Rhythmbox still plays songs after exit

This is intentionally the default behaviour: allowing you to minimise ("close") Rhythmbox and control it from the Sound menu.

To work around this you need to "quit" Rhythmbox by selecting File->Quit in the menu, or using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Q.

Related Question:

• Is there a plugin for Rhythmbox to exit on close?

Command-line Way

Try this command on terminal to close rhythmbox immediately,

sudo kill $(ps aux | awk '$11=="rhythmbox"{print $2}')

It's an one way of killing rhythmbox using it's process id(pid).

With some applications, typically media players, they run in the background unless you quit the application. Whenever it is open, use File > Quit or Ctrt+Q. They typically run in indicators on your panel. This is so that instead of closing when you want to clean your desktop, they keep playing.

I know that Clementine and Audacious stop playing when you hit the "x" button. Maybe you should try those players instead.

It seems that there is much disagreement and flip/flopping on how the close-window, (x) button, etc. does/should work in Rhythmbox. In fact both behaviors have been reported as bugs on several occasions for various reasons. This one claims close == hide, while this one claims close == quit. Whatever the case, I think the functionality should be configurable so it's up to the user to change it.

After reading around through bug reports, I think that's exactly how it's supposed to work. If you read this comment in the above-mentioned bug, the poster claims the behavior can be turned on/off by enabling/disabling the Status Icon plugin:

1. open Rhythmbox
2. Edit > Plugins
3. scroll to the end of the list and find the entry marked "Status Icon"
4. deselect "Status Icon"
5. close the window

I tried this on my system (Ubuntu v10.10, Rhythmbox v0.13.1) and it did not work. Back wading through the bug reports it seems there was a patch applied to fix an indicator-application compatibly issue that broke the Status Icon plugin behavior. I am no longer 100% sure what the current status is on all this, but I think the above procedure should work.

Indeed, toggling this behavior in Banshee is a very similar process, which actually works.

Go to the sound icon in the top bar and stop / pause from there (under volume control you have player control) , or close it while window visible from the file menu.

This is still not fixed in Ubuntu 20.04, and there are several bug reports about it, among which the ones previously mentioned here, and also this one.

The simple way to stop it is

pkill rhythmbox

Or you can restart it, and select "Stop & Quit" in the menu.

After that, I definitely solved the problem with

sudo apt purge rhythmbox

:-)