Jun

4

Exaile! The amaroK replacement for GNOME

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My search for the perfect music player has continued for a long time. I like Rhythmbox-like players with good library management over the straightforward XMMS-style players. Lately, I’ve been using Quod Libet a lot. Its search function is second to none, and Ex Falso, its companion application for tag editing is really sweet. I never felt comfortable with Quod Libet’s radio stream support. So, most of the time I reverted to browsing Shoutcast streams with Streamtuner and playing them with Beep.

I’ve always admired amaroK’s all-in-one philosophy. Functionally, it’s the undisputed champion of players. Alas, amaroK is very resource-hungry and my poor box is slow. To make matters worse, amaroK loads a bunch of KDE libraries along with it, so running it in GNOME is painful.

Thus, I have been on a lookout for an amaroK replacement for GNOME for some time now. Listen seems promising, but frankly it has always felt a bit unstable (not that amaroK itself never crashes, but that’s one thing we don’t want to clone from it.) Then I stumbled upon an even younger Exaile! on the Ubuntu forums and it is awesome. Written by synic in Python, it promises to be all i’m looking for. Rock!
Exaile
Exaile! player jazz action

Exaile has all I want:

  • You can easily browse either your library or the file system
  • Good search function
  • Streaming radio support and shoutcast directory browsing
  • Tag editing
  • Album art fetching from amazon.com
  • Is a GTK+ app and fits well into the GNOME desktop
  • iPod and mp3 player support (well, I don’t need this but there it is if you have python-gpod installed)

Of course, after testing this app and falling in love with it, i had to biuld a package for Ubuntu Dapper. Enjoy, but remember that this project is very young and you might find bugs (all standard disclaimers about my packages’ reliablility apply too, of course.)

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