module proposal: Rhythmbox

[Colin Walters <walters gnome org>]

Hi,

I would like to see Rhythmbox as part of GNOME 2.6.  I think the latest
development tree is finally approaching a point where I would feel
comfortable with widespread distribution.

Why should we include Rhythmbox?  Well, good support for digitial music
is increasingly something that people expect from their desktop.  We
already have nautilus-media, but Rhythmbox takes things a step farther
by making it extremely easy to browse and organize your music.  The
widespread success of iTunes is a good metric for the merits of this
approach.

I'm aware that saying "This other desktop does it" is not necessarily
viewed as a good reason for GNOME to do it, but just as a point of
comparison:
Apple has iTunes¹, Windows has Windows Media Player², and KDE will have
JuK³.  I think GNOME should have Rhythmbox⁴.

For people interested in evaluating Rhythmbox, you have two choices.
First, you can use the last released version, 0.5.3.  Apart from a slow
but large memory leak, it's relatively usable.

However our latest development version in CVS HEAD/arch --mainline is a
big leap forward in speed and stability, with just a few features
remaining to be implemented and a few bugs squished before it's ready to
be released as 0.6.0.

I expect we will be making the 0.6.0 release in approximately 2.5 weeks
or so, but since now is the time for new module proposals, I wanted to
start discussing it.

So, what say ye?

¹http://www.apple.com/itunes
²http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/windowsmediaplayer/getstarted/default.asp
³http://www.slackorama.net/cgi-bin/content.pl?juk
⁴http://web.rhythmbox.org/