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 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, too. Tributary can access and stream music from Jellyfin, Plex, DAAP/iTunes shares, internet radio stations and Subsonic/Navidrome setups as well – all from a UI that looks uncannily like a real 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 is out of step with the way modern Linux distributions look and behaviour. Plus, GTK3 is in maintenance mode and many distros are keen to drop any dependencies that pull 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.

How to install Tributary on Ubuntu

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.

Super thanks, Scotty!

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