FolderView: Rhythmbox Plugin To Browse Your Music By Folders

I've recently discovered a new Rhythmbox plugin called FolderView. Like the name suggests, this plugin allows you to browse the music in Rhythmbox by folders.

Unfortunately the plugin doesn't work like I would have expected: it only allows you to browse the music already in the Rhythmbox database. So if you don't want to add your music to the Rhythmbox library, you can't use this plugin to simply browse the music by folders like it is with Exaile for instance.


Even so, the plugin is very useful if your music collection is well organized in case of folder structure (by artist / album / genre or whatever). For example, if your music is not tagged or badly tagged, Rhythmbox won't be of too much help in finding the music you want to play but with FolderView, you should easily be able to find any track you want to listen to (of course, you need a decent folder structure for that). Another use for FolderView is when you don't remember a song name but you know the folder it's in or simply want to listen for some music in a certain directory.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:zedtux/rhythmbox-folderview
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install rhythmbox-plugin-folderview

sudo apt-get install subversion

mkdir -p ~/.gnome2/rhythmbox/plugins/ #in case it doesn't exists already
cd ~/.gnome2/rhythmbox/plugins/
svn checkout http://folderview.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ folderview

Then simply start Rhythmbox, go to Edit > Plugins and enable FolderView.

When I first discovered this plugin, it didn't work with Rhythmbox 0.13.1. The bug has now been fixed but there is still one small bug that needs fixing: if you're playing a song and pause it, when changing folders, Rhythmbox will start playing the first song in that new folder. It's not a big issue, but still a bit annoying. Must have something to do with the fact that Rhythmbox does not have a stop button. Hopefully this bug will be fixed soon (I've already reported it).