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)


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.
2 responses to “Rhythmbox Revisited”
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.
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.