Been enjoying Rhythmbox, what are your thoughts?

TIL rhythmbox still exists.

I've been a Linux user since 2005ish and a DJ since at least 2013. I've tried a lot of music players including Rythmbox. I settled on Clementine/Strawberry or Amorok, depending on use case. Haven't used either of them recently.

With that said, there is no right answer. Find one you like!

Absolutely classic music player. The iTunes 1.0 UI pattern, which was pre-enshittification. To my eyes, I still don’t think I’ve ever seen a more overall efficient and descriptive way of browsing a local music library.

Awww... iTunes is that bad now? Man....last time I used iTunes was probably 2010 or so. Bummer.

I'm just going to use this opportunity to publicly grieve again for Winamp fake becoming open-source: https://hackaday.com/2024/10/16/winamp-taken-down-too-good-for-this-open-source-world/

I like Strawberry, for two reasons:

It was the first player I found that supported playing directly to a pipewire sink, without going through the Pulseaudio compatibility layer.
It can stream hi res FLAC files from Tidal.

I never managed to make Tidal work. How did you do it?
- +1 — I tried getting the gosh darn API key for hours with no success. Share your secrets (original commenter)!

Fooyin is also a solid choice.

the UI kinda looks like a QT based Rhythmbox. I'll give it a try later 😀
- It is heavily inspired by foobar2000, one of the GOAT under windows IMHO.
- I can't decide between Fooyin and Rhythmbox. I'd love to stick with Rhythmbox, but I really miss waveform view.

Rhythmbox has been my main music app for over 15 years now. Every now and then I'll check out other options but I always end up back after a couple days.

I do wish they would give the UI some attention. Nothing major, just a few visual tweaks to bring it inline with modern Gnome (the alternative toolbar plugin is really close)

Same, I just really want the automatic playlists feature, but no other music players that look nice on gnome seem to have that. Pretty much all newish players are so minimal
I personally would like the album cover to be a bit larger

It still can't sort or browse by album artist, which makes it a real pain to use. You have to apply a patch and compile it from source to make it usable.

is there any alternative that works for you out of the box?
- There's musikcube if you're looking for a terminal based player.

I prefer Quod Libet but I have fond memories of rhythmbox.

I just went on a journey looking at different local music players.

Just tried Rhythmbox. It's not terrible, but not great either. It looks very bare bones.

Of the ones I've tried, I like Elisa the best. I spent a ton of time getting HQ artwork and quality metadata on my files and Elisa really shows that off. Rhythmbox barely shows any artwork. I just have two complaints about Elisa. First, Qt apps just don't feel right in Gnome for various reasons: fonts are often too thick, icon contrast is bad, and Qt theme is weird for non-Breze. It also has weird scrolling behavior: it has forced scrolling smoothing and acceleration.

Runner up is Sayonara. It's Qt based, but actually feels decent in Gnome. Overall I like the UI more than Elisa, but unfortunately it doesn't handle showing my library as well. Artwork is duplicated (it shows albums multiple times if songs in them have different years) and some artwork is inexplicably missing.

Just felt the need to say our music libraries look very similar. You have great taste.
I really enjoyed Elisa too! It looks modern and does a great job at showing off metadata 😁

But I still sticked with Rhythmbox because of: 1- it's GTK based, and I'm currently on Gnome (the reason why when using KDE, I stick with Elisa) 2- I kinda did not understand how managing playlist in Elisa works? Maybe I missed something, but Rhythmbox just seemed more simple and direct to the point with that.

But yeah, I do agree with you that Rhythmbox really lacks in the "showing album covers off" space. But in my personal usage, I don't tend to be looking at the UI of the music player on the desktop anyway, since I usually just play music on the background while doing other stuff.

On mobile (android) on the other hand, I'm enjoying Gramophone for not only showing larger covers, but also matching it's own Material You colors to the respective music you're playing, it's neat :p

Clementine or strawberry for me

Same for me. I was using foobar2000 back on windows. When I switched to linux I found out I set up my foobar basically the same as vanilla Clementine was set. So I was sold instantly. Later switched to Strawberry, because I felt Clementine is too long dead and it also started to glitch icons on newer qt for me. Strawberry is great.

It's an amazing music player and shit podcast app

I'd rather use Lollypop.

I am also a fan. Nicely shows album art, and has the "play similar" feature which I find to be very useful. I just pick one album I know I want to listen to, and it chooses the subsequent albums.

I like cmus best. It is both as simple and as complicated as I need it to be.

mpd for me

It literally hasn’t changed even a tiny bit since I first saw it in 2006 :)

I currently use Strawberry - a well maintained fork of the old Amarok player before they redone the UI for KDE 4. It does what I care the most:

Tree view collection with artist -> album grouping
Files view
Lyrics
Tag editor
Queue
Last, but definitely not least - gapless playback

Fork of Clementine you mean.

I am still using Clementine. Strawberry is missing some features.

