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http://www.rhythmbox.org/

Seems decent enough to catalogue everything from ID2/ID3 in MP3.

Searchable.

I'm surprised that Rhythmbox didn't make the list of iTunes replacements. It looks like iTunes, it interacts with your iPod in a similar fashion, and it even supports DAAP. Other than the iTMS, it's almost a complete replacement.

Aren't amaroK and Rhythmbox the open source iTunes?

iTunes on linux?

Another thing XMMS needs is a new version: 2.0. Even though I've switched to Rhythmbox for it's music library and upcoming iPod support, it would be nice if XMMS had some of these features too.

Jamboree

Rhythmbox

Rhythmbox currently doesn't support id3 tag editing. This is a feature that will be added at some point in the future.

You know, if you look outside of KDE apps they can be quite good. RhythmBox is a competent iTunes clone though gstreamer is still a bit immature - for now you may wish to use the Xine backend. If you're looking for something truly fresh then Muine has an innovative, unique (afaik) interface especially suitable for lots of albums. It doesn't do net radio though: it's purely for playing back music. Other downside is that it requires Mono. It works nicely however, in my limited experience.

There are already a lot of replies to this post saying "no definitely not, OSS developers are all elitest ignoramuses" because it's easy to sound insightful when criticising, but really what they're saying doesn't stack up. It might have been right 3 years ago but the improvements made since then have been staggering.

A lot of software has been rewritten or redesigned with usability being core. Example: grip was deemed a lost cause as far as UI went, so Sound Juicer was written instead. XMMS was deemed fundamentally flawed so Muine and RhythmBox were written. Gnome has adopted a pervasive HIG and while it may have a few rough edges still it's arguably more consistent than both Windows (hands up if you read the Windows HIG - thought not) and even Apples (brushed metal or aqua - what mood is Steven in today?).

Today, if you want, you can get software that's had well thought through usability. That doesn't mean everybody uses it, but it's certainly available to those who want it.

Now, there are some big remaining usability issues in free software but these tend to be structural/architectural. For instance Linux software installation is frequently very difficult and it's not easy to solve without a great deal of engineering.

On Windows the GIMP user interface isn't anywhere near as good as on Linux, despite the GIMP 2 itself making great strides over the 1.2 release in absolute terms, the different (arguably worse) Windows WM model and UI paradigms aren't accounted for and there aren't enough Win32 Gimp developers to give Gimp/Win32 an excellently integrated UI. Or at least, not rapidly.

This is more a side-effect of the Gimp being most popular on Linux and the core developers all using Linux though, rather than any fundamental insight into the nature of open source. I've seen some pretty crap ports to Windows UI from commercial companies as well - for instance, the laughable QuickTime 4 which not only made zero effort to integrate with the host operating systems UI but also committed quite a few usability sins like the thumbwheel.

rhythmbox obviously uses theme-able GTK2 widgets instead of static OSX brushed metal widgets. I don't think there's anything to worry about.

And here I thought that the authors were going out of their way to show that they're about fair use, not copyright infringement (even going so far as to NOT remove the purchaser's information from the files, just the DRM). I mean, what good is it if I want to buy a song from the iTMS, but then (since I don't really use Windows or MacOS) want to share that song out via MythMusic, or listen to it in RhythmBox.

Rhythmbox should be what you are looking for, i use it for all my Ogg/Vorbis-Files, including those tagged with chinese names.

Apparently, iTunes does actually work if you install it on Windows then copy it (and the registry entries it creates) across, though it's not really perfect.

Anyway, it's pretty high up on the CodeWeavers wishlist, so expect to see us work on it at some point. Just don't expect it soon - iTunes isn't really a killer app and there are some nice native equivalents like Muine or RhythmBox available.

I'm not sure exactly what the point of these is...we've already got very nice apps that do the same thing as these (and have nicer interfaces): for music, either Rhythmbox or Muine, and for photos, GPhoto. The only purpose I can see for LinSpire to have its own photo and music apps is branding, which is pretty silly since they're already positioning themselves as the OS for "generic" PCs. I'm afraid I just don't see the point.

I must concur...it is really remarkably ugly. It even fails to be the best Linux iTunes style jukebox, that honour falling to the Rhythmbox , which is a new and fancy music management application for GNOME very much in the iTunes style..

If it's striking resemblence you're after, I invite you to compare screenshots of Rhythmbox to screenshots of iTunes. Not that Rhythmbox isn't a great music management program for GNOME in it's own right, but I think you'll agree it looks a hell of a lot more similar to iTunes than LSongs...

Yes, multimedia is certainly something we'd like the desktop to do well. However, it's not realistic to expect comprehensive multimedia support from a Linux desktop today with open source software. It's a very difficult and costly problem to solve comprehensively. There are some positive signs, such as helix community, but you don't really have a single piece of software that does it all as well as the Windows variants.

Ummm...I'm not sure how to respond to this. How about mplayer? That has to be the best movie player I have ever used. And didn't it receive some sort of award recently? Or how about Xine?

Let's see...what else? The GStreamer framework is coming along nicely and will probably mature before the end of the year. There are several audio players available, some more usable than others, though. There are also more specialized programs like the Bedevilled Audio System. So I would hardly say linux is deficient in multimedia software.

I'm surprised redhat has stuck with gnome this long as their DE of choice. It is more usable, and that's why I am glad personally they have.

With so many of the gtk programs riviling the qt equivalents, I wonder why companies always flock towards Qt.

