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 slowly become the music player of choice for Linux users -- it has everything you need. On the other hand, it's slow on GNOME because it is designed for KDE, and must therefore 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.
And let's be honest, here -- the fact that you have to go to the menu or the notification area and select "Quit" from a menu instead of just clicking the X is a huge pain in the ass. What is this, OS X!?
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 (hell, maybe even on KDE systems, too... hey, does anyone even use KDE anymore?).
