After my update to Karmic Koala I found myself in need of a new music player, specially after using the godsforsaken mess that is Amarok 2. In my search for a new music player for Linux I happened to find Exaile. It describes itself thusly:
Exaile is a music manager and player for GTK+ written in Python. It incorporates automatic fetching of album art, lyrics fetching, artist/album information via Wikipedia, Last.fm scrobbling, support for many portable media players including iPods, internet radio such as shoutcast, and tabbed playlists.
It takes a lot of inspiration from Amarok 1.4 in its layout and design choices and since it’s written in GTK you don’t have to install any KDE dependencies.
Even though it’s up to version 3.0.2 at the time of this writing, it should be considered alpha software. Beta at the most:
- Playlist import/export doesn’t really work. You can import only from M3U playlists and export to XSPF playlists. The other choices don’t work.
- Overuse of playlist tabs.
- Most plugins don’t work the way they’re supposed to.
On the plus side, the developers offer a repository for it, so you don’t have to jump through hoops like you do when you want to use SongBird.
After attempting to use it for a couple of days, I’ve decided it’s not for me. Hopefully I’ll get SongBird working without too many problems.