Sad state of music playing on FC4

[Paul Michael Reilly]

Having just done a fresh install of FC4 (with subsequent update) to my
Thinkpad laptop I moved on to try out the Gnome recommended Music
Player, aka Rythmbox.

In this sad tale, the first attempt was to have Firefox visit an m3u
file on my music server.  Things got off to a good start as the first
of thousands of songs started playing.  Awesome.  After the first song
... nothing.  Hmmm.  I used the very nice little panel applet to
select play and the next random song started playing.  Then when it
was done ... nothing again.  Eventually a popup complained about an
"unexpected end of stream".  Googling turns up no similar behaviors
nor any clues as to what's going on.  OK, so Rythmbox is not ready for
prime time.  Back to xmms.  xmms handles the m3u as expected.  No
problems.  But I sure like docking the xmms controls into the panel.
Imagine my chagrin when I learn that FC4 and docking xmms controls are
not happening (please, please tell me I'm wrong and what I missed and
how to do it!).

Rhythmbox was singularly disappointing for an heir apparent to the
Fedora/Gnome Music Player throne.  I found it very unintuitive and
amazingly short on functionality, not to mention lack of robustness.
I have a hunch that my m3u file format is not to Rhythmbox's liking
but I'll be damned if I can figure out what it is looking for.  Feel
free to reference or suggest the format that it expects for streaming
songs from a music server.

Thanks,

-pmr