Post details of freeware that are found to be not portable here. Posts in the submissions forum relating to freeware found to be not portable should also be moved here.
smaragdus wrote:I wonder why are the Clementine developers so shy about the portable version.
Good question. I suspect (but don't know) that it's because they already support SO MANY platforms that they don't want to create further product confusion. I have no doubt there's at least one person on their team who is sick of getting bug reports that don't have very specific details about what platform/setup is being used. Add to that TWO Windows versions?
On the other hand, maybe it's just not seen as a priority by the team.
@webfork
I don't think that a Windows portable version would have caused any confusion, perhaps the Clementine developers underestimate its importance but the significant thing is that the portable version exists, it is maintained and everyone really interested will find it sooner or later. Perhaps the developers might have created one single installer which would offer normal and portable installation.
Update on portability: smaragdus pointed out to me that Clementine creates a \data folder on the root folder. I thought this was caused by a network program I was running during my test but it turns out not. Either way, deleting this folder doesn't appear to impact performance, suggesting it's a temporary folder.
Regardless, in almost every scenario I can think of, it's bad software design to write to root directory. Updating my original post.
@Midas
Thank you for checking the latest Clementine nightly. I have the feeling that fixing the portability issues is not at all a priority for the developers.
smaragdus wrote:@Midas
Thank you for checking the latest Clementine nightly. I have the feeling that fixing the portability issues is not at all a priority for the developers.
Yeah I don't know what's going on with the Clementine project. I essentially switched back to VLC and streamWriter for my music needs.
Midas wrote:... regarding the "\data" folder issue
Looks like that got fixed. I didn't gets the latest version fully, but this specific issue did get resolved.
EDIT: the program is taking up 50% of my CPU to play an internet radio station. I even turned off the visualizations and I'm still wasting a ton of electricity without benefit. Going back to streamWriter.
There hasn't been a stable/portable release of Clementine in almost a year, so the existence of a fork might be regarded as encouraging. YMMV.
Strawberry is a audio player and music collection organizer. It is a fork of Clementine created in 2013, it's written in C++ and Qt 5. The name is inspired by the band Strawbs. It is aimed at audio enthusiasts who either purchase high resolution audio files from sites such as HD Tracks, or rip their CD's to FLAC or WavPack.
> the existence of a fork might be regarded as encouraging
I always wish when this is done they make a crystal clear case about what they're doing different from the original project, even if it's just attempting to continue where they left off. Ah well. Hopefully it keeps moving as Clementine was a great player.
I'm not getting the sense from digging that Clementine has resumed work, though I hope I'm wrong about that. I put a lot of time into that program so I was disappointed that it didn't resume. Still, I'm very glad to see Strawberry still underway.
Clementine is not natively portable because it writes on:
- registry: Qt entries (Trolltech)
- inside system: %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Clementine
"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the universe trying to build bigger and better idiots. So far, the universe is winning." - Rick Cook.