Comment 3 for bug 210872

There is a configuration option in a GUI...just not the one you looked at. This is really a documentation problem. If someone turned the instructions I'm including here into a FAQ entry or something like that, I don't think there's any application change needed here. It's just really not obvious what to do.

The basic fix is to run gconf-editor and navigate to /apps/rhythmbox/ui where you'll find a checkbox for show_notifications exposed. Toggle that off and notifications go away.

Unfortunately, gconf-editor isn't available via the default Ubuntu menu structure either. You can fix that by System/Preferences/Main Menu, going into the System Tools section, and enabling "Configuration Editor". Now gconf-editor will be available with that name under Applications/System Tools.

So the all-GUI solution here is to edit the menus, add Configuration Editor, run Configuration Editor, navigate into the Rhythmbox UI section, and turn off show_notifications.

Alternately, the quick command-line workaround is to edit .gconf/apps/rhythmbox/ui/%gconf.xml and edit the line that looks like this:

<entry name="show_notifications" mtime="1242152894" type="bool" value="true"/>

so that the value is "false". That seems to work fine, but you don't have to do that manually and using the official editor tool would presumably be preferred.