Exaile Music Player Lives On, Version 3.3.0 Released With Many Improvements [Ubuntu PPA]

With no major release in more than 2 years, many thought Exaile, once a pretty popular music player (it was even the default Xubuntu music player), was dead. But it turns out that's not the case and a new version - 3.3.0 codenamed "jump" -, has been released a few days ago.

Exaile, an application designed with Amarok 1.4 in mind, but for GTK, comes with many of KDE's Amarok 1.4 features, along with some extras. Since our last post on Exaile dates back to 2010, here's a quick features overview:

• can handle large music libraries
• tabbed playlists
• plugins support which includes a huge list of plugins
• cover fetching
• CD playback, iPod and USB mass storage support
• advanced tag editor
• ReplayGain support
• equalizer with presets
• Moodbar integration
• multimedia keys
• lyrics fetching
• dynamic playist
• Last.fm support
• many many other features

Exaile 3.3.0

Besides dropping the leading "0" from the version number (going from 0.3.x to 3.3.x), the latest Exaile 3.3.0 "brings hundreds of fixes as well as a lot of new features", says the release announcement. Here's a list of the most important changes in the latest Exaile:

• New / updated plugins: A-B Repeat, BPM Counter: manually set BPM per track, Group Tagger, History: keep history of played tracks and export them to a playlist, Inhibit Suspend, Last.fm Loved Tracks, Main Menu Button: moves the main menu into a single Chrome-like button, MusicBrainz Covers, OSD: completely rewritten with new options, Preview Device: allows playing audio over a secondary device, useful for DJs
• Lots of threading issues which resulted in hangs during playback and upon startup have been fixed
• Asynchronous cover fetching
• Improved import of media from drag drops
• New playlist column: scheduled playback time of tracks
• Tracks and playlist import from and export to arbitrary locations (like network locations)
• Revamped cover chooser and cover manager
• Completely new, provider-based menu system
• Completely rewritten playlist API (cleaner, more flexible and extensible, move and copy tracks arbitrarily between playlists)
• Support relative paths in playlist import/export
• Tag handling: support albumartist for MP3/MP4
• Many UI tweaks and fixes
• Lots of improvements made to Exaile for Windows, including an installer

For a complete list of changes, see the Exaile homepage.

On the left: some of the plugins available in Exaile; on the right: the Exaile cover manager

The new version isn't bug-free and since there wasn't a new release in a long time, expect to find quite a few bugs. Some of the bugs you'll encounter in Exaile 3.3.0 include: non-working Shoutcast plugin, a buggy Lyrics plugin and most importantly, a bug in the Collection Manager dialog under Ubuntu 12.10 (doesn't occur with older Ubuntu versions): when adding a music folder, Exaile always adds your home folder instead of the folder you select.

Here's a work-around for this Collection Manager bug in Ubuntu 12.10: in the "Add directory" dialog, click the "Type a filename" icon (the pen icon), then enter the exact path to your music collection, like for instance "/home/YOUR_USERNAME/Music" and click "Add", like in the screenshot below:

Install Exaile 3.3.0 in Ubuntu

The latest Exaile 3.3.0 is available in the main WebUpd8 PPA, for Ubuntu 12.10, 12.04 and 11.10 - add the PPA and install it using the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nilarimogard/webupd8
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install exaile exaile-plugin-contextinfo exaile-plugin-ipod exaile-plugin-moodbar exfalso

(the last command above installs Exaile along with some Exaile plugins which are not installed by default)

For other Linux distributions and Windows, download Exaile from Launchpad.

If you encounter bugs, report them @ Launchpad!