Rhythmbox 0.9.0

I'm glad it uses Glade for the UI. Hardcoding UI's is stupid.

You might have a point there, but still, the UI is fairly simple, come on, its not evolution, and I do not think evolution uses glade, does it?

Evolution does use Glade.

Hmmm do kindly correct me if I'm wrong but isn't the Rhythmbox's official support channel in #rhythmbox on the irc.gimp.org server. Seems like the same case with those seeking assistance on msicellaneous GNOME issues #gnome on freenode when they should really have gone to #gnome on the gimp.org server instead.

I have just looked at Amarok, and it have way too many tabs, buttons, sliders, and windows for my taste.

I see many of your points about RB, but reading the RB mailinglist for the past 10 month the development have far from been halted or paused.

Though I hope it is only a lite tag editor that is implanted. EasyTag is much faster to fire up than RB.

I would guess that there only are a hand full really needy features left to implant in RB:

* A second library. E.g. for singles or songs without full albums.
* A way to tell RB not to read the artist name from an album. Think of a complilation of various artists.

I am trying to write a patch for the first one mayself, but it is pretty hard!

Conclusion: I think Rhythmbox is pretty good.

Amarok is perhaps cannonical with respect to the KDE experience: really good features lost among fractal layers of clutter. And of course, the usual software bloat. Alas, it has a lot of nice tricks.

Rhythmbox is decent (but no more than decent) for two reasons: it sports GTK+ as its widget toolkit :-) and has a clean user interface, obviously--and wisely--ripped from iTunes. But it lacks way too many features to be considered the GNOME jukebox, meaning GNOME is left with no jukebox at all.

One of the things I miss most in these music players is the ability to keep all my music files neatly tagged and separated in a tidy Artist/Album directory hierarchy, with numbered filenames.

I recently tried the MusicBrainz tagger and it does a very decent job, but is only available for Windows. libmusicbrainz can be used to solve the tagging problem with satisfying results. Amarok (of course) already does that.

In the realm of GNOME, I envision the music library as a GnomeVFS mount, like "music://" or whatever. I even started to develop such a beast, but in the end I'm just human. Do you guys know of something like that already being done, except perhaps Gnome Storage?

The other stuff I'd like to have--and that's where Amarok shines--is quick access to lyrics, pictures, news and other music related information (buying concert tickets? yay!). The wikipedia integration stuff is a very clever idea. But no clutter, please.

Some sort of "Now Playing" list is desirable too. Something always visible, where you can just drop some tracks, hit Play and simply don't have to name. Also, the automatic playlists should have the "n random tracks" option available, besides the "n minutes" and "n megabytes" ones.

Someone mentioned plug-ins. By all means, gentlemen. If there is a python scripting API, even better.

Well, enough ranting. I hope RB development is really back in track and we'll soon be presented to the many enhancements it lacks (and deserves).

When you want to play a compilation album (with several different artists) you just select "All" for artist and then pick the album in the album list. Really couldn't be simpler.

Yes, but the artist database gets all artists from the complilation. Meaning, that the list will contain many artists with just one song.

iTunes have an option to prevent this from happening. It is called something like "Don't add artist from current album".

That is strange, because I am running 0.8.8 and it plays my large collection of Ogg Vorbis files just fine.

--
Come To Daddy

There are no real UI visible changes, just CD Burning through Nautilus CD Burner, and Tag Editing, (which is the same File Properties UI, nothing changed).

Totem is a media player, while rythmbox is more of a jukebox. They're not designed to do the same thing. Totem plays music, while rhythmbox stores and ranks playlists, amounts played, w/e.

If you like totem better, no problem, but at least understand that they're trying to accomplish two different goals.

Muine :D

Muine is in C#, although it is extremely good, its just a cool player, with a very good plugin architecture and whatnot..

But it is still C#, GNOME doesnt allow for higher level languages apps to enter "the club"

And thanks for not letting them in...

C# is not ported to 64bits => C# is useless to me => all apps written in C# are dead to all non-x86...

I wasn't really referring to the default app set in Gnome. Quite honestly I've given up on default apps. I find Evolution to be completely unusable, and I was never really a fan of Rhythmbox. Just my opinion. Gnome can include whatever they like, so long as I can remove it when I want to. My "Muine :D" post was to express that I prefer Muine as a player, and always make installing it one of my first orders of business on a new system.

The plugins are great, and it's REALLY easy to develop your own (as a side note the Serpentine plugin allowed Muine to have cd burning support months before RB :)). Plus its whole album-oriented approach really works well with my listening habits. The album art is a big plus as well.

All this talk about VMs and default apps and languages aside, just comparing the UI, I do prefer Muine.

This has been one man's opinion.

