New music player - Exaile!

**cwrann** · November 3rd, 2007

nevermind

**imdano** · November 4th, 2007

Originally Posted by pt123

That said I fear like other Gnome apps this will become dead when the developer loses interest. This is where KDE has a better community development environment.

I'd say it's actually in very good shape as far as developer interest goes. The project has has three full-time developers right now, and there are a bunch of us that regularly submit patches (and could probably step in if one or more developer leaves).

**averagebeatboy** · November 5th, 2007

Exaile Rulez! Try it you'll like it not as difficult as some others.

Cheers,

Averagebeatboy

**koleoptero** · November 5th, 2007

I had a nice surprise from exaile

I noticed when I first used it that the equalizer was behaving a bit weird. The two last bands weren't doing what they were supposed to do. One was making sound from dull to overly-stereophonic like virtual surround or something, and the other was affecting speaker separation. I couldn't well place the effects at first. But yesterday it hit me.

In windows my sound card had some built in effects that you can manipulate from its app. I discovered that those two last bands of exaile's equalizer were the levels for SRS wow, and speaker separation. I couldn't do anything about those effects before in linux. Now I can LOL

Although I know this is sort of a bug or something, please don't fix it.

**reacocard** · November 6th, 2007

Originally Posted by koleoptero

I had a nice surprise from exaile

I noticed when I first used it that the equalizer was behaving a bit weird. The two last bands weren't doing what they were supposed to do. One was making sound from dull to overly-stereophonic like virtual surround or something, and the other was affecting speaker separation. I couldn't well place the effects at first. But yesterday it hit me.

In windows my sound card had some built in effects that you can manipulate from its app. I discovered that those two last bands of exaile's equalizer were the levels for SRS wow, and speaker separation. I couldn't do anything about those effects before in linux. Now I can LOL

Although I know this is sort of a bug or something, please don't fix it.

heh, its probably not us, more likely upstream gstreamer. Don't worry, we won't tell them.

**wyth** · November 6th, 2007

I so want to use this. I've been checking back in on it for about three years now, and use it for streaming audio and playing music.

But there's a few things that it really needs before it's as functionally as it could/should be. Those fall under the categories of device support and granular podcast management, and granular control.

Device Support
This is getting better. The mass storage device plugin was a big help, and now Dan O'Reilly has been working on an mtp plugin (see the launchpad page here). This isn't quite ready yet. It will see items on a device, but I've had no success in getting it to transfer. Seamless device support will push Exaile up a few notches.

Granular Podcast Management
This is one that irks me personally the most. Exaile wants to be the Gnome answer to Amarok, but Amarok has got this one figured out, and Exaile doesn't. (Actually no Gnome app that I know of does.) To wit:

Amarok will allow you to choose when you want to download a podcast with a right-click
Amarok will allow you to choose where your podcasts are saved.

Exaile and podcasts:

Exaile downloads all podcasts at once; you don't have control over what podcasts you download when.
Exaile puts all its podcasts in a podcast file in the hidden .exaile folder. This doesn't make sense. At least keep them visible with the rest of the audio files.
Exaile changes the titles of downloaded podcasts from human readable to a string of letters and numbers.
If you delete a feed, it keeps the files. Should have the option of deleting the files as well.

These issues are showstoppers in some cases. In my case, I keep all my audio on a separate partition available to a few different systems. This makes using Exaile for my podcasts unusable.

It should be possible to determine the location where you want your podcasts saved. Rhythmbox and Amarok manage this. Amarok will also allow you to do it for each podcast feed -- keep one in your home folder, another with your music, another in another partition.

Rhythmbox doesn't handle podcasting as well as Amarok, and when you transfer to an mtp device, it doesn't group them (so instead of one folder for This Week in Tech, you get five TWiT files in the topmost folder on the device). This is again something else Amarok has figured out.

If Exaile could manage to get the device support up to snuff, allow you to keep files organized on the device, make it possible to choose where you save your podcasts, and choose to download each podcast one by one when you want to, then you'll really have something here.

**reacocard** · November 6th, 2007

Originally Posted by wyth

I so want to use this. I've been checking back in on it for about three years now, and use it for streaming audio and playing music.

But there's a few things that it really needs before it's as functionally as it could/should be. Those fall under the categories of device support and granular podcast management, and granular control.

Device Support
This is getting better. The mass storage device plugin was a big help, and now Dan O'Reilly has been working on an mtp plugin (see the launchpad page here). This isn't quite ready yet. It will see items on a device, but I've had no success in getting it to transfer. Seamless device support will push Exaile up a few notches.

