Exaile – GTK Clementine!

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The 1.4 branch of KDE’s music player Amarok is admittedly the best music player that ever existed :) Unfortunately, the Amarok developers decided that it was too good to be true and they destroyed it with version 2.0, but Clementine did the trick by forking 1.4 and evolving into an even greater music player. Clementine uses Qt though, and we don’t prefer this toolkit in our system…so what about an Amarok 1.4 “clone” that uses GTK?

Yes, there is one and it’s called Exaile! It has just released a new version yesterday that is called “the jump”. I suppose it is called like that because they jumped the version numbers from 0.3.3, straight to 3.3.0! This of course doesn’t declare anything regarding the stability or the maturity of the application, but it does declare a lot in terms of how many fixes, improvements and new features were implemented in this new version.

The changes and improvements are so many that I won’t even bother to choose the most important on this article. You can read all about them on Exaile homepage. Being a Clementine user myself, I just want to see how well Exaile can do the same things for me in 3.3.0.

First of all Exaile uses the same logic in GUI design. You have the menu on top, the source and activities tabs on the left, the playlist on the center and the play/stop buttons on the bottom. This is the familiar way…

Once Exaile has searched your hard disk for your music, it sorts your collection by artist, album, date, genre etc. The very useful files tabs works exactly the same way as Amarok 1.4 and Clementine which is good.

The rest are still pretty much to be worked…

The internet radio has only shoutcast streams by default and it actually failed to load any while testing. The “smart playlists” do offer randomizing and generate according to rating but that is all you’ll get. Also, you won’t find the magnificent Clementine’s auto-rating that makes rating and generating playlists a lot easier.

What else is there? The cover manager is pretty much the same “no reason to exist” thing but it is available in Exaile too!

What can bring the whole experience a lot higher are the plugins. You can enable things like Last.fm dynamic playlists, Jamendo music search and play, Wikipedia information about the artist playing, Beats per Minute counter, Alarm, optically different progress bars and a ton more…

Exaile is one of the applications that belong in the “should-exist” category. It is far from perfect, but very usable at the same time. Most things are there and working just fine and I am sure that soon we will have a mature and fully featured “gtk Clementine”. My only real complain here is the use of gtk2 instead of gtk3 that may brake coherence sometimes :(

Other than that, it does what I want and it does it with low resources and in a completely familiar way. Give it a try and see how it fits your needs.

Exaile Homepage

pt3

for a gnome shell lover you got good taste in music

and a pity they are not using PPAs

Mathi

Look at webupd8 Site. They made a ppa for many apps, also the new exaile

nick

best player app
bzt

I used to use Exaile a while ago, but somehow it became too buggy and slowish. I have switched to Clementine but I guess I will give Exaile another try now.
ScionicSpectre

Always liked Exaile- it’s written in Python, you know ;). The benefit Exaile has (aside from using GTK, which I hope won’t be the primary reason people choose apps) is that it has no relation to Amarok 1.4 aside from some interface elements. The code is pretty fresh.

I agree that using PyGObject and GTK 3 would make more sense now that they’ve been around for some time. Until then, at least we have a matching GTK 2 theme.

alex285

> aside from using GTK, which I hope won’t be the primary reason people choose apps
Primary reason to pick is the App to begin from G, GTK comes second :)

http://profiles.google.com/bwat47 Brandon Watkins

In the past I didn’t like exaile because it didn’t seem to be very actively developed and had some annoying bugs (for example ever since the first release of exaile it always freezes completely when trying to import my library, no other player has that issue). I’ll give it another try since there is finally a major new release and see if its improved, and it looks to be actively developed now.

Regarding QT, QT apps have very good gtk2 integration, so if you use a unified gtk2/3 theme they fit right in, so I see no reason to avoid QT apps when using gnome. Since exaile still seems to be using gtk2 in your screenshots, its gnome integration isn’t really any better than clementine’s…
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