Today we'll be looking at Exaile, an open source and cross platform music player for Windows, macOS and Linux. Some of you may recognize the program, as it has been around for a long time.
Exaile's interface has a menubar at the top, a sidebar to the left, and a music playback pane to the right. Click on the "Add Music" button and a pop-up window prompts you to select the folder that you want to add to the program's music library. You may this to rescan existing folders that you've added.
Your audio tracks are displayed in the Collection tab on the left panel. It lists the tracks by artist, but you can change the view to Album, Genre, Date, among other options. Use the search box to quickly find an artist, album or track from your collection. Exaile automatically expands albums in the search results to display tracks that matched the keyword.
Right click on a track to enqueue, append or replace a selected track in your playlist. You may use this context menu to rate tracks, view the track's properties or open the folder that contains the file. Double-click on a song to play it. The right pane displays the album art, artist and track information on the top. Click and drag the slider to the right to adjust the volume.
Exaile music player supports playlist tabs, which allows you to switch between them with ease. The playback controls let you shuffle, repeat, pause, play, jump to previous and next tracks. The File menu can save playlists in the M3U format, open music folders, import playlists. The Open URL option is useful for streaming audio files directly from the web.
Let's move to the side bar, it consists of various tabs. The "Collection" tab is your music library. Exaile can stream internet radio stations. You may save your favorite stations for easy access. Click the add station button, give the station a name and paste its streaming URL, and you're good to go. Manage your playlists from the Playlists tab, and use the Files tab to browse your computer for audio that you want to play in Exaile.
The penultimate tab is the Lyrics panel. I couldn't get this to work no matter what. Python, PIP, LXML, BeautifulSoup4 are installed on my computer, and their locations have been added to the PATH environment, but Exaile just wouldn't recognize them. This is the biggest con in the software, getting it to work should be easier.
Add custom tags to your tracks from the GroupTagger panel, and quickly find files that have the selected tag. You can close any of the sidebar panels and re-add them from the view menu.
Exaile has an optional dark theme that can be enabled from the Preferences > Appearance pane. You may toggle the tray icon, set the program to close or minimize to the tray from this screen. The Playback tab has options for Gapless playback, cross fading, and more.
One of the main highlights of Exaile is that it supports plugins. The program ships with many add-ons, though most are disabled by default. Enable the ones you want to add some extra functionality to the music player like automatically fetching the album art, dynamic playlists from Last.fm, A-B repeat, Equalizer, Replay Gain, etc.
Enable the Desktop cover to view the album art of the current track in a floating widget. Toggling the On Screen Display will make it pop up when you pause, play, change tracks. You can't use it to control the playback.
Some plugins aren't functional, notably the including Podcasts, Minimode
Note: There is an alpha version of Exaile available on the GitHub page. This review is based on the latest stable release, i.e. v4.0.2. The program supports major audio formats including MP3, FLAC, WAV, AAC, etc. I mostly tested it with FLAC which it played flawlessly.
The program is written in Python and GTK+. It is not a portable software.
Exaile is a pretty good music player, and looks nice too. The only flaws are the one I mentioned above, some plugins don't work and there's no real documentation that can help users fix the issue. That and the fact that the Lyrics viewer is broken, could be an issue for some (including me).
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