I've been using Quodlibet to play my music for more than a day now. Normally I don't care much about music players, since most of the time I just click on the "Play" button and hide it. However Rhythmbox has been crashing a bit too much for me since I upgraded to the yet-to-be-released Ubuntu Dapper. Quodlibet is also gstreamer-based, and unlike rhythmbox, is written in python. It's a little tricky to install it at a place other than /, but it can be done.

Also found out about ReplayGain, which is a mechanism that Quodlibet uses to do volume normalization a la iTunes. I've been looking for a way to do that under Linux forever, without knowing that Rhythmbox supports it. A couple minutes in #quodlibet and some googling tells me that I need to use other programs, for example metaflac, to generate the ReplayGain tags that Quodlibet and Rhythmbox use to adjust the volume.

The version of Rhythmbox in Dapper also let me find out how crappy EasyTag is when dealing with UTF-8 tags, but Quodlibet can edit tags too, so EasyTag is gone from my computer.

I do lose the nice notification bubbles that Rhythmbox shows whenever a song is played, but I can live without those.