After what seems like months of waiting, a usable version of rhythmbox is finally in Debian sarge.

One problem I did have with it is that it uses gstreamer0.8 which at present can only be configured via gconf-editor — confusingly the gstreamer-properties command would only configure version 0.6 as I now appear to have two versions of gstreamer installed on my system. Anyway, I fired up gconf-editor, went to system / gstreamer / 0.8 / default, changed the value for audiosink to esdsink and all now works nicely.