Bang for buck, Amarok is the best music player/library manager on earth. But lately, since I’ve been flying Gnome, Xfce and other non-KDE-native environments, I’ve been using Exaile, just for the heck of it. It’s also nice to not have to load KDE libraries, just to play some music. Anyway, Exaile a good program. It’s come a damn long stretch since I first checked it out. It can handle large libraries and with every realease, closes the gap on features that make Amarok the best.

I’ve been using exaile, pretty much exclusively for about a year or more now. I’m not sure what took me so long but I just now ran ‘exaile –help‘ and got the command line arguments. Why didn’t I do this a year ago? I love command line music control. I don’t know if they’re any better, but to me, it’s always much more satisfying to execute tasks via command. Managing my playlist via command line makes it uber.

Usage: exaile.py [option...|uri]

Options:
-h, –help show this help message and exit
-d DIR, –duplicates=DIR
Finds and deletes all duplicate tracks (based on their
md5 sum)
-n, –next Play the next track
-p, –prev Play the previous track
-s, –stop Stop playback
-a, –play Play
-t, –play-pause Toggle Play or Pause
-q, –query Query player
–gui-query Show a popup of the currently playing track
–get-title Print the title of current track
–get-album Print the album of current track
–get-artist Print the artist of current track
–get-length Print the length of current track
–current-position Print the position inside the current track as a
percentage
-i VOL, –increase_vol=VOL
Increases the volume by VOL
-l VOL, –decrease_vol=VOL
Decreases the volume by VOL
–play-cd Start playing a CD
–new Start new instance
–set-rating=RATING Set rating for current song
–get-rating Get rating for current song
–settings=SETTINGS Settings Directory
–cleanversion
–version
–testing
–no-equalizer Disable Equalizer support
–start-minimized Start Exaile minimized to tray, if possible

Awesome. For me, at least.

I’m just on a role with the KDE worship. To think, a mere few days ago, I peevishly looked down on all things K. I keep finding more and more bad-ass apps and features that makes me wonder if this website is going to transform into a repository for drooling desktop worship. I’ve gotta reign the geek shit in, I know. But, since I’ve already started this post, allow me to indulge in a bit more of the antisocial software fetish.

My latest object of amorous sheep-humping enthusiasm is amaroK, a media player for KDE that comes pre-installed in Kubuntu. An all-in-one player and music library manager, amaroK is definitely the best I’ve ever used. Using MySQL to manage a database of my music collection, it fetches album covers, artist biographies from Wikipedia and discographies as well as lyrics. It does an excellent job of creating dynamic playlists by analyzing the music I listen to the most. You can’t help but be happy with the damn thing. Another plus is that amaroK works with the Last.fm service, letting me post my listening habits to my profile page as well as any other place I should choose. Case in point, notice the “Recent Music” section I’ve added to the sidebar of this page. As I listen to a song, amaroK updates Last.fm, which in turn updates this list on my website. Kinda cool.

Should I be in a statistical mood, amaroK gives me loads of summaries. What I listen to, like the best and might like. Songs are rated and scored depending not only on how often I play a song, but also how much of the track I listen to. A song I listen to in entirety gets a much higher scoring than a tune I skip after thirty seconds of play. I can also check Last.fm for even more charts and displays showing the history of self-inflicted my ear damage and the fact that I have a serious problem with Death Metal. I’m so deaf, but very happy.