Exaile: The Music Manger for GNOME That's More Than an Amarok Clone

Nathan R. Hale
The things I require from my music manager seem pretty simple: I want to be able to easily create playlists, quickly look up artist info from wikipedia, manage my podcasts, and easily transfer tracks to my Cowon iAudio 7. Things like online music store integration are optional for me, but I do like good Last.fm support. Of course, virtually every music manager for Linux--from Rhythmbox to Banshee--provides the basic features that I need...but Rhythmbox's podcast support is poor, Amarok clashes with my GNOME desktop, and Banshee is too unstable on my system to be usable. I had all but given up on finding a music manager that I really liked, but then I revisited a project I had tested and given up on months ago: Exaile.

I am thrilled with the improvement and development that this application has seen. The interface is intuitive, it has great podcast support, it syncs well with my iAudio device, and looks fantastic on my desktop. Not to mention the fact that it starts quickly and runs like a top...no crashes at all thus far!

From the Exaile official site:

Exaile is a music player aiming to be similar to KDE's Amarok, but for GTK+ and written in Python. It incorporates many of the cool things from Amarok (and other media players) like automatic fetching of album art, handling of large libraries, lyrics fetching, artist/album information via Wikipedia, Last.fm submission support, and optional iPod support via a plugin.

IMHO, Exaile is one of the most under appreciated music managers for the GNOME desktop. If you're looking for an intuitive, stable, and easy way to manage your music collection, then check out Exaile.

http://www.exaile.org/

Published by Nathan R. Hale

Composer, writer, and sci-fi fan Nathan Hale was born in the USA, but spent his childhood abroad in Africa and Europe. He enjoys lending a global perspective to all his creative efforts, including freelance...  View profile

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