Sunday, July 15, 2007

Exaile: Python-based GTK media player

I don't know on which planet I got linked to Exaile, a GTK audio player written in Python. Anyway, I installed it some days ago and downloaded some plug-ins (IM status, which works great with Pidgin; and Mini Mode, which makes Exaile about as high as the Gnome panel and only about one third of my screen wide).

Exaile is great, it has a slick, but simple interface, nice features (the music library is created by adding paths to my music collections, which is a no-nonsense way of managing the library ;). Bulk downloading album art and album cover search are great features. Last.fm integration is built-in, and DAAP support can be enabled by installing a plug-in.

There are still some annoyances: For example, tracks with no album set are displayed as "Trackname from by Artist", i.e. the album title is simply missing. But thanks to the great build/run architecture of Exaile that makes it possible to patch and test/debug directly in the SVN working directory, I was quickly able to come up with a patch, which will hopefully be included in Exaile soon.

Other than that, I can only recommend Exaile. It is in active development, and the problems and bugs that are currently present will hopefully be patched out in future versions :)

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