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.
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 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?
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..
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 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.
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 I can instead spend my efforts on solving the frequent re-scanning issue
It turns out that frequently re-scanning isn't an issue. The default conditions for the Elisa settings are like so:
For a long time, I left all those defaults in place. I'm now pretty sure that it's the Keep running in system tray ... setting that causes the problems.
If I turn that OFF, I can shut down the app and restart it numerous times without losing the loaded collection. The gear icon spins for a while, but it's just a quick scan to see whether anything has changed. It's not adding any tracks, because I haven't ripped any new CDs. It did remove some "Unknown" albums that I'd deleted in Dolphin, which tells me what its purpose is. As the menu item says, it's refreshing the library -- adding any newly ripped albums to Elisa and removing any that have been deleted.
On the other hand, if I leave that setting turned ON, and reboot while Elisa is running in the system tray, when it is once again running in its window, its album list is empty. The refresh operation needs to import all the tracks to Elisa.
Turning that feature OFF is not a big issue. I have no reason to ever leave Elisa running in the system tray, especially if doing that causes such a problem.
Well, I may pass for a stubborn fan of mpd.
If I'm not wrong, mpd will scan every codec supported by ffmpeg. Microsoft's proprietary wma included.
Mpd builds a database and sends data via alsa, pulseaudio, pipewire, snapcast, .. whatever!
It's a server only. No interface whatsoever. You need a CLI or a graphical client.
Music players often (most of all) try to retain both aspects (client/server). The result is lack of flexibility. At the very least in my opinion.
The only drawback : there are many howtos around mpd BUT, actually, there is a steep learning curve behind (at least for me - I'm not a geek, just a user with reasonable goals).
Once it's installed and working, the advantages are unprecedented : speed, quality (Lo-Fi or Hi-Fi pushed to its limits) and portability.
Clients : Malp on android, cantata with linux (and windows but unmaintained - although it works).
Well, it's very 'linux' : powerful but not friendly (requires some investment).
But I'm totally convinced it's worth it.
If you install 'Cantata' with solus, mpd is considered as a dependency (which I consider wrong) and will be installed.
You have to configure mpd (mainly, a matter of specifying the location of music files) and launch it (via systemctl). Then Cantata will connect to the mpd server (be it local or remote) and fetch its database.
Give a try (but expect some time to get it working - but once it's done, you won't find a more powerful setup).
Have a nice week-end!
in case of emergency