Rhythmbox

Last updated
Rhythmbox
Developer(s) The GNOME Project
Initial releaseAugust 18, 2001;22 years ago (2001-08-18)
Stable release
3.4.7 [1]   OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg / 16 April 2023
Preview release none [±]
Repository
Written in C (GTK)
Operating system Linux, Unix-like
Available inMultilingual
Type Audio player
License GPL-2.0-or-later
Website wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Rhythmbox

Rhythmbox is a free and open-source audio player software, tag editor and music organizer for digital audio files on Linux and Unix-like systems. [2]

Contents

Rhythmbox is designed to work well under GNOME, but can function on other desktop environments. It is very scalable, able to handle libraries with tens of thousands of songs with ease. It provides a full feature set including full support for Unicode, fast but powerful tag editing, and a variety of plug-ins.

Rhythmbox is the default audio player on many Linux distributions including Fedora, [3] [4] Ubuntu since v12.04 LTS, [5] and Linux Mint as of version 18.1. [6]

Features

Rhythmbox offers a significant number of features, including:

Music playback

Playback from a variety of digital music sources is supported. The most common playback is music stored locally as files on the computer (the 'Library'). Rhythmbox supports playing streamed Internet radio and podcasts as well. The ReplayGain standard is also supported. Rhythmbox also supports searching of music in the library.

Playlists may be created to group and order music. Users may also create 'smart playlists,' ones that are automatically updated (like a database query) based on a customized rule of selection criteria rather than an arbitrary list of tracks. Music may be played back in shuffle (random) mode or repeat mode.

Track ratings are supported and used by the shuffle mode algorithm to play higher-rated tracks more often.

Gapless playback

Enabling the crossfading backend option with a duration of 0.0 switches Rhythmbox into gapless playback mode for music formats that support it. Gapless playback is not enabled by default.

Music importing

Audio CD burning

Since the 0.9 release, Rhythmbox can create audio CDs from playlists.

Album cover display

Since the 0.9.5 release, Rhythmbox can display cover art of the currently playing album. The plugin can search the internet to find corresponding artwork, and as of 0.12.6, can read artwork from ID3 tags. If an image file is saved in the same directory as the audio track this is used instead. [7]

SoundCloud

Rhythmbox can browse and play sounds from SoundCloud, via built-in SoundCloud plugin.

Song lyrics display

Since the 0.9.5 release, Rhythmbox can provide song lyrics of the currently playing song by pressing [ctrl + L], as long as the lyrics are stored in a lyrics database.

Audio scrobbling

Rhythmbox can submit played songs info to a remote scrobbling service. [8] This information is used by the remote service to provide user specific music recommendations. Rhythmbox currently supports three scrobbling services:

Music can be scrobbled to all services at the same time.

Control remote rhythmbox via GNOME web browser Rhythmbox web remote control.png
Control remote rhythmbox via GNOME web browser

DAAP music sharing

Rhythmbox supports sharing music and playing shared music on local network via DAAP sharing plugin. The plugin uses libdmapsharing to provide this feature.

Devices

Rhythmbox uses the Linux udev subsystem to detect player devices.

Podcasting

Rhythmbox can subscribe to podcasts from the iTunes Store, Miroguide or by manually providing a podcast feed URL. Subsequently, new podcasts are automatically downloaded and available from the Library under the section Podcasts.

Web remote control

Rhythmbox can be controlled remotely with a Web browser, via inbuilt Web remote control plugin.

Plug-ins

Rhythmbox has a plug-in API for C, Python, or Vala. [9]

There are nearly 50 third party plug-ins for Rhythmbox. [10] including a 10 Band audio Equalizer, and many official plug-ins [11] including: [12]

Integration

Rhythmbox displaying a pop-up notification from the GNOME notification area GNOME Music-Applet screenshot.png
Rhythmbox displaying a pop-up notification from the GNOME notification area

Rhythmbox has been extensively integrated with a number of external programs, services and devices including:

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Xfce</span> Desktop environment

Xfce or XFCE is a free and open-source desktop environment for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GNOME Evolution</span> Personal information manager software and workgroup information management tool for GNOME

