Been enjoying Rhythmbox, what are your thoughts?

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?

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

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 really just want a media player that:

1. Has good media library support based on tags (lots do)

2. Has ReplayGain support (lots do)

3. 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.

Cider, apple music

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.

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

Clementine was the best

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.

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

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.

TIL rhythmbox still exists.

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

It's an amazing music player and shit podcast app

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/

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)

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!

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

Cantata.

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.

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

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.

Fooyin is also a solid choice.

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.

Clementine or strawberry for me

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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!

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

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

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.

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.

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

Command line mplayer has been plenty for me.

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

I use audacious with a winamp skin.

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

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

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

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)?

Couldn't figure how to use the equalizer of strawberry