We got the Jazz

Friday, November 9th, 2007

The Rhythmbox addin for GNOME Do just got a whole lot sexier.



Search by album name.


Search by artist.


Thanks to the transparency of GNU/Linux and the GNOME environment as open systems, it took me about 40 minutes to write this addin. There were no iTunes database files to decrypt, or undocumented technologies to contend with. All I had to do was read the Rhythmbox database file in ~/.gnome2/rhythmbox/rhythmdb.xml. Mono made the rest very easy.


A beautiful GTK icon is shown if the cover art is missing.

7 comments

  1. David Nielsen wrote,

    any hopes for a similar addin for Banshee?

  2. Dave wrote,

    Of course! I much prefer Banshee to Rhythmbox, but a Rhythmbox addin was just too easy not to whip up. Banshee’s new media server dbus backend will make it really easy to make a super-powerful addin for GNOME Do. This Rhythmbox addin is really very limited.

  3. Peng wrote,

    Why with my Gnome Go, the album arts never show? Do I need special settings with Rhythmbox?

  4. Dave wrote,

    You can’t see album art because Rhythmox hasn’t downloaded it yet. Rhythmbox only downloads album art once you’ve played the album, so as you play more music in Rhythmbox, more cover art will be available to Do.

  5. Peng wrote,

    Oh I see, thanks … But I noticed rhythmbox only writes information of those albumart downloaded from web into rhythmdb.xml, while I actually have many ablumarts saved as “cover.jpg” in those album folders … therefore I have quite a lot of albums showing no cover in gnome-do, until I delete those cover.jpg’s and let rhythmbox download them again.

  6. Dave wrote,

    I didn’t know about this “cover.jpg” feature. Maybe I will update the Rhythmbox plugin in a few weeks to look for those files.

  7. Abhiroop wrote,

    I know this is old but I want to comment about the bug that Peng mentioned.

    Basically I usually download cover art when I buy the album and rip it onto my hard drive. Therefore, in each of my artist/album folders I have a file called cover.jpg which has the cover. Rhythmbox (while playing the song) searches in the directory and displays it.

    What your plugin is doing is displaying ONLY the covers that Rhythmbox has downloaded from the internet and stored in “/.gnome2/rhythmbox”

    Since none of my covers were downloaded, I essentially have no cover art in gnome-do. Any thoughts on this?

    Thanks for the plugin!