GNOME Evolution is the official personal information manager for GNOME. It has been an official part of GNOME since Evolution 2.0 was included with the GNOME 2.8 release in September 2004. It combines e-mail, address book, calendar, task list and note-taking features. Its user interface and functionality is similar to Microsoft Outlook. Evolution is free software licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Banshee (media player)</span> Open source media player

Banshee was a cross-platform open-source media player, called Sonance until 2005. Built upon Mono and Gtk#, it used the GStreamer multimedia platform for encoding, and decoding various media formats, including Ogg Vorbis, MP3 and FLAC. Banshee can play and import audio CDs and supports many portable media players, including Apple's iPod, Android devices and Creative's ZEN players. Other features include Last.fm integration, album artwork fetching, smart playlists and podcast support. Banshee is released under the terms of the MIT License. Stable versions are available for many Linux distributions, as well as a beta preview for OS X and an alpha preview for Windows.

The Java Media Framework (JMF) is a Java library that enables audio, video and other time-based media to be added to Java applications and applets. This optional package, which can capture, play, stream, and transcode multiple media formats, extends the Java Platform, Standard Edition and allows development of cross-platform multimedia applications.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Compiz</span> Compositing window manager for the X Window System

Compiz is a compositing window manager for the X Window System, using 3D graphics hardware to create fast compositing desktop effects for window management. Effects, such as a minimization animation or a cube workspace, are implemented as loadable plugins. Because it conforms to the ICCCM conventions, Compiz can be used as a substitute for the default Mutter or Metacity, when using GNOME Panel, or KWin in KDE Plasma Workspaces. Internally Compiz uses the OpenGL library as the interface to the graphics hardware.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">PulseAudio</span> Sound server for Unix-like operating systems

PulseAudio is a network-capable sound server program distributed via the freedesktop.org project. It runs mainly on Linux, including Windows Subsystem for Linux on Microsoft Windows and Termux on Android; various BSD distributions such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and macOS; as well as Illumos distributions and the Solaris operating system. It serves as a middleware in between applications and hardware and handles raw PCM audio streams.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">LMMS</span> Free software digital audio workstation

LMMS is a digital audio workstation application program. It allows music to be produced by arranging samples, synthesizing sounds, entering notes via computer keyboard or mouse or by playing on a MIDI keyboard, and combining the features of trackers and sequencers. It is free and open source software, written in Qt and released under GPL-2.0-or-later.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GNOME Panel</span> Taskbar implementation for the GNOME desktop environment

GNOME Panel is a highly configurable taskbar for GNOME. It formed a core part of the desktop in GNOME 1 and GNOME 2. It has been replaced in GNOME 3 by default with GNOME Shell, which only works with the Mutter window manager.

Avant Window Navigator is a dock-like bar for Linux, which sits on an edge of a user's screen and tracks open windows. Instead of representing open windows as buttons or segments on a bar, it uses large icons on a translucent background to increase readability and add visual appeal. The program was created by Neil J. Patel.

IcedTea is a build and integration project for OpenJDK launched by Red Hat in June 2007. IcedTea also includes some addon libraries: IcedTea-Web is a free software implementation of Java Web Start and the Java web browser applet plugin. IcedTea-Sound is a collection of plugins for the Java sound subsystem, including the PulseAudio provider which used to be included with IcedTea. The Free Software Foundation recommends that all Java programmers use IcedTea as their development environment.

Strigi was a file indexing and file search framework adopted by KDE SC. Strigi was initiated by Jos van den Oever. Strigi's goals are to be fast, use a small amount of RAM, and use flexible backends and plug-ins. A benchmark as of January 2007 showed that Strigi is faster and uses less memory than other search systems, but it lacks many of their features. Like most desktop search systems, Strigi can extract information from files, such as the length of an audio clip, the contents of a document, or the resolution of a picture; plugins determine what filetypes it is capable of handling. Strigi uses its own Jstream system which allows for deep indexing of files. Strigi is accessible via Konqueror, or by clicking on its icon, after adding it to KDE's Kicker or GNOME Panel. The graphical user interface (GUI) is named Strigiclient.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Moblin</span>

