Tributary music player on a dark background showing a UI very much like a modern a Rhythmbox

Ever wondered what a GTK4/libadwaita version of Linux music player Rhythmbox might look like? Well, a new app in development imagines just that.

Tributary bills itself as a ‘high-performance’ media manager in the vein of Rhythmbox. It’s being written in Rust and uses GTK4/libadwaita.

Tributary can also access and stream music from Jellyfin, Plex, DAAP/iTunes shares and and Subsonic/Navidrome setups. It also makes it easier to browse and play internet radio stations.

Explaining the decision to create ‘yet another music player’ – no longer a historical meme, as the glut of vibe-coded Amerbol-style GTK4/libadwaita music apps that clog up code repos and app review queues of late attest – developer John-Michael Mulesa said this:

“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 under consideration too, as the app hopes to “work out of the box on any Linux distro, Windows, and macOS”.

The catch?

Tributary is a new project. It’s in alpha. Oh, and as it’s not actually based on the Rhythmbox codebase it can’t, and likely won’t, do everything Rhythmbox can – there’s no drag and drop transfer to media devices, for instance, and no CD ripping feature.

From tribute act to headliner?

Rhythmbox remains Ubuntu’s default music app on ‘extended’ installs, but the aging codebase and design is increasingly out of place on a modern GNOME desktop. GTK3, which underpins it, is also in maintenance mode, and many distros keen to drop dependencies that drag it in.

Between Ubuntu’s growing fondness of Rust and Rhythmbox’s (f)ossified backend, should the distro’s developers decide to audition for a new music player to join its band of default apps1, this would make a great tribute act.

Just sayin’.

How to install Tributary on Ubuntu

You can download a Deb installer from the Tributary GitHub releases page to try it out.

Keep in mind that it is still in alpha and thus a work in progress. Not all features planned have been added yet, and those which have may be buggy.

If you have a homogeneous music library I’d love to know how you get on with it.

Thanks for the tip, Scotty!!

  1. —inb4 you joke no-one listens to MP3s anymore. ↩︎