Rhythmbox Music Player is a music player and library for tagged files, that support various music formats. It was inspired by Apple’s iTunes. Although it is designed to work well under the GNOME Desktop, I had no issues with it in KDE. RhythmBox uses the GStreamer media framework. It is currently under active development.
Advantages
- Clean Look
- While other players aim to make their software flashy and full of features, RhythmBox went for simplicity. The inferface is very direct and easy to use.
- Browse Mode
- This is an easy way to browse through a large music collection.
- Global Shortcut Available
- I don’t know how – but Global Shortcuts are available. There is no option for it – but one of my global shortcuts – Ctrl+Alt+Home for Play/Pause works.
Disadvantages
- Music Library
- All your music must be within one folder if you want to use RhythmBox’s Music Library. You can set only one folder as the ‘Library Location’. This option is available at ‘Edit > Preferences > ‘Music’ Tab > Library Location
- Font Bug
- When I start RhythmBox, the font of all application becomes one size smaller. I think this is a bug that is limited to KDE – but still very irritating. The only way to fix this is restart the X Server
- Play Queue
- At the top left corner, in the Library column, there is a Option called ‘Play Queue’ – don’t mistake it for Playlist. This is a Queue of all the songs that must be played. If you try to play any song in that list, that song will jump to the top.
- Minimize to System Tray
- To hide the player don’t close it – that will quit the application. If you minimize it, it goes to the taskbar – I want to minimize it to the system tray. To do that, just click on the RhythmBox icon in the system tray. It take a little getting used to – but a workable method.
really this “minimize to tray” problem is a big problem. I never like it to click on tray icon to minimize the rhythmbox.
Rhythmbox has also this cool feature, with which you can share your songs with others. Its pretty cool specially on LAN. You get this list of people who are sharing music and you just select one and play the songs. I like it a lot.
Though there is this feature I would like rhythmbox to have. It should support mpd. I now prefer to run mpd over rhythmbox/amarok.
You can actually get Rhythmbox to look at more than one folder – there just isn’t a config option for it in the UI. Run “gconf-editor” from the command line, double click on “Apps”, scroll down to “Rhythmbox” and click on it, then double-click on “library locations” on the right hand side, click on “add”, then in the dialog that pops up, type in the other location you want to add, in the format “file:///your/music/dir”, click OK, and you’re all done.
Now when you look in Rhythmbox config, you’ll see that instead of your original music dir, it says “Multiple locations set” – so from then on you’ll need to use gconf-editor to add/remove locations. Until they (hopefully soon!) add it to the UI.
And I wholeheartedly agree with the above comment – all Rhythmbox needs to be the best linux music player is the ability to front-end mpd – the most versatile music player.
@Ash
Thanks for letting me know about that.
Try Control-W for minimizing to tray quickly.
I think the Rhythmbox is the best choice between all the audio players on linux. I’m gnome fan so I don’t like KDE’s Amarok, which also has a bad browser, in my opinion.
I’ve testet _many_ audio players for linux. It came out that the RB has all I need and all I want. others may be having more features (like intelligent playlisting like in listen or recommens feature in banshee) but have a too high resource usage. And others again have less features or a bad music browser or an ugly skin which I can’t change to gnome 😉
So I’m happy with RB.
I hope RB will also get some more interesting plugins.
If you go Edit->Plugins and tick “Minimise to tray” it will go to tray on closing the window 🙂
Does anybody know how to get a cd/dvd burner/ripper with Rythmbox , I installed it but now I cant copy any of my cd’s to my computer
I like Rhythmbox more than Amarok ’cause have a cleanest interface.
Do you know if exist some plasmoid to control it on KDE , the plasmoid for MEDIA only works with Amarok, and others media player , but not with rhythmbox 🙁
How do you get rid of single mp3 entries. That’s what is most annoying for me.
I also really would lke rhythmbox to control mpd…