Rhythmbox and Banshee

Rhythmbox

Rhythmbox is the official music manager for the Gnome desktop. Like all the Gnome apps here, it uses the GStreamer framework for playback, so it can play just about any file you toss at it. At first I worked with Rhythmbox version 0.9.6, the version built into Ubuntu's Edgy Eft release.

• Browsing and searching: The interface for browsing and searching is clearly patterned after iTunes, and is very efficient. It does not, however, pass the alphabetization test I mentioned above; the developers are aware of the issue but a solution doesn't appear imminent. Grade: B+
• Playlist management: Simplistic and cumbersome if you have more than a dozen or so playlists. Rhythmbox does let you export playlists as M3U or PLS files, though I missed the menu item for this in my initial review. (Look not in the context menus, but rather to Music, Playlist, Save to File.) Grade: C
• Rip and burn: Easy-peasy. Every bit as simple as it should be, though the command to start a burn is not easily discoverable (see 'Audio CD Source' in the program's help). Grade: A-
• Tag editing: Intermittent. It's unclear to me what's going on here. Sometimes Rhythmbox will let me edit a file's tags--other times, not. Editing multiple files at once never seems to work. Grade: D
• Internet radio: Well, if you know the URL of a stream you want to listen to, you can feed that to Rhythmbox, and it will tune in the station and drop a bookmark into the 'Radio' listing. The bookmark is listed as the URL of the stream, but I can rename it manually. I appreciate the rudimentary support, but there's plenty of room for improvement. (Rhythmbox's Podcast module is in a similar state of infancy.) Grade: C

Rhythmbox allows for plug-ins, and there are a few good ones: a lyrics fetcher, an album-art fetcher, DAAP sharing (translation: the ability to share music with iTunes users on the local network), and, new in version 0.9.7, an interface to the Magnatune music store. (What Magnatune lacks in inventory--that is, everything you've ever heard of--it makes up for by being DRM-free.)

Rhythmbox also has great iPod support: A colleague of mine was truly impressed when Rhythmbox on my laptop was able to talk to his Mac-formatted iPod--a device unreadable by iTunes on Windows. So I'll award some extra credit here and give Rhythmbox an all-around grade of B.

Banshee

Banshee aims to outdo Rhythmbox. At one point in time, the two applications were virtually indistinguishable, but Banshee is evolving much faster than Rhythmbox these days and now has a look all its own. Banshee is written in Mono, and is thus a favorite of the Novell/SUSE crowd. I began my testing with version 0.11.1.

• Browsing and searching: Banshee's approach is simpler than Rhythmbox's, as it presents your entire library in one enormous list that you can re-sort by any column. A search box acts as an immediate filter for that list. The search/filter function is painfully slow, and Banshee is unresponsive while it is working. Alphabetization does not ignore A or The. Grade: C
• Playlist management: Virtually identical to Rhythmbox's. Works well enough as long as you don't have many playlists. No apparent means to export playlists. Grade: D
• Rip and burn: Simple, straightforward, solid. You can't miss the command for burning a disc--it's a big button in the main window. Grade: A
• Tag editing: The 'Edit Song Metadata' command brings up a simple dialog box that made me smile. You can alter the tags for one or many tracks quite easily. Grade: B+
• Internet radio: A Banshee plug-in handles Net radio. The plug-in is not included in the Ubuntu Banshee package, so I compiled and installed Banshee version 0.11.4 from scratch to check the plug-in out. Unfortunately, it wasn't worth the trouble. The plug-in lets you tune in to only 15 preconfigured stations; you can't add entries of your own. Obviously this is a work in progress. Grade: D

The bad news about Banshee: Every version I've ever tried has been as buggy as heck. Banshee freezes very, very frequently. When it does, it refuses to start again unless I delete its internal database file and re-import my music. Importing music brings the program to a crawl, and I have never been able to import my entire music collection (about 40 gigs) successfully; Banshee freezes somewhere along the way every time. I know there are Banshee users out there who don't experience these problems--could it be that Ubuntu's Mono support is not up to snuff?

On the other hand, Banshee talks to iPods. Via plug-ins, it can fetch album art, let you share your music via DAAP, make recommendations about music you might like, and automatically download podcasts. A "Smart Playlists" plug-in lets you define playlists such as "all songs by the Beatles, before 1968, less than 2 minutes long."

So, as with Rhythmbox, a little extra credit pushes Banshee to a final grade of B-. But I have to add the caveat that if the application crashes with your library as often as it does with mine, it takes itself out of the running entirely.