Clapper can open playlist files. Playlist file is a standard text file with a .claps file extension. It should contain a single filepath per line. The filepath can be either absolute or relative. Playlist can even contain HTTP links instead of filepaths.

Here is an example how to easily create a playlist file inside your music directory:

ls *.mp3 > music.claps

Once you have a playlist, open it with Clapper like any other file. Since the playlist is a normal text file with filepaths only, you can always edit it later in any text editor or echo more media to it. Easy, right?

Hardware acceleration

Using hardware acceleration is highly recommended. As stated in GStreamer wiki:

In the case of OpenGL based elements, the buffers have the GstVideoGLTextureUploadMeta meta, which
efficiently copies the content of the VA-API surface into a GL texture.

Clapper uses OpenGL based sinks, so when VA-API is available, both CPU and RAM usage is much lower. Especially with gst-plugins-bad 1.18+ and new vah264dec decoder which shares a single GL context with Clapper and uses DRM connection. If you have an AMD/Intel GPU and use Wayland session, I highly recommend enabling this new decoder in Clapper Preferences->Advanced->GStreamer.

Other acceleration methods (supported by GStreamer) should also work, but I have not tested them due to lack of hardware.

Installation from flatpak (recommended)

The flatpak package includes all required dependencies and codecs. Additionally it also has a few patches, thus some funcionalities work better (or are only available) on flatpak version (until my changes are accepted upstream).

flatpak install https://rafostar.github.io/flatpak/com.github.rafostar.Clapper.flatpakref

Packages

The pkgs folder in this repository contains build scripts for various package formats. You can use them to build package yourself or download one of pre-built packages:

Debian, Fedora, openSUSE & Ubuntu

Pre-built packages are available in my repo (see status)

Arch Linux

You can get Clapper from the AUR: clapper-git, or

cd pkgs/arch
makepkg -si

Installation from source code

The requirements and how to build from git source code are described in the wiki.

Special Thanks

Many thanks to sp1ritCS for creating and maintaining package build files.