Exaile (
http://www.exaile.org/) is GNOME's reply to AmaroK. It is based on GTK+ and written in Python. It uses the GStreamer engine as its backend. Exaile boasts of many of the features that has endeared AmaroK to so many people. The artist and album information extraction feature is working nicely and it also downloads guitar tablatures from
http://fretplay.com/ and
http://lyrc.com.ar/ provides the lyrics.
I tried out version 0.2.7 from the tarball supplied on the Exaile website, and the first thing that struck me was the absense of a polished build system. One has to do:
$ make
# make install
to install the thing, but the absense of the configure script was a real pain. In no time I ran into a dependency quagmire, but my new found knowledge of Python came in handy. After some downloads and yumming from the Fedora repositories and rpmfind.net, I had Exaile running on my Fedora Core 5 GNOME desktop.
Being a relatively new project, it is not yet as polished as it should be. However it is worth giving a try, and if it were not for the incomplete build system it would have surely got a four star rating.
Thanks to Adam Olsen for developing such a nice program, I do not have to gape at AmaroK on a KDE box.
