Remember me
Ever wondered what a GTK4/libadwaita version of Linux music player Rhythmbox might look like? A new app in development imagines just that.
Tributary is billed as a “high-performance, Rhythmbox-style media manager written in pure Rust with GTK4 and libadwaita”.
It’s more than a way to play local audio files. Tributary can also access and stream music from Jellyfin, Plex, DAAP/iTunes shares, and Subsonic/Navidrome setups, and makes it easy to browse and play internet radio stations – all from a UI that looks like a GTK4 Rhythmbox.
Explaining his decision to create ‘yet another music player’ (no longer a historical meme either, as a glut of Amerbol-style GTK4/libadwaita music apps have been clogging up code repos and subreddits of late, thanks to vibe coding) developer John-Michael Mulesa said:
“I wanted something that still looked and acted like the old Rhymbox/iTunes song library view, while maintaining DAAP library support and adding support for a few additional more modern remote backends.”
Cross-platform support is another consideration, as the app aims to “work out of the box on any Linux distro, Windows, and macOS”.
The catch? This is a new project. It’s in alpha. It’s not actually Rhythmbox or built on its codebase (so it can’t, and likely won’t, do everything Rhythmbox can – there’s no drag and drop transfer to media devices, for instance).
Rhythmbox is still Ubuntu’s default music app on ‘extended’ installs, but its aging codebase and design looks increasingly out of place on a modern GNOME desktop. And GTK3, which underpins it, is now in maintenance mode, with many distros keen to drop dependencies that drag it in.
Tributary is off to a promising start.
And with Ubuntu’s growing fondness of Rust and Rhythmbox’s (f)ossified backend, perhaps it may find itself in the spotlight should the distro’s desktop team decide to audition a modern music player for a role in its band of default apps1.
Download a Deb installer from the project’s GitHub releases page to try it out. It’s in alpha (I did mention that, right?), so keep that in mind.
You can’t install it from Flathub yet, but that is the natural downstream destination for a GTK4/libadwaita app worth its salt.
If you have a homogeneous music library I’d love to know how you get on with it.
Thanks for the tip, Scotty!!