Exaile

1 Introduction
2 Installation
3 Running
4 Plugins

Introduction

Exaile is a GTK+ media player, very similar to the KDE based Amarok player. This guide is based on version 0.2.13.

Installation

The Exaile package is media-sound/exaile.

Emerge with ask and verbose options to check out what dependencies are going to get pulled in and which use flags will be used.

emerge -av media-sound/exaile

The use flags available are pretty standard for a media player.

Once emerged you should get an icon in your X menu to launch.

Running

The first time you launch Exaile it will pop up a message that you have no library defined. You can follow the instruction to define your music folders straight away or hit cancel to get to the main app. Music folders can always be (re)defined later through the preferences dialog.

Plugins

Unlike Amarok that seems to pull in many desirable features by default or through the USE flags, many of the features of Exaile over and above basic music playing are provided through plugins.

Many of these plugins have further library dependencies which may require more emerging. Perhaps in the future the ebuild will be changed to pull these dependencies in but at present you may need to work out what dependencies are required and merge them yourself. Luckily the plugins seem to be well behaved and inform you what they are going to need and warn if you try and enable them without having the correct libraries.

Below are specifics about plugins tested. Please add details of any plugins you try out.

libnotify

This adds on screen notifications of what Exaile is up to. You'll need libnotify.

MTP Device Manager

Used to connect and manage MTP (Microsoft's Media Transport Protocol) compatible devices such as Creative Zen

This uses libmtp via a python mtp library called pymtp.

The python wrapper is not available in portage so you'll have to download it from | Nick125.com and install it yourself. From posts in other distros it appears the page does move around from time to time. If the link doesn't work go to the | Nick125.com Homepage and search. If all else fails | Google is your friend.

Since this is a source build you'll need to sort out the dependencies yourself. The following dependencies have been identified for pymtp 0.0.4

{{Ebuild:media-libs/libmtp}} >= 0.26
{{Ebuild:dev-python/ctypes}}

Currently libmtp 0.26 is masked in portage so unmask it.

echo "=media-libs/libmtp-0.2.6* ~x86" >> /etc/portage/package.keywords
emerge -va media-libs/libmtp

Now we can grab the pymtp source and install it. The following is for 0.0.4 but you should check the site and use the latest version.

cd /usr/local/src/
wget http://downloads.nick125.com/projects/pymtp/pymtp-0.0.4.tar.bz2
tar xvjf pymtp-0.0.4.tar.bz2
python setup.py build 
python setup.py install

All being well this should install the script to your python site-packages folder (e.g. /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages). Test the install by connecting your player and running the example program provided

python examples/deviceinfo.py

This should connect to your player and output a listing of the tracks and playlists.

With these dependencies in place you should now be able to go back to Exaile and enable the MTP plugin. This will provide an additional tab on the left hand side called 'Devices'.

Click the devices tab and choose 'MTP Device Manager' from the drop down list at the top, then click the connect button alongside it. Exaile will connect and retrieve the song list from your player.

Note: Some users have reported errors loading the contents of their media player. This appears to be an encoding issue. This can be fixed by editing some of the python code manually. If anyone knows of an official fix please add details.