Rhythmbox is a free and open-sourceaudio player software, tag editor and music organizer for digital audio files on Linux and Unix-like systems. Rhythmbox is designed to work well under GNOME, but can function on other desktop environments. It is very scalable, able to handle libraries with tens of thousands of songs with ease. It provides a full feature set including full support for Unicode, fast but powerful tag editing, and a variety of [|plug-ins]. Rhythmbox is the default audio player on many Linux distributions including Fedora, Ubuntu since v12.04 LTS, and Linux Mint as of version 18.1.
Features
Rhythmbox offers a significant number of features, including:
Music playback
Playback from a variety of digital music sources is supported. The most common playback is music stored locally as files on the computer. Rhythmbox supports playing streamed Internet radio and podcasts as well. The ReplayGain standard is also supported. Rhythmbox also supports searching of music in the library. Playlists may be created to group and order music. Users may also create 'smart playlists,' ones that are automatically updated based on a customized rule of selection criteria rather than an arbitrary list of tracks. Music may be played back in shuffle mode or repeat mode. Track ratings are supported and used by the shuffle mode algorithm to play higher-rated tracks more often.
Enabling the crossfading backend option with a duration of 0.0 switches Rhythmbox into gapless playback mode for music formats that support it. Gapless playback is not enabled by default.
Since the 0.9 release, Rhythmbox can create audio CDs from playlists.
Album cover display
Since the 0.9.5 release, Rhythmbox can display cover art of the currently playing album. The plugin can search the internet to find corresponding artwork, and as of 0.12.6, can read artwork from ID3 tags. If an image file is saved in the same directory as the audio track this is used instead.
SoundCloud
Rhythmbox can browse and play sounds from SoundCloud, via built-in SoundCloud plugin.
Song lyrics display
Since the 0.9.5 release, Rhythmbox can provide song lyrics of the currently playing song by pressing , as long as the lyrics are stored in a lyrics database.
Rhythmbox can submit played songs info to a remote scrobbling service. This information is used by the remote service to provide user specific music recommendations. Rhythmbox currently supports 3 scrobbling services:
Last.fm
Libre.fm, the open-source drop-in replacement
Listenbrainz
Music can be scrobbled to both services at the same time.
Rhythmbox supports sharing music and playing shared music on local network via DAAP sharing plugin. The plugin uses to provide this feature.
Devices
Rhythmbox uses the Linux udev subsystem to detect player devices.
Podcasting
Rhythmbox can subscribe to podcasts from the iTunes Store, or by manually providing a podcast feed URL. Subsequently, new podcasts are automatically downloaded and available from the Library under the section Podcasts.
Web remote control
Rhythmbox can be controlled remotely with a Web browser, via inbuilt Web remote control plugin.
Plug-ins
Rhythmbox has a plug-in API for C, Python, or Vala. There are nearly 50 third party plug-ins for Rhythmbox. including a 10 Band audio Equalizer, and many official plug-ins including:
Music Applet, a GNOME panel applet that provides Rhythmbox playback controls from within the panel. Music Applet has since been superseded by Panflute
Rhythmlet, another gDesklet that retrieves album art locally or from Amazon.com, has configurable display strings, playback controls, editable ratings and a seek bar
SideCandyRhythmbox, a gDesklet-based Rhythmbox control and SideCandy display
