(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