Clementine was the best

I use strawberry now, which is a clementine derivative. Having my library in one column on the side and just pulling stuff from the library to a variable custom playlist is my preferred player style. Exaile is also like this, and deadbeef too if your library is organized and you add the filebrowser plugin. I use strawberry over those two because it's the only one I can get from the main arch repositories and I try to minimize AUR usage.

Pragha actually fits this style too and is still in the arch repos, but I don't understand why because it stopped getting upstream updates years ago and is a buggy mess compared to strawberry with no advantages.

I definitely miss the clementine remote though, being able to control the player from an android phone was so convenient and I don't know any other player that has similar.
- being able to control the player from an android phone was so convenient and I don't know any other player that has similar.
  
  Well, you can remote control playback in Kodi through apps like Kore, and browse the libraries, but it's a totally different experience in comparison to dedicated music player apps. Kodi is more like software for a home theater PC, a.k.a. media center.
  
  The best viable solution I can think of, that includes a desktop UI and remote control from a phone, would be hosting a Jellyfin server for the music library, then using the client app for Android to remotely control another client app running on your desktop. I do that everyday (but mostly for video content), since I'm using my phone to control playback on a Raspberry Pi running Kodi with the "Jellycon" client add-on, but that could be any other Jellyfin client, such as a regular Jellyfin desktop client.
- Thanks for this i will check strawberry app
Still is. I use it everyday.

I use mpd and ncmpc++, myself. My library got too large (Just shy of 70,000 songs now) and all the GUI players choke and freeze when I try to scan my library, including Rhythmbox and QuodLibet. I'm kind of interested in how inori develops, since ncmpc++ isn't getting any active development beyond fixing bugs when things break with updates, but I'm also pretty happy with it for now.

I just read that navidrome

Handles large libraries!

Plays well with gigantic music collections (tested with ~900K songs - 2/3 FLAC, 1/3 MP3)

Though, I don't know if any of the supported Subsonic API clients can handle as much...
- Gonic works pretty well with my library, and Tempo is fine for a client. I mostly just put stuff on an SD card in my Fiio these days, though.

If you are an audiophile, nothing beat QuodLibet right now.

Oooh, I'll have to check this one out. I still dualboot Windows for a couple of things and one of the things I've been missing a lot is a player as good as MusicBee. Strawberry comes pretty close, but not quite. Luckily I've found that MusicBee works really well through Bottles, but I would prefer to use a native application.
- Elisa is also decent if you use KDE, QuodLibet is more on the customizable side.

Been liking Amberol lately, but it's extremely simple. Nice UI though.

I enjoyed it at first, but it was too simple for my personal use. What it lacked the most for me was a playlist management, I didn't find any option for that feature

Command line mplayer has been plenty for me.

I used it on Mint. I liked it. I use Strawberry now because it can bypass software decoding and output audio directly to my DAC.

I also use Rhythmbox, the UI is clean and simple. Other music players either are too complicated (UI has too much clutter, play queues) or want to automatically import all audio files in my home directory into the library, which is annoying. But to be fair, I haven't tried a lot of other players, because I'm happy using Rhythmbox.

i can't leave foobar2000 until i find something that has dolby headphone 🥲 and it's sometimes wonky in wine

has dolby headphone

What does that mean?
- there's a dolby headphone addon for it and it creates like a 3d sound. all alternatives I've tried so far suck ass.

I just looked up the initial release, it was in August 2001. I don't remember the first time I used it, but it was probably 20 years ago. Still remains my favourite for the reasons you mentioned.

Cantata.

Same here. Nothing even comes close, at least in my opinion - it's comparable to foobar2000.
@WeAreAllOne @merci3 That's my current player of choice on KDE. Sadly it's no longer maintained. Hopefully some fork will succeed
- I think I've read somewhere that there still is maintenance but can't find it now. In any case Cantata works perfectly!

You can have a look at this superb list for you to test other softwares : https://www.linuxlinks.com/best-free-open-source-music-players/

Tauon is really, really great. But because it is not the most stable on my system (arch) I mainly use Strawberry which is also great.

Thanks for the tip 😁 Where did you get Tauon from? The AUR? There is an official flatpak release, which I presume would be more stable.
- From AUR yes. I did not test the flatpak. It needs some time to know how to use it but it is rewarding.

can anyone suggest a tool to re-assess all my ripped mp3s and flacs with artist/track title info? I ripped ages of music from CD, and at some point a lot of the data got dicked up.

Musicbrainz picard has an option to tag files based on acustic fingerprinting
- TY!

I use audacious with a winamp skin.

Love Rhythmbox! I used it way way back when I first installed Ubuntu (back when it was good) and it was part of a special nostalgic feeling of having been ushered into this new linux world, and I think it lets you rate your songs 1-5 stars (if you want) and I had a lot of fun doing that.

My only complaint with Rhythmbox is that it lets you close it while playing a song and then the ui is gone but the song keeps playing. Insanity!

