I'm using Rhythmbox, and never had it lock on me. If I did, it's usually a sound device handling issue, but that's more a pulse issue than it. That's been a long while.

I started using Banshee, which is imho a better clone of Rhythmbox, but far more buggy. It does some nicer things like showing you band wiki's, but otherwise I tend to like the UI better in general, when it works. Why I'm using Rhythmbox again currently...

I don't really do "playlists", I just have a filer subdirectory of various sorted formats of music, and these do a good job of indexing and searching based on whatever id3 tag data. If rhythmbox is being weird, try banshee. If Banshee is weird, try rhythmbox. If both are being weird, try vlc.

Another option I've used you might consider is my logitech media server as my catalog and player on my filer, that I use with various squeeze player setups around my house already with a squeeze client receiver on my desktop too making it an endpoint to play out to. It's normally meant as a home room audio distribution ala sonos and various commercial setups, but open, and uses either compatible hardware or software players with a nice web UI or tons of phone apps available for control you might like.

You can install the receiver client (server too even) on your desktop, and use a browser to play playlists from a webpage or phone app playlists or an indexed catalog. This comes with the benefit you can duplicate/sync your music in other rooms, or the whole house where you have players connected to your network. My pioneer living room receiver with ethernet shows up as an endpoint to play music to even in the lms server (volume control even!), otherwise I have a bunch of obsolete android phones with a squeeze client around my house powering various speakers in rooms that do audio, or some raspberry pi's, but a desktop receiver client works on linux and I presume windoze too.

It has good playlist support to trigger across any number of linked receivers if you use them I hear (my buddy is a reformed apple person duplicated my setup, but does playlists).

HTH!

-mb

On Sat, Mar 3, 2018 at 5:58 PM, Victor Odhner <vodhner@cox.net> wrote:

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

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