Ages ago, in the long-forgotten days of 2008, there was Amarok 1.4. And it was good. Then KDE4 came along and Amarok was rewritten, reshaped, becoming something... different. Something unsettling. Something not altogether pleasant.

Fear not. Today we have Clementine.

I consider Clementine a triumph of Free Software. A great project fell off the rails, so someone else picked up the pieces, forked it and kept the spirit alive.

Amarok is looking really good these days:

Hold on, that's not Amarok! It's Clementine, a Qt4 port of Amarok 1.4, aka "my dreams finally come true", aka "what Amarok 2 should've been". It's functional right now, not quite as fully-featured as Amarok 1.4, but all the major bits are there, and it's being actively developed.

Once again I am amazed at and eternally grateful for the number of choices of media players there are in Linux. It seems like I write a new blog entry every other week saying how great some media player is. The reality is that there really are tons of great options. And this is yet another.

But Amarok 1.4 was special. And I really hope Clementine succeeds.