infinitymdm Hopefully I will end my inquiries with you before this is a full-blown hijack. Any additional questions I will start my own thread.
2 developments:
1) I cannot get a song to play one right after another. Like an album, for instance. I only have two options: play same song in a forever loop, or shuffle. How to remedy?
2) Ignore metadata comments. What a difference a day and a reboot makes. I've been saying that since 2017 and still stunned by the celtic magic. Anyways it reads my album title/artist/track/etc now.
graci

      brent 1) I cannot get a song to play one right after another. Like an album, for instance. I only have two options: play same song in a forever loop, or shuffle. How to remedy?

      You'll want to add some tracks to a playlist or the queue.

      The queue is just the ordered list of upcoming tracks, FIFO style. You can see what's in your current queue by clicking on the little button to the left of the search bar.

      You can add songs to playlists by right clicking them from the main list. You'll probably need to create a playlist - that can be done from the right-click menu as well. Then you can head to the Playlists tab (star button at the bottom of the screen) to manage your created playlists.

      Usually, if I want to listen to a whole album, I'll double-click the first song to start playing, and then shift-click to select the other songs I want. Then I right click the selected group and add to queue. Sometimes I'll have some songs still enqueued from a previous listening session, so maybe I have to clear the queue first before adding what I want to hear to it.

      For the most part things are pretty intuitive in my opinion (but of course that's just my opinion and may not reflect your experience). If you have other questions though, feel free to start a new thread.

        ok with playlist star selected + double click album it all makes it to the playlist for album listening. but shuffles. Unclick the 'h' thing then click the loop button next to it gives me sequence. Everything is intuitive after you learn it🙂. I didn't even have to do the shift-click. That part solved!
        My mistake is assuming as I often do; other players I've played songs in sequence right out of queue bypassing the playlist creation.
        This is still simple and elegant. Thanks for maintaining this app and answering my questions. This is my new music player.
        edit/spell

          brent other players I've played songs in sequence right out of queue bypassing the playlist creation

          I'm pretty sure museeks does this too - if you have a clear queue, shuffle and loop off, and double click any song from the main list view, it will add all following songs to the queue.

          Oh, and don't give me too much credit for maintaining the package. That's the easy part - I just make sure it still builds after it gets a new release version. The hard part is actually making the software. Credit for that to martpie on GitHub and the other contributors.

              4 days later

              infinitymdm I just learned about this music player from your post, and I don't know how such a good app could have missed me. Over the years I've been searching for a minimalist music app, and hovered between Audacious and Rhythmbox. I've also tried many, many others and they just didn't tick the right boxes. Weird thing is that I've never heard of Museeks until I saw your post. This is possibly as close to perfect as I've gotten. The only thing I would probably request of the developers is to enable an option so that the columns displayed on the library page can be edited. Other than that, this player gives me life!

              Thanks for the recommendation.

                I spent years being annoyed with Rhythmbox because of the notifications, which I couldn't find any way to disable. today I found out that you can disable them - they're provided by a notifications plugin which is enabled by default, but can be disabled. I never would have guessed that, somehow.

                I might keep using cmus for the most part... we'll see.

                I think Elisa is just about perfect, but lately it's starting to annoy me. With 6,532 tracks in my music library, every time I start Elisa, it takes the time to "refresh" the library. Yeah, it reads all 6,532 of those every time I start it up. And in order to get "refresh" to work, I need to close Elisa and restart it, otherwise the gear icon just spins and nothing is loaded from the NAS.

                Does anyone know if there is a setting somewhere that I don't know about, that would get it to retain that informaton between sessions?

                  WetGeek I think all music players automatically run an indexer (it opens to populate from /home/music afaik)--maybe it's the quality of indexer? You might have to comb through settings trial and error. Only used Eliza once.

                      brent I think all music players automatically run an indexer (it opens to populate from /home/music afaik)--

                      Yep. I created a symbolic link from /mnt/Music to Music in my /home directory. I just opened Museeks to see if it had the same problem, and it doesn't. It opened up with a page full of Bee Gees tracks, something my wife was listening to a while ago. No need to go read the entire library.

                      File systems (on Windows, anyway, and I'd bet on Linux, too) are able to trigger something to happen when something in a folder has been added, updated, or deleted. That's the only time an entire music library needs to be updated, in my opinion. Certainly not every time a music player app is started.

                      I might just start using Museeks more often. Elisa just displays album covers, and that's fine if you know what album you're looking for and it's not one of 7 album covers that look exactly alike. Then you need to load each album to see if it's the one with what you're looking for. For example, I have a set of all 9 of Dvorak's sympnonies on 7 CDs, and their covers are identical. To find the symphony I want to listen to, I have to just start opening albums until I find it.

