14 DAY TRIAL // Exaile is a music player that boasts all the features you would expect to find in a great app, but it's not all that popular. It doesn't have anything to do with the quality of the app, so we decided to take a closer look and decide whether it's worth recommending.
The Linux platform swims in music players, not to mention media players. There are so many out there, a lot of them very good, which makes it difficult to keep track of all of them. Some of those players have been around for a long time, like Amarok or Rhythmbox for example, but new ones are available as well, which means that there is still room for improvement, and some developers think that they can do a better job.
The competition for the best music player on the Linux platform is a close one, and it's hard to pick a winner, mostly because no application has it all. Some are better than others, but none of the available apps meets all the criteria. They are either good looking, but don't have everything that people want, or they have too many features and not enough focus on user experience.
To be fair, only a few music players fulfill most of the criteria for the majority of the users, and we will find many users ready to say they don't need anything else. Exaile is trying to enter a niche already occupied by a top of other apps, but it doesn't show up empty handed, as we'll soon see.
Installation
I tested Exaile in Ubuntu 15.04, but I didn't get to use the latest version of the application. The developer only provides the source package, and I encountered a couple of compilation problems. It took too long to find out what the matter was, so I installed the version available in the repositories, which is a little bit older, but not by much.
The latest changes made to Exaile were not all that important, so if you don't care about having all the latest versions, you're not going to have any kind of problems with the older version. Also, please keep in mind that this issue is only relevant for Ubuntu repositories. If you are running Fedora or Arch Linux, it's quite possible that you will have access to Exaile 3.4.5.
Usage
We'll skip to the obvious feature of the player, which is to play music. The first thing a user encounters is the main window, separated into two areas. After you define the folder with the music (multiple folders are supported, of course), you will see that all the music is on the left side, and details about the loaded playlist are on the right side.
It's not your usual layout or functionality, but it defines clearly what you want to be playing. It doesn't prevent the user from building a playlist with all the music in the computer, but it allows for a little discrimination before starting to listen to the music.
The application also has a number of vertical tabs that have various functions. For example, you can see the folder in the PC, you can load some predefined playlists, go to a Podcast browser, check the Lyrics for the song (if it exists), or choose an online radio station.
Exaile also comes with a comprehensive tag editing functionality that can work with multiple files at once, a normal-looking equalizer, a tool to fetch covers from online sources, and a ton of other plugins. In fact, many of the features in Exaile are provided by plugins and only a few have been activated.
