3 Frequently asked questions

Shane Bell edited this page 2014-05-12 03:49:18 -07:00

Table of Contents

• I can't seek through MP3s
• Nothing else can play sound while Clementine is running
• I can't play MP3s in openSUSE
• I get a missing dependency on gstreamer0.10(decoder-audio/mpeg)(mpegversion=1)(layer=3) on Fedora
• Why doesn't Clementine use MySQL?
• Why doesn't Clementine use Phonon/VLC/Xine/...?
• Where is Clementine's database?
• Is Clementine CPU hungry?

I can't seek through MP3s

The MP3 decoder in GStreamer's FFmpeg plugin doesn't support seeking through MP3s, you should install the one in GStreamer's ugly plugins package instead.

Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly Fedora: su -c "yum install gstreamer-plugins-ugly"

Nothing else can play sound while Clementine is running

Make sure you have PulseAudio and GStreamer's PulseAudio plugin installed.

Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install pulseaudio gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio Fedora: su -c "yum install pulseaudio gstreamer-plugins-good"

I can't play MP3s in openSUSE

openSUSE's gstreamer0_10-plugins-ugly package is incomplete, and doesn't contain any MP3 codecs. You should add the Packman repository (instructions on the openSUSE website) and install the gstreamer0_10-fluendo-mp3 package.

I get a missing dependency on gstreamer0.10(decoder-audio/mpeg)(mpegversion=1)(layer=3) on Fedora

Fedora doesn't come with MP3 support built-in. You need to add the rpmfusion repositories and install gstreamer-plugins-ugly as explained in the unofficial FAQ.

Why doesn't Clementine use MySQL?

Clementine uses SQLite to store metadata for the songs in your library, as well as your playlists and devices. We've found that SQLite provides great performance even on huge libraries (300,000+ songs), and Clementine uses the FTS plugin to make searching even faster. We see no benefit in supporting other database backends as well as or instead of SQLite, and it would make the code much more complicated and difficult to maintain.

Why doesn't Clementine use Phonon/VLC/Xine/...?

GStreamer is the only audio backend we have found that supports our featureset.

• Phonon
  • Does not support getting the raw audio stream for use in analysers and visualisations.
  • No Hypnotoad support.
• VLC
  • Has buffer under-run problems.
  • Extracting raw audio data requires building a separate plugin.
  • No Hypnotoad support.
• Xine
  • Poor Windows support.
  • No Hypnotoad support.

Where is Clementine's database?

Clementine stores all the information about your library in its sqlite database. This is in a different place depending on what operating system you use:

• On Windows: %USERPROFILE%\.config\Clementine\clementine.db (where %USERPROFILE% is C:\Users\<username> on Windows 7 and Vista, or C:\Documents and Settings\<username> on XP)
• On Linux: ~/.config/Clementine/clementine.db
• On Mac OS X: ~/Library/Application Support/Clementine/clementine.db

Is Clementine CPU hungry?

This depends on the hardware you're running Clementine on. On an Intel i5 quad core, Clementine uses around 1% CPU on normal playback. When scanning the library, or doing other background jobs, it can be as high as 25% for one CPU. On machines, like netbooks (e.g. Eee PC 701 or 901) with an Intel Atom CPU running at 600Mhz, Clementine may use around 40% CPU on normal playback and when doing background jobs its CPU usage can go up to 80%.

Updating the database can cause some temporary playback problems (stuttering) on these machines. Especially if the storage is provided by USB sticks, SD cards or over the network (WiFi). Normally, these problems disappear when the database is up to date.

If you want to minimize CPU usage of Clementine, you can do the following things:

• You can disable the analyzer at the bottom of the window (right click on it and choose "No analyzer"),
• Otherwise, you can uncheck "Show a glowing animation on the current track" in the preferences.