Forget iTunes - try RhythmBox - an "integrated music management application, originally inspired by Apple's iTunes."

The latest development version now has preliminary support for the iPod and, best of all, it doesn't support DRM ;-)

It's kind of ironic that their homepage banner shows rhythmbox playing "Bring Me to Life" by Evanesence.

Seeing as their server is on its way to being Slashdotted, maybe a better choice of Evanesence song would have been "Going Under?"

my replacements for those two ugly citizens has been Rhythmbox and Galeon.

But... But...

Without rewriting the wheels we wouldn't have so many iTunes clones!

Actually, I'd suggest that for a music playe with a good GUI you should look at Rhythmbox.

The current XMMS release is Gtk1 only (boo!) although it is being rewritten from the ground upwards. However, somebody has make a Gtk2 fork of the current XMMS codebase, named Beep which is looking pretty decent.

I would agree with the original post. JuK looks hideous. However, hideous is not unusable which I would say is the most important point. Still, we'd all be Gucci models if we could.

I downloaded it on to my 800Mhz Sony VAIO laptop, it took about 10 minutes to install and needed a reboot (Don't remember Linux making me do that). After installing it loaded it up. First of all its dectection of music files is not that great, as it listed many mpeg and avi files as "music". It also installed QuickSlime on my computer which explained some of the bloat. It used the ugly brushed metal interface instead of Aqua and it didn't look right at all. Its nothing like the Mac version of itunes (I tried it on a G5 at pc world, it the Mac version rocks). Not only that, but the lack of support for .wma, .wav, .ogg. and .gcx files made it useless for my needs. I tried the Music store, but since I live in the UK, I could only listen to shitty bit rate 10 second previews of the songs. The visualisation sucked too, especially compared to the goom visualiser on Linux!

In conclusion, Slow, Ugly, Dosen't support my music. If you have a Mac and Live in the USA, then its probably right for you, but for everyone else its Windows Media Player or Rhythmbox for Linux/BSD users

Rhythm box is a Itunes like music player for Linux. I'm using on Mandrake 9.2, its really cool!

uh, we've had rhythmbox for quite some time now.
its still not a 1.0 release, but we all know that a 1.0 in OSS is MUCH different than an M$ or most other commercial 1.0 releases.

Well, there's Rhythmbox. It doesn't seem to have the ability to edit ogg vorbis tags (dunno about mp3), but as long as your tags are good, it's decent at displaying your music library in a vaguely iTunes-ish way.

rhythmbox

RhythmBox definitely has the most refined interface of any Linux audio player. It got that way by being a direct freaking clone of iTunes.

Funny how that works. You might even say that Apple knows something about user interfaces.

for linux users, we already have an choice, we have rhythmbox already damn close to ituns, and ofcourse, free

He doesn't mention other, very nice multimedia players like Rhythmbox, JuK, or Zinf. For anyone like me who became frustrated with XMMS' slow development and lack of features these are the things you should check out.

Plus no one has anything like iTunes.

Rhythmbox
JuK
liteamp


Put on your sunglasses before visiting JuK's website.

You might like Rhythmbox a bit better than GQmpeg or xmms but it depends how you weight your different needs. It doesn't look like ass and it has neat metadata but 1. no viz, 2. no ID3 editing, and 3, no moon on a stick.

This is assuming a gtk2 app is acceptable, you can get it running-without-crashing for enough time to build up useful playlists and use it enough to make the metadata actually have an effect.

If you can't, there was a fork/branch a while back that add's streaming management and is relatively stable.

For the id3 tags, I highly highly recommend EasyTAG.

Rhythmbox is built for GNOME 2 and gstreamer, and fits right in on a GNOME desktop (KDE too, if you're using Bluecurve or Keramik/Geramik). It takes a little effort to get working right now, but it should become a lot easier once GNOME 2.2 final is released in a month or so.

At the end of the article, when asked about what they are looking forward to in Gnome 2.2...

Dave: I'm also looking forward to seeing some apps beginning to mature. Galeon2 is one of the ones I'm waiting eagerly for, and Rhythmbox would be nice to have too."

They got the link to Rhythmbox wrong. Should be .org, as correctly linked above.

RhythmBox, perhaps?

Rhythmbox is coming along quite nicely, and the authors were wise in not using a name that could potentially cause problems (especially after the killustrator incident).

It's not ready for prime-time, but I hear it might be included in GNOME 2.2. So developers, if you like itunes-style playlist management, and like GNOME, try hacking on rhythmbox!

Rhythmbox is an iTunes clone for Linux; if it could use the iTunes database format, it would be an obvious choice.

"Why can't someone make an iTunes clone over on Linux?"

"Why can't someone make an iTunes clone over on Linux?"

I'm going to cop a karma hit for saying this, but this is the one thought that truely sticks out in my mind when I look at Rhythm Box. It is a direct rip-off of iTunes, and they don't even try to hide it. "Takes its inspiration from Apple's iTunes"? More like "steals all of it's ideas completely from Apple's iTunes". This is about as 'innovative' as Microsoft. This is open source innovation?

Honestly, how can someone look at Rhythm Box and then say with a straight face that the open source community has/does not steal ideas from closed companies?

I've spoken about Rhythm Box on IRC many times before expressing these feelings. I'm not some troll, look over what I've posted in the past. This has just been the first time I've seen RB mentioned on Slashdot somewhere, so I thought I'd rant. But honestly, Rhythm Box is the biggest copy job I've seen for quite some time.

it's called rhythmbox
looks pretty cool

rhythmbox.