Been quite a while since our last alpha, but it shows. A short list of what’s new:

• the queue manager is back, with a shiny new interface.
• a new ratings widget lets you set ratings just by clicking on the star in the rating playlist column.
• dynamic mode now keeps a fixed-size buffer of 5 songs, so you can skip songs you dislike without running out of playlist.
• a new Device Manager which will form the core of our device system for 0.3.0. Currently only supports connecting to and playing music from usb mass storage devices autodetected by HAL.
• many new plugins, and updates to old ones
• LOTS of bugfixes

You can find the source tarball and a deb package on our downloads page. Note that this is still a development release and contains bugs. Upon discovery, bugs should be reported to our bugtracker, so that we can fix them and make Exaile more stable than ever!

As of August 15, 2009, album art downloading from Amazon will no longer work unless you sign up for an AWS account.

See http://vimtips.org/2009/05/08/amazon-aws-api-changes-and-you/ for more information.

This release includes more improvements over our first alpha than I can name, and also fixes a number of bugs that were present in 0.2.14. We still lack any kind of iPod/PMP support and several other features, but the core player is now very solid. You can get the source or a deb from our downloads page, or if you’re using Intrepid and our Ubuntu PPA just install the new “exaile-devel” package.

Exaile 0.3.0a now has a working install target in the Makefile, so I’ve decided to start posting automated weekly tarballs for those who don’t want to use bzr snapshots. The first of these is located at http://www.exaile.org/files/weekly. They will be posted every Wednesday at 5:00pm.

Note: These are automated tarballs, and are in no way guaranteed to be remotely stable, or to even run at all. Use at your own risk.