Granular Podcast Management
This is one that irks me personally the most. Exaile wants to be the Gnome answer to Amarok, but Amarok has got this one figured out, and Exaile doesn't. (Actually no Gnome app that I know of does.) To wit:

Amarok will allow you to choose when you want to download a podcast with a right-click
Amarok will allow you to choose where your podcasts are saved.

Exaile and podcasts:

Exaile downloads all podcasts at once; you don't have control over what podcasts you download when.
Exaile puts all its podcasts in a podcast file in the hidden .exaile folder. This doesn't make sense. At least keep them visible with the rest of the audio files.
Exaile changes the titles of downloaded podcasts from human readable to a string of letters and numbers.
If you delete a feed, it keeps the files. Should have the option of deleting the files as well.

These issues are showstoppers in some cases. In my case, I keep all my audio on a separate partition available to a few different systems. This makes using Exaile for my podcasts unusable.

It should be possible to determine the location where you want your podcasts saved. Rhythmbox and Amarok manage this. Amarok will also allow you to do it for each podcast feed -- keep one in your home folder, another with your music, another in another partition.

Rhythmbox doesn't handle podcasting as well as Amarok, and when you transfer to an mtp device, it doesn't group them (so instead of one folder for This Week in Tech, you get five TWiT files in the topmost folder on the device). This is again something else Amarok has figured out.

If Exaile could manage to get the device support up to snuff, allow you to keep files organized on the device, make it possible to choose where you save your podcasts, and choose to download each podcast one by one when you want to, then you'll really have something here.

These are very well-thought-out suggestions! Thanks for taking the time to put this together, I've shown this to the other devs and they agree with your points, so it's really just a matter of someone getting the motivation to work on this, maybe it'll get in the plans for 0.3.

**imdano** · November 7th, 2007

Originally Posted by wyth

The mass storage device plugin was a big help, and now Dan O'Reilly has been working on an mtp plugin (see the launchpad page here). This isn't quite ready yet. It will see items on a device, but I've had no success in getting it to transfer.

Really? That should be working with the latest couple of patches I uploaded on launchpad. If you run exaile from a console, do you see any error messages popping up when you try transferring a track to the device? Also, what kind of player are you using?

It'd probably be best to reply in the launchpad bug report, just so all the information regarding the plugin is in one place.

**wyth** · November 7th, 2007

Hey, I'm glad the suggestions help. I hope it didn't come off as sniping; if I had the python skills, I'd be doing what I can to help with this. But I'm trained for a different kind of writing.

I just tried transferring files again, and I think I didn't give it enough time last time. There's no progress bar, and after a couple minutes, I didn't see any status change, and assumed the transfer didn't take. I gave it a bit more time this time, and it worked just fine. I noticed that sometimes it said "transferring" at the bottom of the application; it didn't always say this, but that may have been between transfers.

I'm using an iRiver T10 1gb media player that's perpetually stuck in the hell of mtp. Turns out iRiver locked in mtp firmware for U.S. devices shortly before I bought it, and didn't advertise this fact until shortly after I bought it. So much for iRiver.

Like Rhythmbox, Exaile puts all the files in the top-most folder of the device. When the device is plugged in, it shows the files in folders organized by album in the application, but on the device itself, this isn't so.

I know I asked a lot in the first post, so I won't go too much farther now, but as I was adding files, I thought a right-click "add to device" option would be fantastic -- something that would add the file to the transfer queue. Right now you have to add the files to a playlist and then drag them over. It's no biggee, just a little clunky.

Thanks for the good response. I've been watching this project since it began, and really like the direction it's heading.

**imdano** · November 8th, 2007

Originally Posted by wyth

I just tried transferring files again, and I think I didn't give it enough time last time. There's no progress bar, and after a couple minutes, I didn't see any status change, and assumed the transfer didn't take. I gave it a bit more time this time, and it worked just fine. I noticed that sometimes it said "transferring" at the bottom of the application; it didn't always say this, but that may have been between transfers.

I think it should say "transferring" every time. At the moment, most of the GUI related aspects of the transferring process are handled by exaile itself, not the MTP plugin. I do think exaile provides a way to have a progress bar though, as does libmtp, so that's something I can probably add in the future.

Like Rhythmbox, Exaile puts all the files in the top-most folder of the device. When the device is plugged in, it shows the files in folders organized by album in the application, but on the device itself, this isn't so.

I'm planning on storing tracks as Artist/Album/Title on the device, but it's being held back by some limitations in pymtp right now. Once that gets worked out upstream or I figure out a workaround that will get added.