Revisiting Linux Part 1: A Look at Ubuntu 8.04

Applications: Audio Organization/Playback

Windows Default: Windows Media Player
What I use: iTunes/Winamp
Ubuntu Default: Rhythmbox/Totem

There are 3 things people will never agree on in this world: Politics, the Yankees versus the Red Sox, and what multimedia player to use. It doesn’t take much effort to find someone who hates any given player and has their own idea of what the best player is, so looking at the players included with an OS is somewhat academic. No matter what OS it is, a number of users are going to replace the default with something else. So for our discussion on multimedia playback, I’m going to preface this with a thought: the Ubuntu defaults aren’t the only options, there are other programs out there if the defaults aren’t satisfactory.

With that said, when it comes to audio organization and playback Ubuntu comes with two programs: Rhythmbox and Totem. Rhytmbox is Ubuntu’s dedicated audio organization and playback suite – analogous to iTunes – while Totem is a combined audio/video player, similar to VLC or the classic versions of Windows Media Player. In spite of the fact that Rhythmbox is the dedicated audio suite, I mention both of these since Ubuntu will in fact use both. Attempting to open an audio file from the file browser will default to Totem, while Ubuntu’s application menu calls Totem “Movie Player”, leaving the “Music Player” distinction to Rhythmbox. As a result Ubuntu is a bit schizophrenic about its audio software – it’s inconsistent throughout the OS.

Since Totem is an audio/video player, we’ll save it for our Video section and focus on Rhythmbox. As I mentioned previously, Rhythmbox is analogous to iTunes; even the manual specifically mentioned that the program was “originally inspired by Apple’s iTunes.” In fact there’s not a lot to be said about Rhythmbox: it looks mostly like iTunes, it acts mostly like iTunes, and it does most of what iTunes does. Consider it iTunes-lite, and that’s Rhythmbox in a nutshell.

As iTunes-lite, Rhythmbox holds both the benefits and the downsides to such a design. Monumental among these are the fact that Rhythmbox isn’t nearly as bloated as iTunes can be. Rhythmbox gives you the basic iTunes experience while eating less than half the memory and loading in less than half the time it takes for iTunes to load. iTunes may have a lot of features, but you’re paying for them somewhere. For most people, the complete iTunes feature set is overkill and they would be better served by lighter program like Rhythmbox.

The price of that lightness however is the feature set that Rhythmbox doesn’t implement. Among other things it lacks its own ability to extra audio from CDs, instead relying on another Ubuntu program, Audio CD Extractor (Sound Juicer) to accomplish this. Similarly, it lacks the ability to quickly encode existing songs in to another format. Last, for purchasing music it doesn’t have access to a full-featured store – the included interfaces are for Magnatune and Jamendo, which are best described as indie stores. Purchasers looking for mainstream music would be limited to Amazon’s store, which has a proper web interface and may be a curse or a blessing depending on how much you like the iTunes Music Store being integrated in to iTunes.

Rhythmbox does have the ability to synchronize music with portable media players, however since Apple actively blocks their iPhoneOS based devices from syncing with anything besides iTunes, Rhythmbox can’t actually sync with the portable media players most people have. This meant that I was unable to sync my iPhone with Rhythmbox, and had to dual boot instead. We don’t have a legacy iPod on hand, but it sounds like the latest Classic/Nano models won’t work either. Users with legacy iPods would need to seek out something like GTKPod, which is designed specifically for iPod synchronization and should do the job.

Ultimately the usefulness of Rhythmbox depends on how well you know iTunes and how many of its deeper features you use. For basic music organization and playback it does just fine – you may as well be using iTunes. But power users will probably be unsatisfied. Meanwhile Windows Media Player users will find it a tossup; it still has fewer features than WMP, but WMP has always needed to take a hint or two from iTunes when it comes to layout.

Final Verdict: Satisfactory/Only Meets Some of My Needs