Archive for December 21st, 2006

Posted on December 21, 2006 - by jono

Exaile

Another post outlining something that seems rather cool, but unnoticed. Last time it was Flightgear.

A mail to the LUGRadio email address pointed to a media player called Exaile. It is a GTK based media player using GStreamer, written in Python, and aims to be the same kind of kitchen-sink media player that Amarok is to the KDE desktop. I know, I know, the last thing we need is another media player…

So, I gave it a whirl, and I am pretty impressed. My media player requirements have grown quite a bit in recent months, and although happy with Rhythmbox, this little gem has a bunch of other things that I dig:

• Build in Internet radio – I love listening to some of the death metal stations, and I have been waiting for an eternity for Internet radio from something such as Streamtuner to be built into a media player. Good work.
• Information – it will grab information from wikipedia and lyrics.
• Tablature – for the song you are listening to, the tab will be grabbed if available. This is wicked-cool.

It also has the things I come to expect from a media player:

• GStreamer support.
• Album art.
• OSD.
• last.fm support.

This little dude also supports CDs and iPod’s, although I have not tested it yet.

So yeah, pretty decent jobby from my initial testing, and because it is written in Python and using GStreamer and GTK, it subscribes to the holy platform of greatness. Amazingly, it seems the whole thing was written by one guy – Adam Olsen. What an incredible achievement.

I think the only thing I would like to see is some more love on the UI – I know this is intended to be a hardcore media player like Amarok, but I think it could do with some UI love to make things easier to navigate and use.