Exaile

Exaile is a music player for Linux. I initially installed it after upgrading to Ubuntu 9.04 and finding that Amarok has been trashed. I have nothing against whoever in the Amarok project decided to make these horrible changes. I work on several open source projects, and my motivation is to produce apps that I like, and I don't often ask the community what they'd like. I'm assuming that's what happened with Amarok, it's just that the direction it has gone is not the direction I want to go.

So I searched around and found Exaile. It actually looks and runs a lot like the old Amarok did. I don't tend to make playlists. I have all my music in a single directory, separated out by subdirectories by artist, and further subdirectories by album. I tend to play complete albums, so this organization works well for me. Exaile has a file view that lets me drag and drop folders into the playlist area, and that's it. That's all I want, simply play the music and get out of the way. I don't want to look at visuals of someone else's idea of that music looks like graphically (I've got my own case of synesthasia, and I don't need any help with the visuals...) I also don't really care about the album art or the back cover or whatever. If I want those, I'll go take the covers off of the shelf and look at them directly.

Anyway, Exaile is a great app and worth looking into if you just want a good music player that just plays music. To install the latest, use apt-get and install exaile-devel:

sudo apt-get install exaile-devel

If you just do:

sudo apt-get install exaile

you'll get the older version from Ubuntu rather than the latest from the Exaile project.