When comparing Spotify vs Clementine, the Slant community recommends Clementine for most people. In the question“What are the best audio players for UNIX-like systems?” Clementine is ranked 6th while Spotify is ranked 32nd. The most important reason people chose Clementine is:
Clementine features competent tag managing for all music files, be it album art or just simple text entries.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Huge collection of music and fast access to newly released songs
Spotify has over 20 million songs and arguably the largest collection out of its competitors and usually has the fastest access to new music.
The Spotify desktop client allows local music files to be imported with the option of syncing with a mobile device which largely mitigates the issue of missing artists.
Pro Related artists
Helps to find new authors based on your previous picks
Pro Curated playlists
Public playlists on Spotify created by other people are great for finding new music.
Pro Client's functionality can be extended via third-party apps
Spotify desktop client allows for third-party apps. They extend the functionality of Spotify and many of them offer new ways of discovering music. Noteworthy apps include Moodagent, Last.fm, Swarm.fm, ShareMyPlaylists, The Hype Machine, We Are Hunted, Shuffler.fm.
Pro Has a free version
A free, ad-supported account allows streaming from an extensive library of music.
Pro Weekly Discover playlist uses a great algorithm
A playlist generated by Spotify based on your listening habits and released every Monday. The algorithm used by this playlist is great and stands out from its competitors.
Pro Tag editing
Clementine features competent tag managing for all music files, be it album art or just simple text entries.
Pro Intuitive and fast to set up
Clementine is easy to get up and running with lyrics, equalizer, online info, etc., within minutes after installation.
Pro Sensible UI
A fork of the 1.X line of Amarok, Clementine favours usability over design trends.
Pro Very good folder organization
Organizes your music folder based on the tags of your library.
Pro Remote app for Android
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.
Pro Supports a lot of online services
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.
Pro Built-in equalizer for custom sound
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.
Pro Creates playlists based on past music you listened to
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.
Pro Built-in format conversion
Users can format any of their music files to a different format with Clementine's built-in format conversion tool.
Pro Can display song lyrics
Fetches lyrics from several lyric providers.
Pro Looks good and is really responsive
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.
Pro Decent library management
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.
Cons
Con Free account have lots of ads
If you hate commercials, you would buy Premium or go on using something else.
Con Discovery is terrible
The discovery algorithm is poor and does not learn fast enough. Not obvious how to train it.
Con Poor audio quality
There's a high range of bitrates and most of vary from average to bad.
Con Slow development
Very little development work has been going on for a while as of mid-2017. Nobody is responding to bug reports.
Con Resource exhaustive
Clementine uses up to two orders of magnitude more CPU than VLC and takes up about 180 MB of memory, plus additional memory for spawned processes (tag-readers), while VLC uses 80 MB with no other processes.
Con Doesn't allow gapless playback
Con Bit perfect output no longer configurable
Audiophiles want to play their expensive HD albums.
Con Too bloated by default with things like LastFM that can't be removed
When you install it, you get ton of internet radios and services plugins, that you can't remove, only turn off. There is also useless stuff like artist info that doesn't work and stuff.
Con Not customizable
It doesn't allow you to modify its interface by dragging toolbars around etc.
Con Horrible user interface and confusing layout
Con Ugly
Con Goes crazy with CPU and RAM
Takes its toll on your system's CPU and RAM.
Con Default settings aren't great
Although this is subjective, you might have to do some tweaking before you like it.
Con Ugly ressource hog with no features and buggy without hotfix
And yet Nr. 1 recommended because of nerds being accustomed.
Con Slow to start in Gnome/Cinnamon
It takes about the same time to start as an IDE or Photoshop.
Con Not a lot of documentation
Clementine does not offer a lot of documentation, which can make discovering its features a bit difficult.
Con Buggy
Clementine is probably the most fully featured music player for Linux, however it has its own issues. It crashes and experiences occasional memory leaks that can slow down your system.
Con Database regularly messes up
Con Sometimes messes up taskbar
Con Last.fm support is broken
Con Cannot choose which tag profile to use
I use Tag2 (ID3:2.4) which doesn't seem to be the default tag used and I can't see a way to choose this.