Ubuntu’s default Rhythmbox music player finally released a new version with podcast improvements, code cleanup, and various bug-fixes.
It has been more than 2 years since the last release of Rhythmbox music player. The new Rhythmbox 3.4.5 comes with improvements to the podcast support:
- Rewritten podcast downloader with better resume and retry
- Use podcast episode GUIDs to handle episode URL changes
- Fixes for feed description, album art, and downloading issue.
The release also ported DAAP plugin to libdmapsharing-4.0 API, enabled UTF-8 support in metadata scanner. The app ID has been renamed to “org.gnome.Rhythmbox3”. And, it has now switched to Meson for its building system.
Other changes include:
- Remove soundcloud plugin, mmkeys plugin, and gnome-settings-daemon MediaKeys plugin
- Song info ui, webremote plugin, and many other fixes.
- And, translation updates. See more here.
How to Get Rhythmbox
Ubuntu usually won’t update the package for all current Ubuntu releases. So far, the only way to get Rhythmbox is using the Linux universal Flatpak package.
1. Press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open terminal. When it opens, run the commands below to install the Flatpak daemon:
sudo apt install flatpak
Ubuntu 18.04 and Ubuntu 16.04 need to add the Flatpak PPA first.
2. Next, all current Ubuntu releases may install the player by running the command below in terminal:
flatpak install https://dl.flathub.org/repo/appstream/org.gnome.Rhythmbox3.flatpakref
To avoid duplicated app icons, you may remove the system default package via sudo apt remove rhythmbox
Uninstall Rhythmbox flatpak
For any reason, you can remove the package easily by running the command below in terminal window:
flatpak uninstall org.gnome.Rhythmbox3
And cleanup unused runtimes via flatpak uninstall --unused.