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!
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 really really don’t get why you just can’t organize your music in plain old folders with rhythmbox. Not Playlists, not Meta data. Just folders. Ist it that exotic? Is it that hard to implement?
My musics are organized by metadata, playlists AND folders. I currently got about 1980+ songs locally, and felt like I needed all of these methods to keep them organized and good looking
TIL rhythmbox still exists.
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.
I’m currently using Sayonara, but Rythmbox is perfectly fine too.
