It's A Binary World 2.0

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)

Songbird Podcast interface
Songbird Podcast interface

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)

Rhythmbox Podcast interface
Rhythmbox Podcast interface

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.

Eric Mesa

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2 responses to “Rhythmbox Revisited”

  1. Eric, I’m glad you’ve given Songbird a test flight, and I’m glad you’ve filed a bug for the podcasting meta data bug too. 0.2.5 is still a preview/alpha so please forgive us for the bugs. Since 0.2.5, we’ve taken a step up, re-organized, and re-written a bunch of Songbird for 0.3. 0.3 represents the first release on our new code path. It will be reasonably faster, more stable, and will address as many user-feature bugs as we can fit into our QA cycle.

  2. Thanks for responding! How did you find my post, if I may inquire?

    I’m sorry if it came off as an attack – I only meant that it currently didn’t meet my needs and that pushed me to get my podcasting needs from Rhythmbox. I must also say that Songbird is definitely the best player on Windows. I upgraded to the latest WMP and it feels so broken – even worse than you guys and you’re alpha/beta while they’re not.

    Keep up the good work and I’ll revisit soon.