Developer(s) | The GNOME Project |
---|---|
Initial release | August 18, 2001 |
Stable release | |
Preview release | none [±] |
Repository | |
Written in | C (GTK) |
Operating system | Linux, Unix-like |
Available in | Multilingual |
Type | Audio player |
License | GPL-2.0-or-later |
Website | wiki |
Rhythmbox is a free and open-source audio player software, tag editor and music organizer for digital audio files on Linux and Unix-like systems. [2]
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, [3] [4] Ubuntu since v12.04 LTS, [5] and Linux Mint as of version 18.1. [6]
Rhythmbox offers a significant number of features, including:
Playback from a variety of digital music sources is supported. The most common playback is music stored locally as files on the computer (the 'Library'). 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 (like a database query) based on a customized rule of selection criteria rather than an arbitrary list of tracks. Music may be played back in shuffle (random) 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.
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. [7]
Rhythmbox can browse and play sounds from SoundCloud, via built-in SoundCloud plugin.
Since the 0.9.5 release, Rhythmbox can provide song lyrics of the currently playing song by pressing [ctrl + L], as long as the lyrics are stored in a lyrics database.
Rhythmbox can submit played songs info to a remote scrobbling service. [8] This information is used by the remote service to provide user specific music recommendations. Rhythmbox currently supports three scrobbling services:
Music can be scrobbled to all services at the same time.
Rhythmbox supports sharing music and playing shared music on local network via DAAP sharing plugin. The plugin uses libdmapsharing to provide this feature.
Rhythmbox uses the Linux udev subsystem to detect player devices.
Rhythmbox can subscribe to podcasts from the iTunes Store, Miroguide or by manually providing a podcast feed URL. Subsequently, new podcasts are automatically downloaded and available from the Library under the section Podcasts.
Rhythmbox can be controlled remotely with a Web browser, via inbuilt Web remote control plugin.
Rhythmbox has a plug-in API for C, Python, or Vala. [9]
There are nearly 50 third party plug-ins for Rhythmbox. [10] including a 10 Band audio Equalizer, and many official plug-ins [11] including: [12]
Rhythmbox has been extensively integrated with a number of external programs, services and devices including:
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