Here’s the Deal

Rhythmbox vs Audacious

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When comparing Rhythmbox vs Audacious, the Slant community recommends Audacious for most people. In the question“What are the best audio players for UNIX-like systems?” Audacious is ranked 1st while Rhythmbox is ranked 22nd. The most important reason people chose Audacious is:

Audacious is a classic music player at heart that has not felt the need to weigh itself down with an assortment of unnecessary options. Advanced functionality can be attained through plugins available from within the program.

Specs

No specs yet!

PlatformsWindows, Linux, BSD

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Common Questions

What are the best audio players for UNIX-like systems?

What are the best media managers for Linux?

Pros

Pro
Loads of features

Rhythmbox allows you to extract CDs to MP3s while listening, and you can also burn CDs from playlists. You can listen to Last.fm and podcasts through Rhythmbox, which has support for lyrics and more.

Pro
Plugins add only the features you want

Rhythmbox has built-in support for first and third party plugins. Instead of adding a bunch of features not everyone will use, you can download just the plugins that you want.

Pro
Podcast management

Rhythmbox features built-in podcast management.

Pro
Pre-packaged!

Rhythmbox comes pre-packaged with distros like Ubuntu, so you can just start listening to your favorite music - no apt-get install!

Pro
Internet radio

Rhythmbox has built-in support for users so that they can add their own streaming audio / internet radio channels.

Pro
Reliable

Pro
Good organization

Music can be browsed by the usual artist and album, but Rhythmbox also allows for genres which aren't supported by all music players. It also has a very useful queue box.

Pro
Streamlined player not weighed down by unnecessary options

Pro
Tons of plugins

Pro
Lightweight

My audacious uses only 18.5 MB of RAM. It has a Winamp visualization style that's very minimized and convenient.

Pro
Support for Winamp themes

Audacious can switch from its GTK interface to one that matches the looks of the famous Winamp player. What's even better is that this interface supports any Winamp themes, which allows for more options.

Pro
Folder oriented player, but able to play any music container and highly configurable

Lets you play, delete and even change metadata of your music files.

Pro
The easiest player for multiple types of files

It plays dts, aac multichannel, etc.

Pro
Compatibility with most media formats

It's able to reproduce most of media formats without external plugins.

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Cons

Con
Buggy and slow when there's a large music collection

Can't cope with a large music collection.

Con
Not crossplatform

The only bad part of RhythmBox is that I cannot install it on other OS's.

Con
No album artist field

Most other modern music players come with an Album Artist Field when sorting music. Collaboration is very common these days and often a song would feature multiple artists, but sometimes it's easier to just sort for Album Artists. It's a rather simple feature, yet Rhythmbox has repeatedly shot down its users for making that request.

Con
No folder browse/add-to-playlist view

So few music players seem to let you browse by your directory structure and add songs to a playlist that way. That's unfortunate because it's a really useful feature and eliminates the problem of mistagged music.

Con
Still no built-in equilizer

Rhythmbox has been around for a good while now and yet there is still no default built-in equalizer. An equalizer allows users to tweak the audio to their preference. It can also help compensate for hardware (for example, lots of headphones are bass heavy, but to get a more balanced sound an equalizer can tune the bass down a touch).