Rhythmbox Revisited

A while back (6 mo to a year ago), I tried Rhythmbox and found it too buggy for me. I absolutely hated it. I loved Amarok so I used that within KDE, but it took forever to load within Gnome. So what was I to do? Ever since Fedora started packaging Mono, I’ve been using Banshee. But I find it extremely slow, less featured than Rhythmbox, and without Podcast support. I hate iTunes, so my podcast support has been coming from Songbird. However, they have a really annoying bug that makes using it for podcasting horrible. (I’ve filed a bug report, but no fixes yet) Here’s an example of what the podcasting interface looks like: (click the image to see it full size)

This is horrible! I can’t see any of the MP3 metadata! The horrible part is that it’s there when it first grabs the files, but then dissapears as each file is downloaded!! Also, I was unable to subscribe to the Linux Link Tech show or the IEEE Spectrum podcast. Enter Rhythmbox. (again, click the image for full size)

Here you can see how much better this is! I can see the titles of each podcast and thus know which week’s podcast I’m listening to. Also, Rhythmbox allows me to delete the shows I’ve listened to. In Songbird, if I delete a podcast it is redownloaded next time around.

So far I’ve been using Rhythmbox all day long without any problems. I really like it a lot. It may become my new default player for Gnome and Gnome-like environments like Xfce.