Full Circle Magazine FR

Last month, we talked about using Rhythmbox, the default application for ‘ripping’ CDs to MP3 format, to make your media easier to manage. This month, we’ll talk more about exactly how to use Rhythmbox to manage your music collection. Recapping from last month, Rhythmbox will usually show up by default on the Ubuntu Launcher, close to the bottom of the default applications that are there. Its icon appears like a rectangle with some concentric circles: That’s it, just above the ‘Show Applications’ drawer (the unmoving set of white squares at the bottom of the Favorites launcher). Once you launch it by clicking the icon: you’ll see this screen (right). As mentioned last month, when you first run Rhythmbox, it automatically searches your hard drive and indexes all the existing music it finds.

Track Properties As shown above, when you launch Rhythmbox, you will see a list of the music on your hard drive. You can right-click on any track and select Properties to get access to details on that track: As you can see, there are fields you can edit that include the track name, the artist, the album name, genre, year of release, a comment field, and others, all on the default pane – Basic. Many of these properties will be filled in automatically if you are online when you rip the CD, and the album is found on the Musicbrainz online service that helps Rhythmbox to be more automated. At the top of the dialogue box, you can also switch to properties for the track’s sorting parameters, details, and even album art. Album Art The album art pane will default to showing the album art downloaded automatically from the Musicbrainz service, assuming you were online when you ripped the MP3. If none shows up, you can click the Fetch button to try and retrieve it from Musicbrainz. If that doesn’t work, you can find and download the art you choose, then click the Browse button on the Album Art pane and navigate to wherever you saved the art file.

Additional Details – Track Ratings The Details pane has additional properties for the track, the most interesting of which may well be Rating: Under Rating, you can click however many stars you want to give the track, out of a possible five. Once you’ve done this, the track will show up in the default playlist ‘My Top Rated’ (on the left side of the program window), assuming you’ve given the track a four- or five-star rating: The music in that playlist will automatically sort by higher-to-lower rated. Your 5 star tunes will be at the top, 4 star music at the bottom. Next month: More music management using Rhythmbox.