While I like C# as a language, I don't like virtual machines. I am running rhythmbox right now on amd64.

23.5 MiB Resident, 13.3 MiB shared

I also have beagle running (just as it is a mono app for my point, I don't use it for the reason I am giving here.)

mono is

28.2 MiB Resident, 9.1 MiB shared

already the mono runtime is wasting more memory than rhythmbox is doing, you then need to throw in the memory usage of the apps using mono.

mono-beagled is

40.6 MiB Resident, 10.7 MiB shared

mono-best is

46.9 MiB Resident, 23.3 MiB shared.

memory is cheap, but why waste it running apps in a virtual machine when we can have apps written in C, C++ that don't waste so much memory?

admitedly this is a bit of an unfair comparison as I should really use a mono based music jukebox app, but just the mono runtime shows the bloat.

After all, this is Redhat that has last word in any important decision regarding GNOME.

I know. Remember how Red Hat forced us all to write our apps in java-gnome? And rewrite all the utilities in python? Man, those guys are powerful.

Don't blame Red Hat for that! First of all, how can you say that it's Red Hat who says what Gnome is to be? As far as I can see, it is still community driven desktop, and a really good one too. Do you even know why they don't want to include C# programs there? Well, I can think of a few good reasons. Just think of it; if they accepted Muine to base GNOME installation, for me it would mean installing libgliplus, mono, gtk-sharp, art-sharp, gnome-sharp, glade-sharp, gconf-sharp and then muine. So, all those things for just one single program! If all the program were written in C#, then it would make more sense to add it. C on the other hand is a different situation altogether. Almost every distro comes with GNU C compiler, and there are hundreds of C compilers all around the world for many different platforms. So, it's just more widely used language.
-WereCat

Control? I see, GPL suddenly became non-free.

Well, I don't really know much about the politics behind Gnome, so I'm not going to try to act like I knew, but I just have the picture in my mind that they still do listen to the community, even though the progress may be slow. I don't really have much to complain, except that Nautilus doesn't support NFS, or external handlers for various Howl services..(I did post my proposition to the mailing list, but never got any replies. I wonder why.)

But you know, if you think Gnome has too many dependencies now, then is that a good reason to add some more? I'd say it just doesn't justify adding more to that. We should wait till they get some of those dependencies removed, and then see about adding some new ones. Oh, I don't have anything against adding new programs to base Gnome installation, but I'm still againt Mono. Mono just adds an unnecessary virtualization layer and slows things down. It's not a big deal with newer machines, but Gnome is supposed to work on older machines too. Besides, Mono eats huge amounts of memory. Just check it for yourself, you'll see.
-WereCat

Maybe you could be interested in my program : gmusicbrowser

Well I haven't seen many rhythmbox crashes since I started using it at about version 0.6. About the id3 editing, I realy think it would destroy the interface. It if should be there, then it should have it's own tab/window. I much better like using one program for the task. Easytag is realy good editing tags. http://easytag.sourceforge.net/ Try it if you'd like to.

I already use easytag - and I'm genuinely astonished that tag editing still hasn't been added to Rhythmbox (I'm talking about 2 years since I last looked). It so basic to the operation and claims of the application (management via tags) that the fact it still can't do it pretty much guarantees that there's no way I'll ever be using it.

That you should need another program (which has another view of where your music is on your computer) to do this is truly pitiful... and I'm not overstating things to say that the Rhythmbox devs should be ashamed of such a miserable performance.

Well how do you know, that it hasn't been added? Somebody did post this:
CD Burning tag editing
Those are the two big changes and better iPod support in terms of detection and such.
I just said I wouldn't like it. Not that it hadn't been added. IPod stuff is nice, cdburning and tagediting is far out.

I wouldn't call it a "music management application" either, but as a player and a jukebox it's more than one could hope for! Also about the stability: it hasn't crashed even once in about a year now, and it runs just smooth even on my old P3 Katmai (450mhz) without eating much of CPU time. I don't know how well it runs with other distros, but atleast on Gentoo it works. I know, I have 3 Gentoo machines...Oh, and I haven't had any problems whatsoever with it except for not being able to edit tags. But now that 0.9 is here, I guess that won't be a problem anymore..
-WereCat

Since I moved my music to a webdav server I cannot use rhythmbox anymore. It crashes all the time. While tracing that bug, I found problems in the http/dav part of gnome-vfs. So I guess that at least some stability problems with rythmbox are in real problems with gnome-vfs.

On the other hand RB lacks some features (editing tags) but that might change.

What I really never had, was a lagging RB. Even on my AMD K6-III. And I have mp3s and ogg-files.

Someone should make gnome-vfs compatible wrapper using ioslaves from KDE :-)
Maybe this would allow users to take proper handling of remote files for granted.