New Rhythmbox 3.3 release for Ubuntu 14.04, 15.04 and 15.10

The official GTK 3.18 release of the Gnome stack of software was last september … but most unusually Rhythmbox never featured with a new release.

Well its here – and its now available for 14.04 (trusty), 15.04 (vivid) and 15.10 (wily) users.

(screenshot taken with rhythmbox 3.3 + my alternative-toolbar plugin)

Thanks to the key Rhythmbox maintainer Jonathan Matthew we have a good release that fixes a whole bunch of crashers and gives us new automatic Android compatibility.

TIP – if you are going to sync to an external card on you phone – rename your “Music” folder on the internal storage, create a “Music” folder at the top-level of your external card. Launch rhythmbox. Using the new android capability, you can automatically find and sync with the Music folder on your external card.

This version contains the following:

Overview of changes in Rhythmbox 3.3

• New plugin supporting Android devices via gvfs-mtp
• Encoding settings are now configurable per device type
• Encoding settings can force lossless files to be transcoded

Bugs fixed:

733830 While extracting music from CDs, information in the “Year” field is lost
748857 Typos in documentation
749015 audioscrobbler: Fix displaying icon for libre.fm
751265 JSON import errors
751630 Sync Preferences Missing
751961 iradio: remove Radio GFM
752433 [PATCH] data: Add various mod files as supported MIME types
753359 Don’t handle RTL icons manually for GTK+ >= 3.12
753767 error: conflicting types for ‘rhythmdb_metadata_cache_purge’
755881 crash when adding files found during startup scan
756992 hangs after handling mod/xm/it (modplug) file when crossfade is enabled
757225 Freezing with crossfade backend and Pulseaudio with GStreamer 1.6.x
760192 commit 85c185d breaks compilation with -Wl,-as-needed
761030 Album-Art caching issue

Stock Ubuntu 14.04 users should definitely benefit for 24+ months worth of bug-fixes and refinements. Note – upstream has bumped the minimum GTK version above that found in Trusty … but don’t worry I’ve backed out those changes – you guys and girls aren’t missing anything vital!

We are not past Debian package import freeze to 16.04 so I expect Debian will upload v3.3 soon and this will make it into 16.04 proper.  Thus, I’ve not this time produced a build for 16.04 users … but may do so with future rhythmbox releases.

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


Note: sometimes the upgrade doesn’t quite work.  If you get a segmentation fault repeatedly on startup then uninstall and reinstall rhythmbox

sudo apt-get purge rhythmbox rhythmbox-plugins rhythmbox-data librhythmbox-core9
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install rhythmbox

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

Resolving no shared folders with VMWare Player 7 and Ubuntu 15.04 guest

VMWare Player is actually a very nice stable virtualisation solution … for older operating systems.

If you are using VMWare Player to experiment with newer operating systems like Ubuntu 15.04 you’ll find out quite quickly, standard stuff like vmware-tools fail to work.  The reason for this is that VMWare themselves are not proactive.  They wait months and months before releasing newer versions of their vmware-tools product.

If you want a pro-active hypervisor – choose virtualbox.  However – I’ve found that virtualbox is very unstable – it often crashes and suspending & resuming guests just doesnt work.

So back to VMWare Player.

Shared folders support for the latest Ubuntu 15.04 using the current vmware-tools (v9.9.2) is broken.  If you attempt to install vmware-tools, a whole host of vmhgfs compilation errors are observed.

Fortunately there is a wonderful GitHub Project that maintains support for new kernels – support for both kernel 3.19 and kernel 4.0 is available.

The readme instructions are self explanatory.  Reproduced here – but remember to re-read the readme for changes and updates – don’t forget to show your appreciation and star that repository and use the briliant Flattr to show your support:

To build VMware Tools, do the following:

1. Checkout the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/rasa/vmware-tools-patches.git

2. Copy or download the version of VMware Tools you wish to use into the vmware-tools-patches folder. To do this use download-tools.sh and pass it the associated VMWare Fusion version number N.B. this still works with VMWare Player!!:

   cd vmware-tools-patches
   ./download-tools.sh 7.1.1

   It is strongly suggested to use the latest version of VMware Tools.

   VMware Tools is also included inside the linux.iso file that is shipped with VMware Fusion, Player, and Workstation – but you should ignore this version and just grab the latest.

3. Untar the tarball, and apply the patches:

   cd vmware-tools-patches
   ./untar-and-patch.sh

4. Run the vmware-install.pl installer to install VMware Tools:

   ./compile.sh

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.