Xubuntu 16.04 LTS will be the first Xubuntu release without a default media manager. To help those without a favorite one, we’ve put up this series where some of the Xubuntu team members talk about their favorite media managers. Later in the series we discuss some cloud services and other media manager options in the Ubuntu repositories. Enjoy!

This time we’re covering the favorite media manager for several people working with the Quality Assurance. We’ll leave for you to decide whether this is a coincidence or not!

How do you listen to music?

Kev: Sometimes quietly, sometimes annoyingly loud :) The media manager starts up when the PC does first thing in the morning, it turns off when the PC does at night. I tend to run with half a dozen dynamic playlists.

My collection is about 1 terabytes, which converts to around 50,000 tracks and 4000 albums. I like the collection to be organized by artist, filetype and album.

Daniel: Most of the time with headphones. I mostly listen to music when I want to focus and/or shut other people’s voices out.

Why is Clementine the best choice for you?

Kev: It’s hard to quantify why but, a few things I like - used it for ages, know it’s ins and outs now. In fact I’ve been using Clementine since more or less it’s beginning, I was using Amarok 1.6x till that went, then found this fork of Amarok.

The Android controller for Clementine is also a useful addition for me.

Clementine has Hypnotoad…

All in all Clementine does what I want with the minimum of fuss – it does add some Qt packages, but what applications don’t add something.

Daniel: Because it is very stable and runs on all platforms on which I need it. Also, it has the rainbow cat! And I also use the Android remote sometimes.

Have you customized Clementine?

Kev: I’ve customised Clementine a bit. Things like moodbar and internet sources – all turned off.

Basic stuff I set up are things like making sure it doesn’t do anything but add a track when adding to queue – I’ll start that when I want. And set up keyboard shortcuts – when keyboard does not have media keys.

More specifically I have some dynamic playlists which I use a lot, these use the genre tag. This does mean you have to make sure genre is right in the tags. As an aside I found easytag easiest to use here, given my file library is alphabetic it was a fairly quick job to set tags for them all. For one off tag edits I can do that within Clementine’s right click track menu if I need to.

In addition I have a few very specific dynamic lists based on artists (or group of artists).

Daniel: No - I use it as it comes by default.

Kev: I think that I have in the last 8 years tried just about everything I could find to try - I always find myself coming back to Clementine though.

Daniel: I have also tried just about every available player, but I like using the same player on each platform, and I could never find anything with the same usability as Clementine.

Kev: I often install Audacious with its library plugin alongside Clementine. I tend to run the development version of Xubuntu from the day after the rest of you find out about the newly released version. It can be useful in my world to have an alternative – Audacious is it. It’s a simple application but without the plugin, not really a media manager.

Finally, feel free to talk about your favorite artists!

Kev: If only I was allowed too – I was asked not to rabbit on interminably about the 70s… suffice it to say that my taste in music is pretty wide-ranging – except for Country/Western and that thing loosely called Pop…

Daniel: I listen to just about every kind of kind of music. I am fairly open to most genres.