Better music player?

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

WetGeek

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.

Mascaret

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!

GuzziPhil

niobleoum

I like Lollypop too. It handles my 800+ album very well.
Doesn't do tag editing so I use Kid3 for that.

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