I have an old netbook recycled as an mp3 player for my shop. It provides line-in to a Bose Wave II radio. Audio wise the setup works and I have my 400+ album collection available. However... in an attempt to simplify the operation my setup I have:

installed Ubuntu Mate 15.04 as the OS
installed audacious 3.5 as the player (Rhythmbox has an issue with mp3 file)
created a user account "disk_jockey" with minimal permissions
setup the netbook to autologin disk_jockey
added audacious to disk_jockey's startup application lists as set power management to shut down when lid is closed

In theory I can open the lid and press the power button. The netbook should boot up (it does) and login as disk_jockey (it does) and then audacious should load (it does) and begin to play where it left off on my playlist (this does not work).

If I configure audacious File; Settings; Playlist; [X] Continue playback on startup it seems to work.

Which brings up a question... What is the --play option (per the the man page " If currently playing, go to the beginning of the song; otherwise, begin playing.") supposed to do?

I also find that using the settings approach works to some degree. However, after several bootups and shutdowns it will become stuck on a random track and will always start back on that track. In thinking about my experiences I have had this happen when trying to play a playlist sequentially. I do not see any bugs which sound like this - guess I will need to file one.

Can anyone tell me if I am on target with my approach or am I missing something? A better player option perhaps?

TIA,

Ken

I decided that the --play option was a bug. I created an account at the Audacious project manager site and began to document the bug. I was testing on a VMWare virtual machine which reproduced the bug nicely. Until... I changed from autologin to manual login. Now Audacious works as I expect.

I am going to put this boondoggle on hold for a little while as I have a workaround on the netbook - press the power button which is configured to "suspend" and it does. Press it again and it resumes and keeps playing - so far, just fine. I will try to get back to this in the next couple of days.

If anyone has any suggestions/input I would still be very happy to hear.

Thanks,

Ken

do you have some mechanism in place that shuts audacious down gracefully before you logout/shutdown? so it can actually remember the current song, write whatever it needs to write?

adding some delay (maybe 5s after automatically starting the Xserver, slightly less before shutting down) might also help.

I don't understand this? You could have Bought Other Sound Equipment, saved money, and had better sound quality.

Thanks ondoho,

In fact, I am simply doing a shutdown via the power button - which is configured to shut down when pressed. I was relying on the Linux shutdown process to close programs gracefully - as it usually seems to do. The suspend/resume process I am using now is working fine so I will stick with it for the time being.

OK 273 you asked for an explanation

When I built my shop 20+ years ago I purchased a small Sony "ghetto blaster" or boom box sort of stereo. I just wanted some music in the shop, not high end sound - I have Sennheiser and Beyerdynamic cans for that. The little Sony worked for many years. When it quit I tried two replacement boxes. One would not tune and the other would not show what frequency it was tuned to or some such rubbish. When I went to return the second one I said @#$% it, I will buy a Bose. I picked up the refurbished Bose for a good price and it has served well for several years.

The problem is - sort of like broadcast TV - 2057 channels and nothing but crap (and commercials). The only station which plays music I like 1) has only about 150 songs in its library I think and 2) follows a "40 minute commercial free rock block" with a 60 minute music free commercial block. I have been tempted many times to throw the Bose out the door - regardless of whether the door is open

I tried using my pocket mp3 player but it did not have enough power to drive the Bose. I do not have a CD player on the Bose, I do not have room in my shop for what I have in there, much less 400 CDs and I do not want to expose my CD collection to the shop environment. The netbook was available, it was an interesting project and the sound is not bad - especially just for background music in my shop. Anything else I can explain?

Ken

A headphone preamp might help your mp3 player power the bose. While giving you a mono button and a mute button and additional outputs if you have additional speakers. Lots of options depending on how much you want to throw at the project.

My setup is basically an hp stream 11 (laptop) $200, a used m-audio mobile pre $100, an hp4 presonus headphone preamp $100, and every pc speaker set that came with every computer ever. Plus an old 150W stereo that drives two magnapans which I sometimes turn on. It sounds pretty good and scales in volume and power usage depending on the activities of the day. A couple powered usb hubs help for those pc speaker sets powered by USB. Or a modern surge protector with usb jacks meant to charge phones and such.

i don't know, your setup seems to be working nicely, the only problem i can see right now is that it doesn't resume the playlist properly after shutdown/reboot?

about shutting down gracefully - yes, the linux system is shut down gracefully, meaning it takes care that your system will boot properly next time.
that doesn't include applications.
anyhow, not sure if that's what's happening...
have you tried other music players?
have you tried mpd + ncmpcpp on a non-graphical install? that would be cool, all the netbook's resources go to playing music and no X-server.
(honestly ubuntu mate doesn't strike me as the right distro for this sort of project, i think i'd rather go for a debian netinstall)

Thanks Shadow_7,

I had considers a headphone amp - but then I would probably rather use that with my headphones - and I would have to remember to bring the player to the shop or back to the house when I wanted to use the cans. As it is I have used stuff I already had and after a few startup issues I am good to go for a while.

Thanks ondoho,

Using the suspend/resume approach I am good to go. At the end of the day I exit Audacious and Caja (aka Nautilus) and shut down the computer. In the morning I boot the computer, Audacious loads on the left half of the screen and Caja on the right half. Audacious starts playing where it left off and Caja is pointed to my mp3 library. When I get tired of the current play list - usually played in shuffle mode - I zap it and drag some different albums from the library. It meets the need.

As to the distro... The computer is a Dell Latitude 2100 - sort of a sub-laptop or netbook - was intended for the education market. I purchased it from the Dell Outlet back in 2009 while I was waiting for my i7-860 desktop to finally ship. The 2100 came with Ubuntu 9.04 installed which, with a total price of about $225 US was the main selling point. It ran great with its Atom processor, 1GB of RAM and a 16 GB SSD. It has since been upgraded to 2 GB RAM and a 60 GB SSD. The original SSD is now the boot/OS drive in my Poweredge 16 TB server. I have run Ubuntu 10.04, 12.04 with gnome-fallback and most recently Ubuntu-Mate 14.04 and 15.04 on the little toy computer. Works fine and thus it was installed when I started this project.

Platyback is fine and I am not doing anything else with the computer at the time - it just serves as a juke box. I did some testing when I first purchased the 2100 - running some video transcoding. The i7-860 of course left it in the dust but it did give my old Pentium 4 a run for its money. A very impressive little toy.

Thanks again to all who have provided input.

Ken