Why is Rhythmbox masked? And how to install?

jufoa

Hey,
Everybody are speaking about the wonderful music player and organizer Rhythmbox and I were about to test it too. I found out that it is Masked. Why? Is there something wrong about it? How can i Install it?

Redson · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 15 Apr 2003 Posts: 137

I've never used rythmbox, so I'm not sure why it's masked, but if you want to see other people's experiences, search the forum for "rythmbox".

To install it type:

superjaded · l33t Joined: 05 Jul 2002 Posts: 802

It's masked because it's fairly unstable. IIRC, the ebuild maintainers even took rhythmbox OUT of portage because of its instability, they only fairly recently put it back in the portage tree.

I've tried Rhythmbox for a little bit after I had been using Musik and atleast in comparison, I have to vouch for Rhythmbox's instability. It's nice because it supports a few more formats than Musik, but Musik is both a lot faster (because of its sqlite backend compared to.. xml? .. fmod is also a lot less boaty than gstreamer) and felt a little more solid.

Kesereti · Guru Joined: 07 Nov 2002 Posts: 520

Fmod also isn't Free (as in speech), whereas Gstreamer is. I don't know whether that's important to you or not, but it is to many people (myself included). Besides, if you don't like Gstreamer, or think it's not mature enough yet, you can make Rhythmbox use the Xine-lib backend with:

superjaded · l33t Joined: 05 Jul 2002 Posts: 802

Hmm.. I have admittedly not given Rhythmbox too much of a chance.

It is noticebly slower than Musik, though.. it took a good 5-7 minutes to load my ~7000 songs initially, and it seems to take around 30-45 seconds to update whenever I change my view. Most of this will probably be better once they move to a db backend of sorts, I would think.

Hopefully they'll implement a sort of "Dynamic playlist" like Musik has, when the time comes. Those are really handy.

It also seems to properly support UTF8, where, as far as I can tell, Musik doesn't seem to. Which is neat. Being able to play my FLACs is also a Good Thing(TM).

I guess I'll give RB another shot.. who knows, I may have to join the RB bandwagon once 0.7 rolls around.

And whether it's Free or not.. well, I run Windows on another one of my machines, so that should say something.

It's nice to have the source handy, but I figure it's not a "make it or break it" thing since it wouldn't be much use to me anyway.

brainlock · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 20 Jun 2002 Posts: 110

What kesereti said is true, the rhythmbox devs are already working on a database backend called RyhthmDB. watch out for the next version, I think it will be pretty good. Plus, it is already very stable for me.

brainlock

jufoa · Posted: Fri Oct 03, 2003 3:06 am Post subject:

Yep,
I'am going to try that musik.