Better music player?

brent

infinitymdm Credit for that to martpie on GitHub and the other contributors.

I had no cash to give but I did email him (via museeks.io) to tell him I like and use his creation. I feel I don't do that enough.

PaperTiger

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.

synth-ruiner

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.

WetGeek

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?

brent

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.

WetGeek

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.

brent

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.

WetGeek

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?

brent

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.

Mascaret

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.

WetGeek

@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.

brent

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.

infinitymdm

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. 🤷‍♂️

WetGeek

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.

WetGeek

brent they would constantly duplicate and double many selections for no discernible reason.

I had an instance of this happening, too, but it turned out to be explainable. Elisa showed four folders for Toby Keith's 35 Greatest Hits, which was actually a two CD set. When I checked the folders with Dolphin, I found out that I'd indeed accidentally ripped the two CDs twice I deleted the second instances of both, and problem solved.

brent

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

WetGeek

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

That's a very good point. In the earleir years of my collection, like most folks, I used Windows exclusively, so a lot of my collection was stored like these, from a Sound of Music album.

That's an obvious deal-breaker for me. It looks like I'd better hang onto Elisa after all. To not be able to play most of the early parts of my library would be intolerable, to say the least. I don't know if the real total would reach 6K+, but it would necessarily be much higher than 925 if Microsoft formats were left out. I didn't start recording using OGG-Vorbis until I started ripping with Linux.

What a sad development this is.

WetGeek

WetGeek I'm tending towards adopting Museeks as our #1 music player.

Well, that didn't last long. After spending hours fussing with this issue, I've decided to -- for now -- just change to my first love, Elisa, as our #1 music player. I can instead spend my efforts on solving the frequent re-scanning issue. I suspect that Museeks may one day include support for .wma files, but Elisa already does, and those are a huge part of my collection.

Converting thousands of .wma files to .mp3 files would double their total size without providing any quality improvements that I could detect. In other words, no upside. Converting them to .flac files would make them 9 or 10 times larger, based on the two that I've converted. It's just not realistic to convert them (and lose metadata in the bargain).

So, I'm done with this for now. Thanks for everyone's input. Unless Elisa really offends me in some way, it's once again our go-to application for playing music.

WetGeek

WetGeek What a sad development this is.

Due to the ubiquity of Windows systems, I'd wager a good bit that a serious number of CDs have been ripped into .wav files. It might be that Museek will add .wav to its list of supported formats some day. The fact that every other music player I've used will display and play them leads me to believe that supporting libraries already exist for Linux. Maybe in one of our updates?

Elisa's count of 6,532 tracks divided by 262 folders in the library results in 25 tracks per albun as an average. That still seems like a high average to me, but the 925 tracks that Museeks identified is only 3.5 tracks per album, which seems rediculously low. Even symphony albums that have four movements nearly always include filler pieces that bring the count to double that or more.

So, Elisa's count seems high, but Museeks' count seems a bit low. Which one should I believe, I wonder?

Mascaret

I only use flac to keep things coherent and "HIFI".
Else, convert your audio files with FFMPEG.
See : https://askubuntu.com/questions/508278/how-to-use-ffmpeg-to-convert-wma-to-mp3-recursively-importing-from-txt-file
Best is to stick to a few well known codecs and avoid all proprietary or uncommon formats..

WetGeek

Mascaret Best is to stick to a few well known codecs and avoid all proprietary or uncommon formats

Great advice, but it comes a few decades too late for me. I'm not sure that I'm ready to convert everything to mp3 files until I've done more research into it, but I did create a file listing all my .wma files. There are 5,517 lines (tracks) in that list So, now I'm a lot more convinced that Eliza's count of 6,532 tracks for the total collection is probably the correct one. And Miseeks accesses only a small part of my collection.

Thanks for your reply. I've found it very useful.

brent

WetGeek have done that as well. Glad you got Elisa mostly dialed in. You Museek in the wings🙂in case of emergency

« Previous Page