Activate Jamendo and Magnatune on Rhythmbox

Rhythmbox has a pretty neat feature inbuilt into it. It has plugins for Jamendo and Magnatune. These sites offer free legal downloads of music from independent artists. And trust me, some of the music is breathtaking!

So how do you activate Jamendo and Magnatune on your Rhythmbox?

Go to Edit and then Plugins option on your Rhythmbox. Then simply activate Jamendo and Magnatune:



Thats it. Now simply click on the Jamendo and Magnatune options on the side panel of your Rhythmbox and the playlists will start loading. Simply double click on the track to listen to it. And right click on it to download the track/album, get artist info, donate etc.

Jamendo loading:



Songs playing from the Jamendo playlist:

Songbird - multiple album entries

Image via Wikipedia

This is something which I noticed the other day. When Songbird detects a new album which has songs from various different artists, it adds a new album entry for each and every song. This can be very annoying because you might end with hundreds of apparent albums when you have only a few.

The solution is very simple. Any album metadata (or ID3 tags) has an 'Artist' entry as well as an 'Album Artist' entry. Mediaflow characterises new entries on the basis of 'Album Artist', so if you have an album which has songs from various artists, i.e. has different 'Artist' entries, edit the metadata and make sure you have the same 'Album Artist' entry for the entire album. That way each album will have 1 entry regardless of the number of singers/artists for that album. I generally use 'Various artists' as my preferred entry. You can of course use your own.

This is a very minor issue but it can bother users. Hope this helped.

Songbird

Image via Wikipedia

I guess most of you must have heard of it, if not then this is for you.

Songbird is to Ubuntu what iTunes is to Mac or Windows. This music player uses the Mozilla build with loads of features. The best part is, it supports 'add-ons', yea much like the ones for Firefox, and believe me the add ons are brilliant! There are loads of customisation options available and the interface is unlike any other media player you have seen. And its syncing features are really awesome. So give it a try.

Songbird can be downloaded from the website here. (Although the Synaptic should already have Songbird)