Rhythmbox

Rhythmbox is the music player that ships with the GNOME desktop. It scans the folders you point it at, reads the tags of the files it finds, and presents the result as a browsable library sorted by artist, album and genre. Playback runs through GStreamer, so which formats open depends on the codec packages installed alongside it.

Beyond local files it handles internet radio streams, podcast subscriptions with scheduled episode downloads, and audio CDs. Playlists come in two kinds: static lists you drag tracks into, and automatic ones built from rules such as play count or the date a track was added. Portable players and phones that expose a media library can be filled from the same window.

Most of the extra behaviour lives in plugins that are switched on or off individually, among them Last.fm scrobbling, lyrics lookup and a notification-area icon. Rhythmbox is written for Linux desktops and has no official builds for Windows or macOS.