This sounds like macOS (in a good way).
actually, it's the contrary for me! 😆 I'm currently trying to find a way to make Rhythmbox behave just like that: keep playing even when the UI is closed
- No idea why you want that, but still... does this help any?
  
  https://askubuntu.com/questions/17134/rhythmbox-still-plays-songs-after-exit

For a second, I misread this and thought Rockbox had a desktop port.

Never heard of it, but looks like a cool project!

I've been enjoying Tauon, it does the things I want

Side question that may be relevant since this is for local collections. Does anyone have a recommended tool for ripping and tagging audio CDs (e.g. with musicbrainz support)?

whipper is my goto for that.
VLC? Been a long time since I've ripped a CD. Looks like most tools are no longer maintained.
Last time I had a PC with an optical drive, I used the built-in features of Dolphin, and using a different software for metadata. If you use KDE, it's hard to find a good reason to do otherwise. It will usually get metadata from CDDB, but on the other hand for metadata It's really hard to beat Picard or Beets.

Beets will also scrape the lyrics and add them to the metadata, beside acousticbrainz goodness, multiple genres from Last.fm, and more. Picard will do most of this as well.
K3B I think.??
I use k3b for ripping and kid3 for editing metadata
Fre:ac seems to run in a wine package.
- Isn't it on flathub?
abcde - A Better CD Encoder

I've been sticking with music players that can output directly through alsa. I settled on strawberry cause it can do that and also has other features that i care about baked in ootb. Deadbeef can also output directly through alsa and i liked it for the most part, but what i didn't like was that things like mpris support wasn't baked in, so i would have to mess with plugins. I don't know if there are any other players that can output directly through alsa, those are the only two that i could find so far.

I love rhythym box, but had an issue getting it to show grillo dlna media shares, had to add dleyna packages and dleyna-grillo then everything was discoverable

I think its almost perfect, just need a plugin to be able to show lyrics synchronised with the song

I'm happy with just reading lyrics on the browser lol
- I'm old fashion, I put the synchronised subtitles on the mp3 files manually as a hobby, using Musicolet on Android, but I can see why is not a thing anymore

I use it occasionally but mostly I use terminal players like cmus or musikcube (aliased to mcu, because... geek)

Mostly I live in my shell with zellij and do basically everything on cli. Even web browsing (allbeit non graphical) can be done with stuff like lynx or w3m. And for fanfiction that's fine.

Just out of curiosity, what advantages do you think cli apps have for this sort of application? Is the experience snappier?
- Honestly I use an app called zellage and I like being able to put my music player(cmus) and artwork ripper(cmus-art), and usually a visualizer (wtf can't I remember it's name).
  
  There's no particular advantage so much as my personal preference for staying on keyboard and off mouse. I have everything bound to key chords that I've more or less memorized so it's a quick ctrl+t n for new tab ctrl+p v move pane down , etc etc and I can do all of it more or less by feeling.
  
  It's largely an aesthetic preference, but It's also that I have a slow system. So I can keep ram use down. 2nd gen core i3 problems (shrugs)

Well i personally doesn't like big screen audio player like clementine or rhythmbox, i like music player as simple & mini as possible like QMMP

Are there any music players that will play my mp3s and stuff but also let me play audio from youtube or spotify without logging in? On android I use Musify, which does this but is a little wonky.

@merci3 Just a very solid player. Linux music players come and go but Rhythmbox has always been there.

Cider, apple music

I really just want a media player that:

Has good media library support based on tags (lots do)
Has ReplayGain support (lots do)
Lets me have an album art panel bigger than a thumbnail (and here is where so many options fall short, including Rhythmbox)

Deadbeef seems to be the closest due to its good customizability, but the plugin which allows for actual media library capability is apparently Mac-only, for some unfathomable reason.

Gonna be stuck with Foobar via Wine for a fair sight longer, I think.

~~Clementine does all those things.~~ I may have mistaken what you are asking for. Are you wanting a cover larger than a thumbnail in the "catalog" section?
- Yes, bigger than that. I have tried Clementine.

I'm currently using Sayonara, but Rythmbox is perfectly fine too.

I really really don't get why you just can't organize your music in plain old folders with rhythmbox. Not Playlists, not Meta data. Just folders. Ist it that exotic? Is it that hard to implement?

My musics are organized by metadata, playlists AND folders. I currently got about 1980+ songs locally, and felt like I needed all of these methods to keep them organized and good looking
- And is there any way to play songs by folder with rhythmbox yet? Haven't looked into it for a while.

Gapless is a sexy gtk4 based player.

Lightweight? I guess things have changed in the last 15+ years... I personally settled on Sayonara. Then I discovered Nuclear. Still undecided.

I use Rhythmbox to edit/import/maintain my music collection and sync my iPods, and then I use Lollypop to play my music from my computer. Lollypop has next to no of the aforementioned features but its just nice to look at and simple.

@merci3 I use rhythmbox as a music and webradio player. It does a good job for this use case.

Couldn't figure how to use the equalizer of strawberry

Been enjoying Rhythmbox, what are your thoughts?

Handles large libraries!