A year and a half ago, the excellent Linux music player Amarok added extensive support for Magnatune. The programmer, Nikolaj Hald Nielsen, did this on his own initiative, simply because he thought it'd be a neat thing for his favorite music player to have, and because he liked Magnatune's business philosophy.

Today I decided to review Rhythmbox 0.11.5, the GNOME audio player. At first glance, Rhythmbox made me a good impression: the layout is simple and clean, similar in many ways to many other players for GNOME, like Banshee, Listen or Exaile.

After reviewing Amarok, a great music player, I’m going to talk today about Rhythmbox. Rhythmbox is the default music player for Ubuntu, so it deserves a little review. I recently installed Ubuntu on a new Laptop and this time, instead of installing Amarok, I gave a little try to Rhythmbox

This is a full tutorial that explains how to use Gnome Do to control Rhythmbox, Banshee, Exaile and XMMS2. It includes: how to install Gnome Do, how to make Rhythmbox use multiple sources for the library, what keyboard shortcuts to use to control the music player behavior.

Amarok sure inspires a lot of KDE-envy for Gnome users. Unfortunately, it doesn't fit in well in Gnome: it's written for a different desktop environment, uses a whole different toolkit, and requires a lot of extra libraries to run. Luckily, there's a great Gnome-based alternative: Rhythmbox.

Rhythmbox is the default audio player coming with the GNOME desktop environment, featuring a clean, typical interface which is so common for GTK audio players. I could say that Rhythmbox has little missing features and it is rather complete.

GMPC, or Gnome Music Player Client is a lightweight client for MPD, extendable through plug-ins: alarm, album view, AWN applet, dynamic playlist, fullscreen info, jamendo, last.fm, libnotify, lirc, lyrdb, lyricsplugin, lyricwiki, magnatune, wikipedia info, taglib (for editing tags) and so on (in the latest version).
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The Linux desktop environment has made great strides in terms of usability in the past couple of years. In that light, I present Rhythmbox, an OpenSource music player ala iTunes for the Gnome desktop.

As a music-playing application for the Gnome Desktop, Rhythmbox really has its bases covered. The only area in which Rythmbox is deficient is in ripping, but there are many other programs that take care of that.