The Best Voted Linux Music Player

The contenders are: MPD, Amarok, Rhythmbox, Exaile and Banshee.

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Listen Review – Alternative Music Player for GNOME

There is a huge number of audio players for GNOME which strive to offer as many features as possible, with Banshee, Exaile or Rhythmbox currently being the most popular for this matter. Since features like easy access to lyrics, Wikipedia information or collection management are a must-have for a complex audio player, it looks like Listen makes no exception regarding those either.

The version I’m going to talk about in this review is the latest, 0.6.3, which was released on July 30, 2009.

Listen is written in Python using the GTK toolkit, and it features a simple and organised interface, providing fast access to information related to the currently playing song, like lyrics, Wikipedia artist’s page, concerts and Last.fm info.

The library is divided into five sections:
- Music, which will show available artists and albums
- Podcast, for managing and listening to podcasts
- Last.fm Station, allowing you to listen to Last.fm radio
- Filesystem, a file browser
- Webradio, a collection of Internet radio stations

Listen offers drag-and-drop support, and besides the usual sorting, the playlist font can also be changed. One of the minuses is that the playlist cannot be sorted by full path or filename.

Among the notable features of Listen are: Last.fm song submission, support for podcasts, Internet radio, OSD (on-screen display), Wikipedia info and lyrics fetching, upcoming concerts, cover fetching (either from the local directory or from Amazon.com), tags lookup, tag editing, support for plugins, song queue, system tray integration, visualizations. Most of these come with the bundled plugins.

An interesting option is the ability to set custom web service filters, which will be skipped when performing web queries. For example, you can add here information which you don’t want to be searched for, like cd 1, cd 2 etc.

Listen also provides no fewer than four view modes: small, normal, full display and party mode, and the latter is practically a fullscreen mode.

Regarding plugins, Listen comes by default with several useful ones, like:
- a 10-band equalizer
- PidginStatus, which will show the song you’re listening to as your Pidgin status message
- a visualization plugin
- Last.fm events, to retrieve upcoming concerts for a band from Last.fm
- Jamendo and Magnatune integration

Installation in Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala

There is a PPA available for the latest Listen release, and to use it add the following two lines inside your /etc/apt/sources.list file:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/listen-devel/ppa/ubuntu karmic main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/listen-devel/ppa/ubuntu karmic main

Next, add the trusted key for this PPA:

sudo apt-key adv –keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com –recv-keys AA832887

Update the packages list:

sudo apt-get update

And install Listen:

sudo apt-get install listen

Official website
Listen on Launchpad

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Exaile 0.3.0 is a Music Player for Ubuntu

Multimedia is important component of an OS and Linux has plenty of options to handle multimedia, especially music. Exaile is a music manager and player for GTK+ written in Python and incorporates many features including support for several portable players.

Exaile is a solid choice for Ubuntu users to manage their music collections. It incorporates automatic fetching of album art, lyrics, artist/album information via Wikipedia, Last.fm scrobbling. It also supports Internet radio services like Shoutcast, includes tabbed playlists, and supports your iPod and other portable music players.

Install Exaile 0.3.0 on Ubuntu

Let’s take a look at how to install Exaile 0.3 on Ubuntu 9.04. The first step in the process is to get PPA added to your software sources list. Go to System \ Administration \ Software Sources.

Go the the tab that reads Third Party Software and add the following:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/exaile-devel/ubuntu jaunty main

Adding the OpenPGP security key

1. Go to the Exaile PPA page (At the end of the post)

2. Download the signing key 1024R/43CBFCC0 (At the end of the post) from the PPA page.

3. Copy the key information on to gedit and save the file as Exaile on your desktop.

4. Import the Exaile OpenPGP key (that you saved on your desktop) by going to the Authentication tab on software sources window.

Install Exaile

Drop down to terminal and type the following commands

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install exaile

This should download and install Exaile 0.3.0 on your machine which takes a couple minutes.

Running Exaile

You can run Exaile by going to:

Applications > Sounds & Videos > Exaile Music Player

If you are a Linux user and want a cool way to play and manage your music collection, you might want to give Exaile a try.

Download Exaile 0.3.0.1

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How-To: Install Exaile 3.0.1 in Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope

Exaile 3.0.1 was released on 6 September and it is a bugfix for the stable 3.0 series. To get it in Ubuntu Jaunty, follow the steps below:

Edit /etc/apt/sources.list and add the following two lines (the second one is needed only if you want the sources too):

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/exaile-devel/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/exaile-devel/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

Make sure to save the file and add the trusted key:

sudo apt-key adv –keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com –recv-keys 43CBFCC0

Next, update the source packages:

sudo apt-get update

To install Exaile 3.0.1, issue the following command in a terminal application:

sudo apt-get install exaile

This should be all. Run Exaile by typing Alt+F2 and entering exaile in the run box that appears.

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