New Rhythmbox 3.2 release for 14.04, 14.10 and 15.04

The official GTK 3.16 release of the Gnome stack of software was last week but what was missing was a new release of Rhythmbox.

Well its here – and its now available for 14.04 (trusty), 14.10 (utopic) and 15.04 (vivid) users.

Thanks to the key Rhythmbox maintainer Jonathan Matthew together with the many visual styling enhancements of Trinh Anh Ngoc we have a good release that fixes a whole bunch of crashers, reworks album-art display and gives a refreshed visual look-and-feel.

This version contains the following:

Overview of changes in Rhythmbox 3.2

• Support for disc and track total tags (Hubert Figuiere)
• Soundcloud plugin
• Ability to clear, re-fetch and manually set cover art using the song info
  window
• Build fixes for Mac OS X (Andrew Brown)
• Many style and layout fixes (Trinh Anh Ngoc)

Bugs fixed:

330686 – same songs played after reading a playlist
554574 – no easy way to unselect the browse by album,artist,genre option
592706 – Unclear string “in” for translation
601747 – rhythmbox skips one or two songs after playing certain songs
733795 – configure warning: ‘INCLUDES’ is the old name for ‘AM_CPPFLAGS’ (or ‘*_CPPFLAGS’)
737058 – Add track count and disc count to the database
737655 – data: Add Vorbis aliases as supported mime-types
738101 – Failure to build with tdb 1.3
738529 – Crash when right clicking the track list in the library
743012 – Rhythmbox fails to import MP3 files with ID3 v2.4 tags created by PicardQT
743493 – Tracks with no embedded covert art show a random cover art from the music collection
743761 – Right click on any file in ‘Tracks list’ clashes the application
745395 – Duplicate symbol _rb_metadata_iface_xml
745399 – gdkx.h explicitly included; prevents building on Mac
746047 – symbolic icon is broken

Notable in this release is the new SoundCloud plugin.

Also is the ability to change the album-art in a new dedicated window (right click a track and choose properties):

Stock Ubuntu 14.04 users should definitely benefit for 18 months worth of bug-fixes and refinements.  We are well past feature freeze so I’m doubtful that v3.2 will hit the 15.04 repositories – expect it to be in 15.10.  Thus, I’ve produced a build for 15.04 users as well.

If you are looking to have the latest, I’ve packaged this together and is now available in my Rhythmbox PPA. This PPA contains the existing Ubuntu patchwork – hide on close, support for local and global menu etc. N.B. – I tend to update my PPA as and when I’m investigating what is new in upstream Rhythmbox.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:fossfreedom/rhythmbox
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt full-upgrade


I’ve also included the visualisation plugin as a dependency together with the Context plugin which is not available in stock Ubuntu.

Grilo is supported just enable the new plugin found in the Plugins menu.

sudo apt-get install grilo-plugins-0.2 grilo-plugins-0.2-mediascanner

The above will give you the new media sources in Rhythmbox – the key being Jamendo – Royalty free music is just a click away. You also get UPnP & DLNA support as well.

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Post Note:

Looking for a more radical look for Rhythmbox…?

The above is part of another plugin I’m currently working on – more on that in a later article.

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Rhythmbox 3.2.1

A bug fix has been released today (19 Apr 2015) with the following changes:

746975 – core dump when using shuffle and playing track changes
747053 – Rhythmbox plugins fail to connect to signal handlers with libpeas 1.14.0

plus a smattering of translation updates.