14 DAY TRIAL // Cantata is a client for the music player daemon (MPD) that comes with a wealth of features and provides a complete experience for users. The latest update in the series is quite consistent, so it's recommended that you get it as soon as possible.
Cantata was designed for the KDE environment, but the interface for the application is written in Qt, so it should work in a lot of different environments. It has a lot of interesting features, such as support for multiple MPD collections, a simple tag editor, a complete file organizer, USB mass storage and MTP device support, audio CD ripping support, and scrobbling.
As you can expect, Cantata is actually a lot more complex than just these few features; it works on multiple platforms, Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X and it's updated constantly.
Cantata 1.4.2 is a big update
"Cantata started off as a fork of QtMPC, mainly to provide better KDE integration - by using KDE libraries/classes wherever possible. However, the code (and user interface) is now *very* different to that of QtMPC, and both KDE and Qt (Linux) builds have the same feature set. Also, as of 1.4.0, by default Cantata is built as a Qt-only application (with no KDE dependencies)."
"Unlike most other MPD clients, Cantata caches a copy of the MPD music library. This is so that it can create a proper hierarchy of artists and albums (where Cantata will use the AlbumArtist tag if found, otherwise it will fallback to the Artist tag), to provide album counts, tracks counts, etc in the browser views and tooltips, and also to help with copying songs to/from devices," say the devs on their website.
The makers of Cantata have explained that the application is now better equipped to guess the name of tracks from the tags, the Tag Editor has been enhanced, the playlist will now provide more details, downloading podcasts should now be working correctly, users can now resize the Album covers, and numerous other smaller fixes have been implemented.
The complete changelog can be found in the announcement. You can download Cantata 1.4.2 right now from Softpedia. Unfortunately, only the source code is provided by the developers. This can complicate things a little bit because it's a complex piece of software and it has many dependencies. Before trying to compile the source, make sure that it's not already present in the official repositories.