I tried out most (if not all) of the music players on flathub, but I always end up going back to Rhythmbox. It’s so simple, lightweight, got just enough features (for my use case) and blends well with GTK Desktops (I mostly use Gnome and Cinnamon) and it looks so clean in my Nord theme 😆
How has your experience with Rhythmbox? do y’all got any alternative you think everybody should give a try? I personally think Elisa is a close second!
TIL rhythmbox still exists.
I’ve been a Linux user since 2005ish and a DJ since at least 2013. I’ve tried a lot of music players including Rythmbox. I settled on Clementine/Strawberry or Amorok, depending on use case. Haven’t used either of them recently.
With that said, there is no right answer. Find one you like!
I like Strawberry, for two reasons:
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It was the first player I found that supported playing directly to a pipewire sink, without going through the Pulseaudio compatibility layer.
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It can stream hi res FLAC files from Tidal.
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I just went on a journey looking at different local music players.
Just tried Rhythmbox. It’s not terrible, but not great either. It looks very bare bones.
Of the ones I’ve tried, I like Elisa the best. I spent a ton of time getting HQ artwork and quality metadata on my files and Elisa really shows that off. Rhythmbox barely shows any artwork. I just have two complaints about Elisa. First, Qt apps just don’t feel right in Gnome for various reasons: fonts are often too thick, icon contrast is bad, and Qt theme is weird for non-Breze. It also has weird scrolling behavior: it has forced scrolling smoothing and acceleration.
Runner up is Sayonara. It’s Qt based, but actually feels decent in Gnome. Overall I like the UI more than Elisa, but unfortunately it doesn’t handle showing my library as well. Artwork is duplicated (it shows albums multiple times if songs in them have different years) and some artwork is inexplicably missing.
I really enjoyed Elisa too! It looks modern and does a great job at showing off metadata 😁
But I still sticked with Rhythmbox because of: 1- it’s GTK based, and I’m currently on Gnome (the reason why when using KDE, I stick with Elisa) 2- I kinda did not understand how managing playlist in Elisa works? Maybe I missed something, but Rhythmbox just seemed more simple and direct to the point with that.
But yeah, I do agree with you that Rhythmbox really lacks in the “showing album covers off” space. But in my personal usage, I don’t tend to be looking at the UI of the music player on the desktop anyway, since I usually just play music on the background while doing other stuff.
On mobile (android) on the other hand, I’m enjoying Gramophone for not only showing larger covers, but also matching it’s own Material You colors to the respective music you’re playing, it’s neat :p
I’m just going to use this opportunity to publicly grieve again for Winamp fake becoming open-source: https://hackaday.com/2024/10/16/winamp-taken-down-too-good-for-this-open-source-world/
I prefer Quod Libet but I have fond memories of rhythmbox.
It’s an amazing music player and shit podcast app
I just looked up the initial release, it was in August 2001. I don’t remember the first time I used it, but it was probably 20 years ago. Still remains my favourite for the reasons you mentioned.
I’d rather use Lollypop.
I am also a fan. Nicely shows album art, and has the “play similar” feature which I find to be very useful. I just pick one album I know I want to listen to, and it chooses the subsequent albums.
I used it on Mint. I liked it. I use Strawberry now because it can bypass software decoding and output audio directly to my DAC.
Clementine or strawberry for me
Love Rhythmbox! I used it way way back when I first installed Ubuntu (back when it was good) and it was part of a special nostalgic feeling of having been ushered into this new linux world, and I think it lets you rate your songs 1-5 stars (if you want) and I had a lot of fun doing that.
Clementine was the best
I use strawberry now, which is a clementine derivative. Having my library in one column on the side and just pulling stuff from the library to a variable custom playlist is my preferred player style. Exaile is also like this, and deadbeef too if your library is organized and you add the filebrowser plugin. I use strawberry over those two because it’s the only one I can get from the main arch repositories and I try to minimize AUR usage.
Pragha actually fits this style too and is still in the arch repos, but I don’t understand why because it stopped getting upstream updates years ago and is a buggy mess compared to strawberry with no advantages.
I definitely miss the clementine remote though, being able to control the player from an android phone was so convenient and I don’t know any other player that has similar.
Thanks for this i will check strawberry app
being able to control the player from an android phone was so convenient and I don’t know any other player that has similar.
Well, you can remote control playback in Kodi through apps like Kore, and browse the libraries, but it’s a totally different experience in comparison to dedicated music player apps. Kodi is more like software for a home theater PC, a.k.a. media center.
The best viable solution I can think of, that includes a desktop UI and remote control from a phone, would be hosting a Jellyfin server for the music library, then using the client app for Android to remotely control another client app running on your desktop. I do that everyday (but mostly for video content), since I’m using my phone to control playback on a Raspberry Pi running Kodi with the “Jellycon” client add-on, but that could be any other Jellyfin client, such as a regular Jellyfin desktop client.
Yeah, I wasn’t considering kodi and jellyfin as music players because they serve a broader purpose than that, but I guess they should count. I do have jellyfin set up for movies and shows, but I’ve stuck with strawberry for music because the player interface is a bigger priority for me than having a remote is.
Command line mplayer has been plenty for me.
I’ve been enjoying Tauon, it does the things I want
