Everything you expect to find in a media player these days is present in Exaile, as well as some unique and intriguing features, including tabbed playlists and downloading of guitar tablature.
Introduction
Exaile is an audio player built in GTK (GIMP toolkit), and although it's not as popular as Banshee, Rhythmbox or Audacious, it's feature-complete and offers a unique concept by using multiple tabs for showing several playlists, each one in its own tab, and other dozens of good features which an audiophile will definitely find useful.
Ubuntu Installation
Users of Ubuntu Gutsy or Hardy can optionally use this repository. Add this line to your /etc/apt/sources.list for Gutsy
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/exaile-devel/ubuntu gutsy main
OR for Hardy
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/exaile-devel/ubuntu hardy main
and then type the following:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install exaile
To enable MP3 support in Ubuntu run the following command:
sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly
Interface
The common interface is similar to the interfaces of other GTK players, with the tabs for collection, playlists, radio and file browser to the left, and the playlist itself occupying the space left. The thing I liked best about Exaile is the ability to open multiple playlists in the same time in different tabs. Even song information will be displayed in a new tab instead of a new window secondary window. You can populate playlists directly by dragging and dropping files from the file browser or search for music using the common syntax.
Features
It's true, there is nothing here unseen before, but it supports plugins, Last.fm song submission and it can sort the playlist by any information available (like bitrate, location, play count, year and so on). It fetches covers from Amazon (but doesn't offer close results when the exact album was not found). And the beautiful thing is that not only it looks for covers in the song's directory, but you can also specify the names for which to look (default ones are cover.jpg, folder.jpg, .folder.jpg, album.jpg, art.jpg) so I only had to add my cover.png format to the list and voilà! It works very well, and you can also use wildcards (tested for * only), so if you put *.png it will fetch any PNG image that it finds first. It also supports downloading of guitar tablature.
Scanning 1500 Ogg Vorbis files took around 35 seconds on my Core 2 Duo 1.6 GHz, which is not bad at all. There are players who just hang in there forever even if you feed them with less than 1000 audio files, so Exaile performs OK at this chapter.
You can burn tracks to audio CDs with the ability to choose which application to use, edit audio tags and set ratings. Exaile also includes visualizations and equalizer, with pre-defined sets.
Conclusion
Overall, Exaile is a very good alternative to the more popular Banshee or Rhythmbox players. Except for the search slowness, this player is full-featured, includes enough configuration options, has Last.fm song submission, equalizer and multiple playlists available in different tabs. Really nice and useful features which make Exaile definitely a good audio player, at least for the GTK fans.
Official website
Download
Required Dependencies to run Exaile