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Re:A simple, clean and cross-platform music player by WalterBright on Sunday November 13, 2022 @08:09PM (#33589139)
All I ask of a music player is to give it a directory with all the music files in it, and then say "play shuffle". That's it.

Sadly, the only player which will do that is Microsoft Media Player. All the others suffer from one fault or another which causes it to fail:

1. requires installing some third party "server" because sharing the directory isn't enough. The "server" then proceeds to consume all the resources of your computer, regardless of whether it is serving or not. I presumed it was trying to copy all my files to the NSA. What else would it be doing with disk drive light on all the time? for days?

2. does not look at subdirectories. Your music all has to be in one top-level folder.

3. randomly hangs and scrambles its music database (better keep a backup!)

4. hangs if you have more than some undisclosed number of music files

5. if you have more than some undisclosed number of music files, it only plays the first N files

6. displays the bit rate of the file being played. Does not display the name, artist, or album.

7. hangs if the USB stick is a large capacity one

I've tried PC software, Linux software, two different Roku media players (including the default one), 4 different internet radios that promised to play media files from a USB device

So what do I use? Microsoft Media Player.

Re:A simple, clean and cross-platform music player by livindub on Sunday November 13, 2022 @08:20PM (#33589200)
Have you looked at foobar2k yet? https://www.foobar2000.org/
Re:A simple, clean and cross-platform music player by gary_0 on Monday November 14, 2022 @12:12PM (#33597309)
It's nicely bare-bones. I drag my music folder into it, hit Sort > Randomize, hit play, minimize to tray. Then music comes out.
Re:A simple, clean and cross-platform music player by WalterBright on Sunday November 13, 2022 @08:12PM (#33589152)
The only one that actually worked was the Turtle Beach Audiotron, until they went out of business which bricked it, because naturally the device was designed to phone home to Turtle Beach and crash if nobody picked up, even to play local music files.
Re:A simple, clean and cross-platform music player by pritambaral on Sunday November 13, 2022 @10:25PM (#33589916)
I've used mpd since my early college years, often in shuffle mode. Always works. None of the issues you describe.

I'm also confident VLC should work, but I haven't tried it for this purpose (because mpd never gave me a reason to), and I'm sure you've tried that already.

Re:A simple, clean and cross-platform music player by WalterBright on Monday November 14, 2022 @12:33AM (#33590482)
Heck, Roku doesn't even work. They've sold what, a million of those Roku boxes? For years? And their !@#$%^&* music player does not work, and never has.

I think it was VLC on Ubuntu that would randomly delete or corrupt its music database. I kept having to rebuild it. The VLC support people told me I was just imagining this :-/

I don't bother filing bug reports anymore on any product (other than D Foundation things), as never in 40 years has that ever produced a positive result. Open source, closed source, makes no difference. I just complain on HN :-)

Re:A simple, clean and cross-platform music player by mdrzn on Monday November 14, 2022 @05:05AM (#33592027)
Winamp?
Re:A simple, clean and cross-platform music player by yuhc on Tuesday November 15, 2022 @04:56AM (#33607237)
Bro there aren't many players that can't do this... This is a fundamental feature of tens of standalone music players. You just need to explore more than Roku or any other streaming service.
Re:A simple, clean and cross-platform music player by zeruch on Sunday November 20, 2022 @01:58PM (#33684001)
I'd say either VLC or Musicolet let you do that as well.