Exaile: The Music Manger for GNOME That’s More Than An Amarok Clone
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/
I find it interesting that Exaile works well on your computer where Banshee crashes. I have the opposite problem on mine when I tested out Exaile a couple of weeks ago. Banshee works fantasic, but Exaile kept crashing on me. Just goes to show you how each computer can be unique with linux.
I’m going to try it now, I too am not happy with anything I’ve used so far.
I wish Banshee was stable on machine! Oh well, though. My issues with Exaile are CD burning (only works with Serpentine installed) and podcast interface (it subscribes and downloads fine, but doesn’t mark them downloaded). Really looking forward to the 0.3 release.