Quick tutorial shows how to show or hide the play bar (control buttons and volume control) in Ubuntu’s default Rhythmbox Music Player.

As a small Christmas present to Rhythmbox v3.x users, a rhythmbox plugin developer has created a plugin allows the control toolbar to be hidden when the application starts.

The bar can be redisplayed via the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+T or the menu “View -> Show Toolbar”.

How to install this Rhythmbox Plugin:

The plugin is available in the developer’s PPA for Ubuntu 14.04 and Ubuntu 14.10.

Press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open terminal. When it opens, run the commands below one by one to add the PPA and install the plugin:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:fossfreedom/rhythmbox-plugins

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install rhythmbox-plugin-alternative-toolbar

For those who don’t want to add PPA, download & install the .deb package (“rhythmbox-plugin-alternative-toolbar_xxx_all.deb”) from the launchpad page.

Once installed, restart Rhythmbox Music Player and enable the plugin from menu “Tools -> Plugins”.

That’s it. Merry Christmas and happy holidays!

via:xpressubuntu

Rhythmbox 3.0 was released in early september, but due to the software freeze and probably the lack of manpower, this newer version did not make it into Ubuntu 13.10 Saucy.

Some PPAs has updated the packages for Ubuntu 13.10 Saucy and Ubuntu 13.04 Raring. So you can upgrade it on your system via below steps.

NOTE 1: The PPAs below are both for personal use. They may or may not work. Use it at your own risk!

NOTE 2: Because the plugins in v3.0 now use Python 3.0, your rhythmbox plugins are probably not work after upgraded.

For Ubuntu 13.10 Saucy:

A rebuild of the Debian sid rhythmbox v3.0 package has been created and updated to fossfreedom PPA. It works great!

Before installing it, press Ctrl+Alt+T on your keyboard to open terminal. Remove the default installation:

sudo apt-get purge rhythmbox rhythmbox-plugins

Then run below commands one by one:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:fossfreedom/rhythmbox
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install rhythmbox

For Ubuntu 13.04 Raring:

After removed the default installation, run below commands to install Rhythmbox v3.0 from Jacob’s PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jacob/media

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install rhythmbox