Better music player?

WetGeek

I love the way Strawberry works ... almost. My problem with it, and others that I've tried, is when it comes to finding something within my music collection.

If I'd like to hear Dvorak's 8th Symphony, for example, I can never find it among the D's in the listing. Or if I'm looking for Tchaikovsky's violin concerto, I can't find it under T. I have to try to remember either the orchestra's name, or the conductor's name, and check to see whether it's under one of those. My music collection currently contains 254 folders, so it can take a long time to find what I'm looking for.

Sometimes I think it might be easeir to just play music from YouTube, but I prefer to limit my Google exposure when I can.

Does anyone know of a music player that has a good search feature, that will allow me to look for an artist, composer, album, conductor, or symphony? Or something close to that? Extra points if that's not its only good feature.

brent

I spent a year testing my limited skills and modest music collection with every single music player in our repo
While some are skimpy, and some don't render, and some are bloated larger then life...I must confess I did not see any music player that was lacking in the indexing department--that's what you are asking about. Looking back I never thought one was bad about that and artist/genres could be called up pretty easy, as well as title. I used Strawberry a few months and did not notice this shortcoming, but I could be not remembering.
(After a year of serious tryouts, I settled on the modest gmusic player.)

WetGeek

brent I did not see any music player that was lacking in the indexing department

Maybe I'm just not finding the searcch feature in these things?

mpiekp

Elisa is fantastic, just use the search function to find your tracks. If you cant see search, press ctrl and f. I have 60gb's of music it finds them all no problems. It's even a fuzzy search so partial matches are shown and lightning fast.

WetGeek

mpiekp

Hmmm .... I'd forgotten about Elisa. I found it on my laptop, and it's on my media machine as well, but I haven't looked at it for a long time, for some reason. When I just tried it on the laptop, it was unable to load any music from my collection, though that NAS share is easy to browse on Dolphin, so it should be visible to any application.

If I go to the "Refresh" item in the menu, it seems to start, and the gear icon spins for about 4 seconds, then stops and nothing has been added. Done that several times, then I reinstalled Elisa, and nothing changed. I checked Elisa on the media machine, and the same thing happened there. Raspberry saw and loaded the entire library on that computer, so I know it's present and available.

Solarmass

Tauon Music Box user here! 🙂
You can enter to the Search mode just by starting typing (Ctrl+F also works). But I don't use Search very often.

https://github.com/Taiko2k/TauonMusicBox (it's available as Flatpak)

brent

WetGeek I think the other two posters have it with ctrl+f for the detailed search. I loved the thumbnails and I always thought I freedom to re-order those in Strawb if I remembered right.

WetGeek

brent I think the other two posters have it with ctrl+f

Yeah, I tried Ctrl+F in Strawberry, and it opened a box near the top of the screen for input, but I haven't seen anything about names or categories. I'll need to play with that a bit more. Strawberry, at least, found and loaded my music library. Elisa has great search features, based on its UI, but so far I haven't been able to get any music into it.

brent

WetGeek that's why I call them auditions😉

WetGeek

Got it! When I found the location to load music from in Elisa, it was set to my /home music directory, where I never put anything. I pointed it to /mnt/Music, and it's now loaded 4,000+ tracks and still going.

Since Elisa has the indexing I need to find what I'm looking for, this one is now solved. Thanks for everyone's input.

brent

WetGeek /mnt/Music? makes sense. most of these things do default to home/music (where I keep my music). Enjoy Elisa!

WetGeek

brent /mnt/Music?

The /mnt folder is where my NAS shares are mounted. There's /mnt/Music, /mnt/Videos, /mnt/Pictures, and so on.

WetGeek

Aw, fsck! I spoke too soon. After all that apparent success with Elisa, I put in my bluetooth earbuds, and tried to select something to listen to in Elisa. But there was nothing there. So I checked the menu again, and the source location was again set to /home/jerry/Misic. And just /home/jerry/Music, where I never keep any music.

So I tried adding /mnt/Music again and again, but every time I close Configure Elisa... and open it again, the library is set back to /home/jerry/Music. It doesn't matter whether I press [Apply] or [OK] after setting the new location, it just doesn't remain set. Once I leave the menu and return, it's reverted.

I have no idea what happened to all that stuff I saw refreshed a while ago. None of it is present anymore.

nathanpainchaud

WetGeek If that's your only issue with Elisa, maybe you could try creating a soft link from the music folder in your home directory to your mounted directory, like this: ln -s /mnt/Music /home/jerry. A warning though that I'm pretty sure you have to delete /home/Jerry/Music before for it work (otherwise it'll complain that a folder of the same name already exists).

At least that's how I handle having my data (e.g. music, documents, etc.) on a separate drive while still being accessible from the home directory so that I don't have to manually configure various programs that default to searching in the home directory.

synth-ruiner

nathanpainchaud yeah, that's the way I did it too. worked well for me except that the symlinked folder doesn't appear in the sidebar in Nautilus anymore

WetGeek

nathanpainchaud try creating a soft link from the music folder in your home directory to your mounted directory,

Thanks, I'll give that a try if nothing else works (e.g., I've made some kind of boneheaded error somewhere).

WetGeek

nathanpainchaud I'm pretty sure you have to delete /home/Jerry/Music before for it work (otherwise it'll complain that a folder of the same name already exists).

it didn't take me long to decide to try this. I did delete the Music folder in the /home directory, and after I created the symlink, it again shows up in Dolphin, with the same name, and with contents identical to those on the Music share. I'm tempted to do the same thing with Documents, Pictures, etc. I never use any of those, either.

Elisa is once again importing lots of music. Now ... if it'll just stay imported, I'll be happy.

WetGeek

So far, so good. I'm now listening to Hungarian Dances, and so far everything seems to have stayed where it was put.

WetGeek

@nathanpainchaud : I want to thank you for encouraging me to make this change. I've known for a long time that hard and symbolic links exist in Linux, and what they do, but just never had any reason to use them for anything. This turned out to be a good reason! I've linked everything in my /home directory to its counterpart in /mnt, and it's working wonderfully.

The shares that are not originally part of /home (like Backups, ISOs, and so on) aren't showing up in Dolphin's list, but if I open the /home folder in Dolphin, they're there. And, of course, they show up in an ls command in the terminal.

Now that I've used links here, I'll probably find other reasons to use them elsewhere. Thanks again.

WetGeek

WetGeek Now that I've used links here, I'll probably find other reasons to use them elsewhere.

For sure! I've modified four of our seven Solus Plasma machines so far, linking the original folders in /home to their counterparts in the NAS shares. And I discovered that if I modified the Panels settings in the Dolphin menu, I could get it to display everything just the way I want it.

Now, applications that save output to default folders in the /home folder don't need to be changed after installation. Browsers, for example, will now save downloads to the right place, without changing their default setting. Screen shots saved to the default Pictures folder will now be stored on the Pictures NAS share. I wish I'd made this change long ago -- it only takes 3 or 4 minutes per computer.

zmaint

Audacious. Especially if you liked winamp.