Ubuntu – What does Rhythmbox do the first time it is run

rhythmbox

Background: I have never used Rhythmbox on this computer.

I just accidentally opened Rhythmbox while my MP3 player was plugged in. Without asking me or explaining what it was doing it started "Importing…" with high disk IO activity in my home folder. I exited the program to stop it, but not before it reached about 30% completion.

What did it just do?

I cannot find any documentation of this behavior on the Rhythmbox website or the Ubuntu Community Documentation.

Update: It occurred to me that the IO activity I saw on my home folder might just be coincidental, if Rhythmbox defaults to scanning my home folder when it is first run. I found this in its Preferences screen:

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Does this help explain what Rhythmbox was doing? If it's relevant, I do not have Music folder in my home folder.

Best Answer

I don't think that Rhythmbox copies music files from MP3-players if the user hasn't told it to do so.

What you saw was Rhythmbox scanning your Music folder. It is default behaviour of Rhythmbox to watch that directory and make sure all music files in that directory are in its music library. It doesn't move or remove or import any music files, it just adds files in your Music folder to the library, so you can play the songs through Rhythmbox.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Rhythmbox isn’t seeing all of the music files

I had a similar problem with Rhythmbox. I don't have nearly the number of files you have, but it was not seeing new files or changed files. I did the following:

In Preferences --> Music, I unchecked "Watch my Library for new files".
Completely closed Rhythmbox (important).
Renamed the rhythmbox database - ~/.local/share/rhythmbox/rhythmdb.xml
Started up Rhythmbox and checked "Watch my Library for new files".
It started checking my collection and found everything.

It seems that my problem was an issue with the configuration file. I had reinstalled Rhythmbox, but had not done a complete uninstall. This left a corrupted configuration file in my Rhythmbox sub-directory. You may want to try this if it's possible that you have a corrupted configuration file.

Ubuntu – How does one clear the Rhythmbox music library database

Close Rhythmbox and delete the Rhythmbox database in ~/.local/share/rhythmbox/rhythmdb.xml.

If you also want Rhythmbox to forget your library paths (the directories where it automatically looks for music), then you need to delete them from dconf:

gsettings set org.gnome.rhythmbox.rhythmdb locations "['file:///dev/null']"

You can then set new paths in the Rhythmbox GUI, under Edit -> Preferences -> Music.

(Note that

gsettings reset org.gnome.rhythmbox.rhythmdb locations

does not work correctly, since then Rhythmbox tries to be "smart" and uses your home directory as a default value. Using /dev/null above prevents this; alternatively you could directly set the library paths using gsettings set).

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Rhythmbox isn’t seeing all of the music files

Ubuntu – How does one clear the Rhythmbox music library database

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