Linux’s Favorite Music Player Rhythmbox 3.5 Lands After Nearly a Decade in the 3.4 Series

Rhythmbox is one of those applications that you will find lurking on a GNOME-equipped desktop. If you are someone who has fully moved on to streaming music/podcasts online, then it doesn’t have much purpose for you.

Even with the rise of streaming, many people do prefer hosting media locally, and that is partly why the GStreamer-powered music player refuses to die.

The GNOME project just pushed out Rhythmbox 3.5.0, the newest release in about nine months. The last one, 3.4.9, mostly patched up plugin loading and swapped in a new playback backend. This time around, the changes are more visible.

The new bits

Buried in the changelog is a fix for the year 2038 problem, the one where systems counting time as a 32-bit number run out of room and start thinking it’s 1901 again. Rhythmbox has swapped the deprecated GTime type for time_t to stay ahead of it.

Then there’s the podcasts page, which has gotten the most visible upgrade in this release.

Episode lists now mark which ones you have already played; notifications for updates and downloads have been reworked; and a new plugin allows you to sync your feeds and episodes through the gPodder.net API.

Lyrics support has also been expanded, where Rhythmbox can now pull lyrics from lrclib.net, read them from sidecar .lrc files sitting next to your audio, and grab lyrics embedded directly inside Ogg Vorbis, Opus, and FLAC files, using a tag that GStreamer recently added.

We round out this release with a couple of smaller fixes that are worth knowing.

The new playback backend, introduced back in 3.4.9 to replace the old crossfading system, is now switched on by default, and a bug that broke playback entirely whenever the crossfade duration was set to zero has been fixed.

The music player also dropped its old appdata.xml file in favor of metainfo.xml, bringing it in line with other GNOME projects.

Download this release

While it doesn’t look like much on paper, Rhythmbox 3.5.0 manages to introduce some important quality-of-life upgrades that will go a long way in keeping the experience clean and the music player relevant.

Seeing that it just landed, most distributions haven’t caught up yet. If you want to install it quickly, there’s an unofficial Flatpak on Flathub.

But building it from source is the recommended way. The repo has all the required instructions and files for you to get it installed on your computer. If that’s too much of an ask, then you could just wait for your distro’s repositories to catch up with the new release.

Suggested Read 📖: AI Slop Keeps Flooding GNOME Extensions