Since my Windows partition on my SSD disappeared again last week (the previous time was only in December), I’ve been taking a break by setting up a fallback Ubuntu installation on another disk. Ah, Ubuntu...such a mixed bag, but I’d forgotten how much fun it can be. Even though there are two other Ubuntu installations in the house, they’re not regular desktops so I spend more time on them when something’s gone wrong. So, although I have been keeping a log of the extensive installation and tweaking, I thought I should dump some of it here too.
Like many things in the Linux world, Rhythmbox (the default music player in Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr) is almost, but not quite what I want it to be, which is Foobar2000 really. The Album setting for ReplayGain is particularly bad. Still it has a certain amount of configurability and has a plugin API which allows more. It comes with quite a few installed already but there are more to be had. Here are a few I’m going to try out.
fossfreedom Repository
A lot of these plugins are available through a repo which makes installation easier.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:fossfreedom/rhythmbox-plugins sudo apt-get update
Art Display
Displays album art at the bottom of the left pane. A little glitchy—e.g. you can’t size it at all and the only way to make it go away is to uninstall.
sudo apt-get install rhythmbox-plugin-artdisplay
Countdown Playlist
Play for a set amount of time.
sudo apt-get install rhythmbox-plugin-countdown-playlist
lLyrics
More features than the standard Lyrics plugin, which uses an annoying floating window. This shows lyrics in the side pane. Sadly these are only downloaded, unsynched lyrics which is irritating when you’ve added synched lyric tags to a lot of files.
sudo apt-get install rhythmbox-plugin-llyrics
OpenContainingFolder
Self-explanatory? When you need to find the actual music file, right-click and this new option appears in the context menu.
sudo apt-get install rhythmbox-plugin-opencontainingfolder
Podcast-Pos
Saves your place in all downloaded podcasts so you can not come back to them later.
sudo apt-get install rhythmbox-plugin-podcast-pos
Random Album Player
Want to listen to an album, but can’t decide which one?
sudo apt-get install rhythmbox-plugin-randomalbumplayer
Radio-Browser
An interface for browsing the many internet radio stations. Also includes a recording facility.
sudo apt-get install rhythmbox-plugin-radio-browser
Remember the Rhythmbox
Shouldn’t all players remember what they were doing when you closed them down? Ah...unfortunately, now I’ve tried this out I absolutely hate it. It doesn’t just remember, but automatically starts playing. It also doesn’t remember the context you were in before—it reverts to the Music view, so it won’t keep playing the playlist, but whatever random thing appears next.
sudo apt-get install rhythmbox-plugin-remembertherhythm
Suspend
Let Rhythmbox suspend or shut down the computer when it’s finished playing. Something else I use in Foobar2000.
sudo apt-get install rhythmbox-plugin-suspend
Wikipedia
Right-click to look up Artist, Album, Track or Genre on Wikipedia.
sudo apt-get install rhythmbox-plugin-wikipedia
The full list of plugins in this repository
Stop After Track
I use the ‘stop after current track’ feature in Foobar2000 a lot. This plugin is a bit more troublesome to install. It seems there was a StopAfterCurrentTrack plugin which was then merged with a ‘stop after a selected track’ plugin.
Oops, not updated to work with Rhythmbox 3!?
- Install git:
sudo apt-get install git - Clone the repo somewhere, e.g.
mkdir stopaftertmp git clone git://github.com/radus/rhythmbox_stop_after_track stopaftertmp
- Run the install script:
sh ./stopaftertmp/install_stop_after.sh - Delete the temp folder:
rm -rf /stopaftertmp
OK, that was more ‘fun’ than fun. I’ll stop now.