If you’re on a GNOME-based Linux machine, you’re no doubt familiar with the love/hate relationship with the Amarok music player. On the one hand, Amarok has become the music player of choice for Linux users; it has everything you need. On the other hand, it runs slow on GNOME because it is designed for KDE, and therefore must load a huge amount of dependent services just to run. When it finally starts, it hogs a lot of memory and isn’t terribly stable. I’ve always had Amarok instability, even on KDE, but it’s worse in GNOME. When it crashes, you have to go to the command line and manually kill the various processes associated with it.

So in looking for some extra Amarok plugins the other day, I stumbled across Exaile, which claims to be an Amarok-like, GNOME-centric music player. I’ve been fooled by claims of music player superiority in the past, but it didn’t involve very many new packages, so I figured I’d go for it and see what happens.

What a pleasant surprise! All of the good features of Amarok without any of the nasty side-effects, plus the ability to have multiple playlist tabs. After two days of solid use, I’m totally convinced that Exaile is the best music player for GNOME systems right now

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