Exaile - Amarok like player for GTK+ and GNOME

I am myself a Gnome guy too, probably like you guys posting here. I like Gnome's simplicity, elegancy trough its clean design. But when it's about media players I surely choose Amarok. Not because I am or I want to be a "traitor", but simply Amarok is the only media player (by media player I now mean mostly music player) which has features I expect and are nice and useful to have. It looks nice (even with the vertical tabs with vertical texts on them), it has preferences to tweak, it has crossfading support (a necessity in my world-view), it has scripting support by which is quite extensible (altough a plugin system wouldn't hurt either by which new features could be added easily and would integrate in the GUI nicely - I love when a player's GUI is extensible, customizable), good que management and (I'm not sure, but probably) a multithreaded background task management system which doesn't slow down the whole application when I click for example "Fetch cover from Amazon.com".

There are at least a dozen Gnome media players (the now classic XMMS, Beep Media Player and its descendant BMPx, Quod Libet, Rhythmbox, Banshee, Listen, Exaile etc.) and almost all of them (mostly those with GTK2 UI) have an ultra stupid volume control widget. Why for God's sake do I need to click on a button with a speaker on it to open a slider just to adjust the playback volume? This way I need to do two clicks and a drag to change the volume, not to mention that if I don't click on that button I have no visual feedback of what is the current playback volume level. In Rhythmbox (the de facto audio player for Gnome) this widget is even put out of view in the top right corner of the window. I don't know you guys but for me this does NOT mean simplicity and elegancy. I think most people would expect the volume controller somewhere near the playback position slider. It would be great if those guys out there who wrote the code for these players would come together and put together a Gnome audio player which would really rock, because individually those different players have nice features which if were in one place would make a good base for a good player.

I don't like Rhythmbox's UI with that browser, for me it's quite ugly and suffers from the usability part too, the new and uprising BMPx has a very nice UI, but under the hood it's buggy as hell and instable - altough it has potential, it's development is a bit slow.

Exaile looks acceptable from the GUI side - I don't say it doesn't need some work, but it's heading in a normal direction.
I look forward to this player and hope it will make it's way trough the "competitors" and become indeed a player comparable with Amarok when features are discussed.

Go Exaile, go!