In a previous post, I described how I found xinf to be a better music player and library for Linux than Rhythmbox, a.k.a., Music Player. Rhythmbox was included on my Fedora install CDs, so I thought I would give it another chance. The short summary is that it is now my primary music player and library, though I will probably also install xinf.
CPU usage, whether due to a newer version of Rhythmbox or due to upgrading to Fedora, now never exceeds 3%, and is usually much lower. Also, Rhythmbox starts very quickly and I’ve experienced no audio dropouts.
The biggest problem I had before with Rhythmbox was that I could not play back my 192 kbps MP3s. I’m pretty sure it would play 128 kbps MP3s, but maybe I was mistaken. Unfortunately, the error message was too cryptic for me to easily figure out what was wrong. In the current version of Rhythmbox, the error message told me what I needed to know.
Failed to create mad element; check your installation
I needed the mad plugin for GStreamer. Mad is an MPEG audio decoder. If you are using yum as your package manager, the plugin is easy to find. First, make sure you have added rpm.livna.org as a repository. Then, as root, run:
#yum install gstreamer-plugins-mp3
If you want to see what else is available for GStreamer, try:
#yum info gstreamer*
The only major negative I have run into with Rhythmbox is playlist support. For some reason, I can’t drag artists or albums to a playlist. It only works with individual songs. The documentation suggests this should work, but there are a couple other places (e.g., an Organize menu) where the documentation doesn’t match up.
One great sign for the future of Rhythmbox is that lots of new development work is ongoing and there are a lot of contributors.