                      I kinda like Museeks' way of scanning through the albums and showing each ones contents at the same time. And I like being able to double-click the first track and have it play the rest of the album.

                        Oh those crazy Gibb brothers, lot of great songs.
                        Museeks does indeed populate right away. It's replaced my old music player.
                        Begs the question now because I might be full of FUD: do they all have indexers? maybe some are cache-driven.
                        https://www.ubuntudocs.com/elisa/
                        "Elisa is a simple user-friendly database-driven music player built on the KDE libraries. It scans your music libraries, either using it’s own indexer of KDEs Baloo indexer depending on the desktop environment (it works in any) and makes them searchable and browsable by album, artist, track and genre."
                        there's gotta be a setting to stop it from autoscanning library I would think.

                          brent It scans your music libraries, either using it’s own indexer of KDEs Baloo indexer depending on the desktop environment

                          Yep. An indexer makes it easier to find what you're looking for, once the library has been scanned (and indexed). My problem is that Elisa insists on scanning the library every time I start it. And if it's running in the system tray, I need to quit it and restart it before it'll do the scan. I don't know what causes it to forget everything and start over again.

                          EDIT: It just occurred to me that my NAS is a little Linux server with 4 10TB disks (HDDs) in it. Natually it's designed to spin down those disks when it's not being used for a while. And it spins them up again the next time it's accessed. Maybe that causes the link to be broken? Hmmm ... but if that's the answer, though, why doesn't it affect Museeks?

                              WetGeek An indexer makes it easier to find what you're looking for, once the library has been scanned (and indexed). My problem is that Elisa insists on scanning the library every time I start it.

                              I got that the first time. Does Elisa have a settings dialogue box?
                              spin up/spin down cycling on your raid is an interesting theory. Hopefully more POVs, its interesting.

                                Hello!
                                My grain of salt : Audacity for instant-on playing music.
                                But mostly mpd+cantata.
                                mpd runs on imx-6 (2 watts avg), fetches files on NAS via nfs (around 2TB of flac) and makes the collection available throughout the local net (actually 3 instances running for 3 users).
                                Having a library with 20+ years of additions, the metadata stored in .flac is not manageable (lacking, incorrect, etc.) and I have to resort to folder tree structure with my criterions on music styles.
                                Moreover, my goal is to : output to HiFi gear (via alsa) or else via pulseaudio to the other computers.
                                Sort of heavyweight but highly functional : the whole thing can be remotely managed with a phone or a tablet.

                                @brent ... I know you've used both Elisa and Museeks. Have you noticed a difference in the number of "tracks" they discover in your music library? When Elisa scans the library, its progress display indicates that it has found 6,532 tracks just before it finishes. That struck me as a surprising number, but I've been collecting music for more than 50 years, so I was willing to believe it despite being surprised. I even mentioned it here a time or two.

                                But Museeks only discovers 925 tracks when it refreshes the library. That makes much more sense to me, so I decided to check what Dolphin says about it.

                                Dolphin says there are 262 folders there, where (I assume) 1 folder = 1 CD that I've ripped to the library. The number of tracks obviously varies from CD to CD, but Museeks' count of 925 tracks seems far more believable to me.

                                Do you find a similar discrepancy between the track counts between these two music players? This makes me wonder WTF Elisa is finding 6,532 of when it scans the library.

                                  WetGeek the elephant in the room that I bit my tongue about and left out of all my conversations regarding linux music players was this: they would constantly duplicate and double many selections for no discernible reason. Two of the same album for many entries. I'd go look in my collection and there'd be one album. The music player often saw 2....🙁.
                                  I don't know if that's the reason for the discrepancy in your counts. I. too, could never get the same count between two players.
                                  Minimalist Museek has no such headaches so far.

                                      WetGeek I'd also like to add this bit of info, grabbed from the museeks readme:

                                      Supported formats: mp3, mp4, m4a/aac, flac, wav, ogg, 3gpp

                                      If some of your music is in some other format, that might be why it isn't showing up.

                                      Or the counts might just be wrong in Elisa. 🤷‍♂️

                                          infinitymdm this is valid. some of my music is not "mp3, mp4, m4a/aac, flac, wav, ogg, 3gpp" extensions I believe.

                                            brent Minimalist Museek has no such headaches so far.

                                            I'm tending towards adopting Museeks as our #1 music player. The more I use it, the more I learn that it does have features I originally didn't believe it had. I'm a guy, so I don't read directions. If I can't figure out how to get a program do something, it's tempting for me to believe that it just can't do it.

                                            I'll keep pretty Elisa in the menu, though, at least for a while. I do like its display of album covers. But for just about every other feature that the two applications share, I prefer Museeks' implementation.