Out of the two machines on my desk at work, I have to pick which one to plug my headphones into and the answer tends to be the Mac. That leads to a further question: what media player to use? Inertia suggests iTunes but, while it has its uses, it is big, cumbersome and certainly fails to do everything I want. My particular gripe is that it seems geared to prefer organising the music library to its own tastes whereas I have my own, filesystem-based approach that lets me access the same (Dropbox-shared) library from several computers running a range of operating systems.

Today I installed an alternative player, called Clementine. This is an Open Source project based on Amarok (which I have used on Linux in the past). So far, I am rather impressed. In fact, I have gone as far as also installing it on my Windows laptop and I am using it to spin tunes round tonight as I type up this post.

As well as all the standard things required of a music player, it has a couple of neat extra features. One is some built in FX tracks. I can overlay what I am listening to (or plain silence) with the sound of falling rain. Very soothing although we are having quite a lot of the real thing at the moment too! It also creates moodbars for each track it plays. As I understand it, this uses the balance of frequencies at sample points throughout the song to generate a horizontal bar made up of various coloured stripes. As you can imagine, this appeals deeply to my inner geek!

Anyway, definitely thumbs up for Clementine.