Rhythmbox is a

free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software available under a Software license, license that grants users the right to use, modify, and distribute the software modified or not to everyone free of charge. FOSS is an inclusive umbrella term ...

audio player software, tag editor and music organizer for

digital audio Digital audio is a representation of sound recorded in, or converted into, digital signal (signal processing), digital form. In digital audio, the sound wave of the audio signal is typically encoded as numerical sampling (signal processing), ...

files on

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

and

Unix-like A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X, *nix or *NIX) operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Uni ...

systems. Rhythmbox is designed to work well under

GNOME A gnome () is a mythological creature and diminutive spirit in Renaissance magic and alchemy, introduced by Paracelsus in the 16th century and widely adopted by authors, including those of modern fantasy literature. They are typically depict ...

, 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 Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

, fast but powerful tag editing, and a variety of plug-ins. Rhythmbox is the default audio player on many

Linux distribution A Linux distribution, often abbreviated as distro, is an operating system that includes the Linux kernel for its kernel functionality. Although the name does not imply product distribution per se, a distro—if distributed on its own—is oft ...

s including Fedora,

Ubuntu Ubuntu ( ) is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed primarily of free and open-source software. Developed by the British company Canonical (company), Canonical and a community of contributors under a Meritocracy, meritocratic gover ...

since v12.04 LTS, and

Linux Mint Linux Mint is a community-developed Linux distribution. It is based on Ubuntu and designed for x86-64 based computers; another variant is based on Debian which is named Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) and has both 64-bit and IA-32 support. T ...

as of version 18.1.

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 Internet radio, also known as online radio, web radio, net radio, streaming radio, e-radio and IP radio, is a digital audio service transmitted via the Internet. Broadcasting on the Internet is usually referred to as webcasting since it is not ...

and

podcast A podcast is a Radio program, program made available in digital format for download over the Internet. Typically, a podcast is an Episode, episodic series of digital audio Computer file, files that users can download to a personal device or str ...

s as well. The

ReplayGain ReplayGain is a proposed technical standard published by David Robinson in 2001 to measure and normalize the perceived loudness of audio in computer audio formats such as MP3 and Ogg Vorbis. It allows media players to normalize loudness for in ...

standard is also supported. Rhythmbox also supports searching of music in the library.

Playlist A playlist is a list of video or audio files that can be played back on a media player, either sequentially or in a shuffled order. In its most general form, an audio playlist is simply a list of songs that can be played once or in a loop. ...

s 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 Gapless playback is the uninterrupted playback of consecutive audio tracks, such that relative time distances in the original audio source are preserved over track boundaries on playback. For this to be useful, other artifacts (than timing-related ...

is not enabled by default.

Music importing

* Audio CD ripping * Comprehensive audio format support through

GStreamer GStreamer is a Pipeline (computing), pipeline-based multimedia framework that links together a wide variety of media processing systems to complete complex workflows. For instance, GStreamer can be used to build a system that reads files in one f ...

iPod The iPod is a series of portable media players and multi-purpose mobile devices that were designed and marketed by Apple Inc. from 2001 to 2022. The iPod Classic#1st generation, first version was released on November 10, 2001, about mon ...

support * Android support

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.

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 trl + 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. This information is used by the remote service to provide user specific music recommendations. Rhythmbox currently supports three scrobbling services: * Last.fm * Libre.fm, the open-source drop-in replacement * ListenBrainz Music can be scrobbled to all services at the same time. Rhythmbox web remote control

DAAP music sharing

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

Devices

Rhythmbox uses the Linux

udev udev (userspace ) is a device manager for the Linux kernel. As the successor of devfsd and hotplug, udev primarily manages device nodes in the directory. At the same time, udev also handles all user space events raised when hardware devices ...

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. There are nearly 50 third party plug-ins for Rhythmbox. including a 10 Band audio Equalizer, and many official plug-ins including: * Cover art search * Audio CD Player * Last.fm / Libre.fm / Listenbrainz * DAAP Music Sharing * FM Radio * Grilo media browser * IM Status * Internet Radio Streaming * Song Lyrics * Magnatune Store * Media Player Keys * Portable Players (generic, iPod) * Android devices (via MTP) * Notification * Power Manager * Python Console (for debugging) * LIRC * Send tracks * Replay Gain * MediaServer2 D-Bus interface * MPRIS D-Bus interface * Browser to integrate Rhythmbox with iTunes * CD/DVD burning based on Brasero

Integration

Rhythmbox has been extensively integrated with a number of external programs, services and devices including: * Built-in support for Multimedia Keys on keyboard * Nautilus file manager context-menu integration, "hover mode" playback in Nautilus * HexChat, via a HexChat plugin. * Pidgin-Rhythmbox automatically updates the

Pidgin A pidgin , or pidgin language, is a grammatically simplified form of contact language that develops between two or more groups of people that do not have a language in common: typically, its vocabulary and grammar are limited and often drawn f ...

user profile with details of the currently playing track * Gajim and Pidgin include options for automatically updating the user status with details of currently playing track /code.google.com/p/pidgin-musictracker/ musictracker on Google Code/ref> * aMSN and emesene can change the user's personal message to current track via the "music" plugin (aMSN) and the "CurrentSong" plugin (emsene), similar to Messenger Plus! Live * Music Applet (previously known as the Rhythmbox Applet), a GNOME panel applet that provides Rhythmbox playback controls from within the panel. Music Applet has since been superseded by Panflute * Rhythmlet, another gDesklet that retrieves album art locally or from Amazon.com, has configurable display strings, playback controls, editable ratings and a seek bar * SideCandyRhythmbox, a gDesklet-based Rhythmbox control and SideCandy display * Rhythmbox XSLT allows the music library to be viewed as a

web page A web page (or webpage) is a World Wide Web, Web document that is accessed in a web browser. A website typically consists of many web pages hyperlink, linked together under a common domain name. The term "web page" is therefore a metaphor of pap ...

* Drivel inserts the name of the track Rhythmbox is currently playing into a

LiveJournal LiveJournal (), stylised as LiVEJOURNAL, is a Russian-owned social networking service where users can keep a blog, journal, or diary. American programmer Brad Fitzpatrick started LiveJournal on April 15, 1999, as a way of keeping his high school ...

blog entry * Rhythmbox Tune Publisher publishes the currently playing Rhythmbox track to

XMPP Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (abbreviation XMPP, originally named Jabber) is an Open standard, open communication protocol designed for instant messaging (IM), presence information, and contact list maintenance. Based on XML (Ext ...

via the User Tune protocol (used by the Jabber World Map) * FoxyTunes, a

Mozilla Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements curren ...

extension that provides Rhythmbox playback controls from within the

web browser A web browser, often shortened to browser, is an application for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's scr ...

* Plugins for browsing and listening to

Creative Commons Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has release ...

licensed albums from Jamendo (via grilo plugin) and Magnatune. * Rhythmbox Remote helps to remotely control Rhythmbox through an Android powered device. * Rhythmbox WebMenu is a fully personalizable plugin that integrates Rhythmbox with several music websites.

References

External links

Rhythmbox website
{{Aggregators 2001 software Applications using D-Bus Audio player software that uses GTK Free audio software Free media players Free software programmed in C GNOME Applications Jukebox-style media players Linux media players Online music database clients Software that uses GStreamer Tag editors for Linux Tag editors that use GTK