::A Geek in Korea::

I am an Ubuntu user that tends to stick to Gnome applications when I can. One exception I made was when choosing my music application. Amarok is a fantastic program to manage music. It’s got tons of features, is extensible, and is really pretty damn cool. It is a KDE application, but both Gnome and KDE applications run in both desktop environments. They simply launch additional windows widgets to draw the menus and handle how the application interacts with the user.

For whatever reason, when I ran Amarok, the system resource usage was exceedingly high. Playing an .mp3 file and maintaining a short play list would eat up 80% of my processor. There HAD to be some sort of bug with it. What can manage my music, play everything in my collection, and use up less resources?

Enter Exaile. The people creating Exaile want it to be an “Amarok for GTK+ written in Python”. Sure. That sounds like exactly what I need.

After I installed Exaile, I selected the plugins I wanted to use, then let it archive my music. From there, it was simple to set up a Random Playlist of 100 songs and start listening to my collection. One of the cooler plugins will let me control the playlist by using menu buttons in the system notification tray. It pops up windows with the album art fetched from Amazon.com. You can even click on a song and find it’s lyrics instantly. It has podcast integration (I never listen to them on my PC though), and everything else I need.

One of the best parts of Exaile is integration with Internet radio stations. It works like Streamripper, where you surf through a list of stations sorted by genre. You can open up a Shoutcast station, add it to a playlist, and listen to it with no problems. Sadly, when I played with streaming radio, the mp3 tags didn’t let it update my Last.fm profile.

While there are a few features missing from what I used to do with Amarok, but Exaile uses few resources at all. While Exaile is a much newer project, it’s come into a usable program quickly. The last time I installed it (0.14 version), I quickly switched back to Amarok, but with the 0.2.11 release of Exaile is my new default player.

Amarok has a pending 2.0 release with all sorts of cool technology on the way. If they improve the performance, I might consider switching back. The competition and constant improvement in applications this high in quality is astounding. I’m happy reaping the benefits as well.

(Windows and Mac users, there are rumors for an Amarok release on your platforms as well, so don’t feel left out for long.)