Rhythmbox is a great music player for GNOME

It’s hard for me to work in total silence. I need some kind of background noise, preferably some familiar music. My music-listening needs are pretty simple: I just need a music player that plays my library of MP3 music and streams from a few websites I like to listen to.

I’ve tried a variety of music players on Linux, but I keep coming back to Rhythmbox, a music player for GNOME. That means if your distribution uses GNOME, it probably also includes Rhythmbox. It’s simple and plays my local music library as well as streams from internet radio websites. I like to listen to both streaming music and my own music library with Rhythmbox on Linux.

Listen to streaming music on Linux

Rhythmbox supports listening to music from several streaming services. If you have a Last.fm or Libre.fm account, you can click the tab on the left to log in. Or, if you want to listen to free streaming radio stations, click the Radio tab on the left to stream from one of the pre-configured internet radio websites. HBR1 Tranceponder is one of my favorite Internet radio stations:

Listen to my music library on Linux

I keep my 20-gigabyte MP3 music library outside my home directory, in /opt/music. There’s no “magic” reason to put the music here, except that it makes my personal backups a lot smaller; 20GB is a lot to back up every week or so. This way, I can make a few copies of my music collection, maybe every few months—but my home directory backups are a lot smaller, maybe about 10 GB.

But storing my music outside my home directory means I need to tell Rhythmbox where to find it. To import music into Rhythmbox, click the Import button, select the /opt/music directory, or wherever you’ve saved your music library, and let Rhythmbox identify the MP3 music collection. When it’s done, click the Import listed tracks button to complete the import process.

Rhythmbox plays my music collection and organizes songs by genre, artist, and album so I can quickly find the music I want to listen to.

This article is adapted from Listen to music on Linux with Rhythmbox by Jim Hall, and is republished with the author’s permission.