04 system and looks really good with options for Visualization too.

Clementine allows the user to move and organize audio files easily. Some examples include the following:

• It's easy to find a specific album song (find artist, select album, select song).
• It's easy to add songs to a playlist and queue the songs.
• It's easy to rename files from their metadata (artist, album, song number, etc).
• It's easy to add cover images.
• There are options to find duplicates, untagged songs, etc.