I’m using Clementine to keep playlists, playing songs one at a time.

(I have migrated from my Mac Mini because it’s vintage 2009, out of support. I looked for a newer Mac Mini but the newest model is five years old. I went to Linux because I don’t trust Apple or Microsoft not to jerk us around, and I want to have a pretty stable 10-year solution. Of course it was cheaper too, but that wasn’t the main issue.

What I want: When running an event, we step through all of the songs in a single playlist. Songs are played in order, stopping after each one.

What I *don’t* need in a music player is what seem to be the most popular features:
  Ability to play a whole playlist as a unit, or at random;
  Access to download from music sources; and,
  Flashy graphics, or album and performer information.

Clementine is very popular and has behaved consistently for me. It lacks *any* real documentation except lots of discussions, mostly about features that aren’t important to me. There’s one “full discussion” that should be part of the installation but I don’t see it. I’ll keep digging through these conversations.

Does anyone know of a player that is (a) very stable [like Clementine], and (b) documented ?

I tried Rhythmbox, but it kept freezing on me. Apparently that’s a known problem.
Rhythmbox apparently has no way to stop after a song if other songs are inline, so that was another deal-breaker.
But I can thank Rhythmbox for leading me to an iTunes playlist converter. No other music players seem ready to import playlist data. Rhythmbox imported it initially but I had to bail due to freezes. But I still have that conversion file, and was able to produce a nice text file that we can search for history. (Newer versions of iTunes do not produce XML conversion data, but mine was a little older so the file was there.)

Current problems I’m working with Clementine are:

It says X-ing a tab for a saved playlist will delete the playlist because it’s not a “Favorite,” but doesn’t tell us how to make it a favorite. The red heart at the bottom doesn’t do it. These are saved files. Our first attempt saved a playlist that we can hide without deleting, even though I see no indicator that it is a “favorite,” but the next two are “not a favorite”. I’ll continue to read all discussions I can find.

We can only mark one song at a time to stop at the end. Once it stops after a song, that flag is removed. So their whole concept of a playlist is start it and it plays through. I’d like to mark a whole playlist to stop at the end of a song. This problem is liveable.

Thanks,

Victor