**Rhythmbox 3.5.0 is out and it now lets you sync podcast subscriptions and listening progress across apps – the standout feature in the music player’s first major release in nine months. **

A new podcast plugin ties into the gpodder.net API so your subscriptions and play counts carry over between Rhythmbox and other compatible clients via a self-hosted sync server like oPodSync or PinePods.

The podcasts page itself is has also undergone a refresh, with the episode list now showing what you’ve already listened so you’re not ending up with a sense of deja vu. The v3.5.0 changelog also notes that podcast update notifications were redesigned too.

Lyrics see attention in Rhythmbox 3.5.0. The Song Lyrics plugin pulls from lrclib.net by default and the player can read lyrics from .lrc files kept with tracks or embedded in an .ogg file (though the latter needs GStreamer 1.25.90 or newer).

Perhaps the biggest change is one you won’t notice.

Rhythmbox 3.4.9 was released late last year and quietly introduced support for a ‘multistream’ player backend. That’s enabled by default in 3.5.0, replacing xfade.

Why the change?

Modernity, mainly.

The xfade backend built one audio pipeline and mixed tracks together itself if crossfade was enabled. Multistream runs each track through its own pipeline and lets modern sound systems like PipeWire or PulseAudio handle it, which they’re much better at.

Plus, the offloading to the system sound server means less code for Rhythmbox to maintain (or be clobbered with speculative AI security reports over).

Beyond those changes, Rhythmbox 3.5.0 also fixes 32-bit time handling for the notorious “2038” issue, fixes a few errant issues and tweaks some of it packaging metadata.

Want to try it out? You can build Rhythmbox 3.5.0 from source – though it is failing for me on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS – or, for less hassle, you can install a Flatpak build from Flathub. The Flatpak is unverified right now, but that could change shortly.

A reminder to Ubuntu users that upstream Rhythmbox looks a little different to the version available in the repos, as the distro applies some UI modifications to make it better match the rest of the desktop.