Title: exaile vs. gstreamer
Date: 2015-02-25
Lang: en
Tags: Gentoo

My favourite music player app on Linux is [Exaile](http://www.exaile.org/). On [Gentoo](http://www.gentoo.org) it's available straight from portage but getting playback working for different audio formats its not quite straightforward.

Exaile depends on [gstreamer](http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/) - albeit not on the latest version but on the 0.10 version line. Since Gentoo supports slotted gstreamer installs you have to remember to add the `:0.10` slot definition when fiddling with the gstreamer ebuilds. In order to change the gstreamer plugins that are installed, take a look on the use flags of `media-plugins/gst-plugins-meta:0.10`:

    [ebuild   R    ] media-plugins/gst-plugins-meta-0.10-r9:0.10  USE="X a52 aac alsa cdda dts dvd flac http* mp3 mpeg ogg pulseaudio vorbis x264 xv xvid -dv -dvb -ffmpeg -jack -lame -libass -libvisual -mms -musepack -opus -oss -taglib -theora -v4l -vcd -vpx -wavpack" ABI_X86="(64) (-32) (-x32)" 0 KiB

Adding/removing use flags and recompiling should do the trick.