Exaile

Exaile is a music manager and player for GTK+ written in Python. It incorporates automatic fetching of album art, lyrics fetching, artist/album information via Wikipedia, Last.fm scrobbling, support for many portable media players including iPods, internet radio such as shoutcast, and tabbed playlists.

Exaile 0.3.0.1 is a bugfix release for 0.3.0. It contains no new features, however it does fix several (14) bugs from 0.3.0. In particular:

• A severe bug preventing migration from 0.2.14 in certain installations was fixed. If you already have an 0.3.0 profile, you can start exaile with —force-import to overwrite your 0.3.0 profile with data from 0.2.14 (lp #420965)
• A bug causing volume to not restore properly when playback resume is enabled was fixed (lp #406400)
• and several more.

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Albus

Albus is a small Python application written for Linux using the PyGTK framework. It allows you to display album artwork on your desktop, with each album cover linked to a directory (presumably one containing media files... such as music files... such as that album's tracks... getting the idea?). From each album cover you can open the album's directory and queue or play its media files with customizable commands (depending on the player).

It was inspired by the late, great Clutter, an old Mac OS X application for the PPC architecture. I'd link you to it, but the developer's website has disappeared and the application now exists most visibly at http://osx.iusethis.com/app/clutter

Albus is not a music player -- it's meant to be used in conjunction with a music player, as a pretty-looking interface. I've used it successfully with VLC, Totem and MPD (via both SonataMPC). Basically, any music player that lets you queue items from the command line will work. and

If you download the Python tarball, you'll find installation instructions in the README.

• Debian package: albus_0.12_i386.deb
• Python tarball (contains source): albus_0.12.tar.gz

Albus is a pet project, and very much a work-in-progress -- as such I make no claims as to its usability, stability, drinkability, so on and so forth. That said, I'll be updating it regularly so please check back every once in a while for an update. Bugs and requests are also welcome.

Transform Ubuntu In Media Center Using XBMC

Adopted from http://tombuntu.com

This guest article was written by Vivek Kumar from TNerd.com, a blog focused on technology news, tricks and tips and Linux tutorials.

Linux has come a long way in support for multimedia and graphics. Today we will see how to transform Ubuntu 8.10 into a media center platform. You can achieve this using various software like MythTV and Boxee, but we’re going to use XBMC Media Center (formerly XBox Media Center).

Before going into the process of installing and configuring XBMC let’s take a look at what it offers.

Home Page: http://xbmc.org/

Description: XBMC is an award winning media center application for Linux, Mac OS X, Windows and XBox. The ultimate hub for all your media, XBMC is easy to use, looks slick, and has a large helpful community.

Features of XBMC

1. a one stop shop for all your multimedia needs: including videos, images and audio
2. multi-platform, Internationalized, and localized media center
3. enjoys a large community with over 50 developers and over 100 translators
4. apart from being a media player, XBMC includes features such as playlist playback, audio visualizations, picture viewing, slideshows, and weather forecast functions, a RSS feed scroller on your home screen, along with community driven third party plugins and addons
5. easy to install on Ubuntu
6. a fluid animated interface which makes a perfect compliment to your Compiz Fusion powered desktop
7. supports album and cover art
8. a very customizable interface which supports skinning

A complete list of features can be found here.

Installation
Open System->Administration->Software Sources and select the Third Party Software tab. Add the following software source:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/team-xbmc-intrepid/ubuntu intrepid main

Close Software Sources and when prompted, choose to reload the repositories.

Install XBMC from the package xbmc (click the link to install), or by running the command below in your terminal:
sudo apt-get install xbmc

Optionally you can also install:

• additional skins
  sudo apt-get install xbmc-skin-*
• support for remote controls
  sudo apt-get install xbmc-eventclients-*
• a scripting example
  sudo apt-get install xbmc-scripts-example

Starting and Running XBMC
All that is left now is to start XBMC. You can start XMBC by going to Applications->Sounds & Video->XBMC Media Center.

Here are two tips to get you started:

• You can navigate XBMC with your mouse or keyboard. To go back to the previous menu, click your right mouse button or press backspace. [update] Commenter Fujiko Fujio posted a link which explains all the mouse and key commands.
• You can resize the XBMC window, but you’d probably like to switch to fullscreen. Open Settings->Appearance->Screen in XBMC and change the resolution option to the default resolution of your display. Restart XBMC and it will load fullscreen instead of in a window. You can also run XBMC with the -fs option to force it to run fullscreen at any other resolution.

The interface is pretty user friendly, so feel free to explore.