I love Exaile, shame it Has Issues

Exaile has been my favorite music player in Linux practically since my very first install three years ago.  It has what I want (usually including decent Shoutcast/Icecast radio support) without cluttering the screen up with stores, video interfaces, and so forth.

Today, I actually figured out the solution for a frustrating problem I'd been running into over the last year or two: when I clean-installed a distro and got Exaile set up, sometimes it would claim it was scanning my music collection for me, but never get beyond 0%.  As it turns out, this only happens if some aspect of Gstreamer -- I suspect either the ogg or mp3 codecs -- isn't fully installed.

So tonight, while typing in handwritten edits to one of my stories/novels, I wanted a particular tone to match what I was working on, but could only think of one song offhand that applied.  I decided to try Exaile's "dynamically add similar tracks to playlist" button with Danger Zone from the Top Gun soundtrack -- and was served up Take It On The Run by REO Speedwagon after it!  Well, if nothing else, it's good for entertainment value, even if it has absolutely no clue what songs sound like...

The record industry said to do *what*?

Hanging out listening to the Grateful Dead's old album Workingman's Dead for the first time, I got an entertaining little surprise from the last "bonus" track... It started up with the song Easy Wind in progress, then a relaxed fellow's voice said over it:

"The Workingman's Dead, by the Grateful Dead. Available on Warner Brothers** tapes and records; you should be able to get your copy by May 15th. Workingman's Dead by the Grateful Dead."

The song continued for a few seconds, and then the guy came back to add:

"Steal one."

**which recently had YouTube remove all Frets On Fire videos that use Grateful Dead music.