Moblin, short for 'mobile Linux', is a discontinued open source operating system and application stack for Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs), netbooks, nettops and embedded devices.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Buzztrax</span>

Buzztrax is a free software project designed to create a clone of the Buzz music composer. Its functionality is to preserve the playability of the compositions made with Buzz. Songs are made by adding virtual sound generators and effects, connecting them, recording short musical phrases and arranging them in the sequencer. For distribution, songs can be exported to common audio formats such as OGG, MP3, WAV and many others.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GNOME Shell</span> Graphical shell of the GNOME desktop environment

GNOME Shell is the graphical shell of the GNOME desktop environment starting with version 3, which was released on April 6, 2011. It provides basic functions like launching applications and switching between windows, and is also a widget engine. GNOME Shell replaced GNOME Panel and some ancillary components of GNOME 2.

The following comparison of audio players compares general and technical information for a number of software media player programs. For the purpose of this comparison, "audio players" are defined as any media player explicitly designed to play audio files, with limited or no support for video playback. Multi-media players designed for video playback, which can also play music, are included under comparison of video player software.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Quod Libet (software)</span> Free and open source audio player

Quod Libet is a cross-platform free and open-source audio player, tag editor and library organizer. The main design philosophy is that the user knows how they want to organize their music best; the software is therefore built to be fully customizable and extensible using regular expressions and boolean logic. Quod Libet is based on GTK and written in Python, and uses the Mutagen tagging library.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Zim (software)</span> Personal wiki software written in Python

Zim is a graphical text editor designed to maintain a collection of locally stored wiki-pages, a personal wiki. It works as a personal knowledge base and note-taking software application that operates on text files using markdown. Each wiki-page can contain things like text with simple formatting, links to other pages, attachments, and images. Additional plugins, such as an equation editor and spell-checker, are also available. The wiki-pages are stored in a folder structure in plain text files with wiki formatting. Zim can be used with the Getting Things Done method.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">DeaDBeeF</span> Audio player

DeaDBeeF is an audio player software available for Windows, Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. An ad-supported Android version is available, but has not been updated since 2017. DeaDBeeF is free and open-source software, except on Android.

The Sayonara Player is an audio software player for Linux and BSD.

References

  1. "Rhythmbox 3.4.7" . Retrieved 5 June 2023.
  2. "Apps/Rhythmbox - GNOME Wiki!". wiki.gnome.org. Retrieved 2015-09-02.
  3. "12.3. Rhythmbox Music Player". docs.fedoraproject.org. Archived from the original on 6 August 2020. Retrieved 10 April 2018.
  4. Negus, Christopher; Foster-Johnson, Eric (25 February 2010). Fedora Bible 2010 Edition: Featuring Fedora Linux 12. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN   9780470637036 . Retrieved 10 April 2018 via Google Books.
  5. "PrecisePangolin/TechnicalOverview/Beta2 - Ubuntu Wiki". wiki.ubuntu.com. Retrieved 10 April 2018.
  6. Drifter, Carlos Porto of Design. "New features in Linux Mint 18.1 Cinnamon - Linux Mint". www.linuxmint.com. Archived from the original on 26 July 2020. Retrieved 10 April 2018.
  7. "Apps/Rhythmbox/FAQ - GNOME Wiki!". wiki.gnome.org. Retrieved 10 April 2018.
  8. "Last.fm Scrobbling: How is it Used For Music?".
  9. "Apps/Rhythmbox/Plugins - GNOME Wiki!". wiki.gnome.org. Retrieved 10 April 2018.
  10. "Apps/Rhythmbox/Plugins/ThirdParty - GNOME Wiki!". wiki.gnome.org. Retrieved 10 April 2018.
  11. "rhythmbox - Music playback and management application". git.gnome.org. Retrieved 10 April 2018.
  12. "Debian -- Details of package rhythmbox-plugins in jessie". packages.debian.org. Retrieved 10 April 2018.
  13. "Debian -- Details of package rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder in jessie". packages.debian.org. Retrieved 10 April 2018.
  14. musictracker on Google Code