Longing for a visually impressive way of browsing your music library in Rhythmbox?
Can you say ‘Coverflow time’!
Step 1: Get the plugin
There are two ways to go about acquiring the plug-in, called ArtFlow and developed by ‘manuwagner2009’.
The first is by pulling it from the SVN source-repository. Note that you will need to install subversion before you can do this.
Pull it via the terminal by entering: –
svn checkout http://rhythmbox-coverflow-plugin.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ rhythmbox-coverflow-plugin-read-only
Alternatively, if you’d prefer an easy life, you can download a pre-packaged tarball below: –
Once downloaded extract the archive by right-clicking on it and choosing ‘Extract here’ from the menu.
Step 2
Now we need install the plug-in. Locate the ‘rhythmbox-coverflow-plugin-read-only’ folder (that you either pulled or extracted) and move it to the following location
- home > username > .gnome2 > rhythmbox > plugins
To find ‘.gnome2’ in your home folder you may need to press CTRL+H first.
Step 3 – dependencies
To enable the plug-in there are a few extra dependencies that need to be installed. Click the link below to be prompted; if you are told it is already installed then you can move on to the next step. Otherwise install it before proceeding.
Step 4 – activate
Open Rhythmbox and navigate to ‘edit > plugins’. In the plug-ins window check the ‘art flow’ bow to enable the feature.
Notes
This plug-in works okay but doesn’t always pick up every album cover, so before you hit your screen/ditch RB for Banshee be aware of that.
Talking of covers the CoverFlow view can ‘freeze’ for a few seconds when first enabled as it processes cover-art – this is particularly true if you have a LOT of album covers for it to chomp through!
If the plugin doesn’t show up in the plug-in list do make sure that you have restarted Rhythmbox and not simply minimised it to the system tray/indicator icon/sound applet.
Thanks to mormope