i donated a fairly low spec laptop for a music night I'm helping a friend put on. we wanted something that wouldn't be a disaster if a beer got poured over it.
it's got 2GB of DDR2 RAM, and a single core 2.0GHz celeron mobile CPU, which is already the best CPU that the motherboard can take, unfortunately it can't take a dual core.
it's got linux mint 19.1 MATE 32-bit on it, and we use clementine music player. it's connected to a mixer with a behringer USB interface. I'd like to be able to fade between songs. i don't mean anything fancy involving a physical midi cross-fader, i literally just want to be able to hit a hotkey when i want it to fade into the next song. unfortunately, when i try to do this, maybe half the time the music just stops while it buffers the next track. I've tried playing around with the buffer size and minimum fill percentage, but it's not helping that much.
I'm sure i recall being able to fade between songs without an issue 20 years ago with winamp on a windows 98 PC, so it's surely possible with this thing?
I'd appreciate any recommendations of distros, software or tweaks. thanks.

I am using Audacious with its cross fading, it seems to be working just fine, I have a 8 core CPU Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2760QM CPU @ 2.40GHz w/16GB RAM though. Audacious has setting for its cross fading as well and it displays the list of songs it has loaded up to be able to click on the next song you want. You can make a play list and load that then work off of that, I just loaded up my entire dir of songs to check that with.

if you want to try that you need to install both
audacious
audacious-plugins

as far as what Linux distro, that should not matter as much unless you just want a striped down distro with just enough to get a sound system working to save space on the HDD.

yeah,clementine's crossfading works fine on a decent spec laptop too, i have an i5 CPU in my own laptop and crossfading works smoothly in that.

i had a look at audacious, it's apparently much less resource hungry than clementine, so potentially a good choice, but it seems the only option for browsing the music library is to have one massive playlist with everything in it? i can't seem to find any kind of artists>albums>songs style library view. is there any way to make it behave like that?

yeah just on the default theme, like I said you can make a cuatom play list and load that with just the music you're going to have aval to play.

I do not mess with it that much to know a lot about it.

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yeah that view is what i meant by just being one massive playlist. i mean a library view where you start with a list of artists, then you click on an artist to get a list of albums, then you can either play a whole album or browse the tracks in it etc

Do you use the cross-fading using only local files (i.e., on the local hard drive)? I've tried it with files stored on a server on our network and it's a disaster. Buffering is taking so long that any cross-fading is not worth mentioning. And this is an end-to-end everything-gigabit network connection between the systems running Audacious and where the music files are located. The buffering problem even worse on my laptop where I'm accessing the music files over a wifi connection.

the files are all on the internal hard drive

yep onboard files.

off the top of my head.
buffering across a network. I cannot image how to do that. setup, One Server -- to --> many pcs
devise a way to pull or push the files into the local tmp to play them then delete when done while keeping a running cache of a few on hand always updating. Would that cause too much traffic and load on a system(s)?

over wifi would take me a little more thought but the process would be the same, because you're basically trying to turn it into a satellite radio type effect. Broadcasting sound waves over a wireless data stream. with wifi causes lag time and interferences like cat5 and crosstalk interferences. (?).

You'd I think would have to create a cache somehow to pull out of that so your lag time is cut down. I am not sure if there is a peiec of software the streams sound .. maybe vlc or mpv they scream video, mplayer too might, for just sound because I know the former two can play mp3's, but as for using them with cross-fading, I'e never looked into it.

My Audacious 'Everything" playlist is just under 4100 hours long (though a fair number of those are 1-3 hour-long podcasts). Maybe that's why crossfading isn't working for me?

it does load playlist, try experimenting --

laptop, not enough room for mp3, 32GB usb stick plenty of room for mp3s.

they got them little inky dinky ones too that do not stick out that far.

Not so. You can have multiple playlists with Audacious.

Not easily. What I've done is a directory hierarchy like:
...and then name the songs as 01-name, 02-name, etc. to make it easier to pay them in the correct order if I want to play an album w/o shuffling the songs.

Then I wrote a script (Perl) that walks through that directory tree and creates strings using the genre, artist, and album plus the song-file-name to be used as the name of a symbolic link that goes into the directory that I specify as the Audacious library directory.
In effect, this flattens the directory structure into a nice flat namespace suitable for Audacious. It isn't pretty to look at but it's not really meant for human consumption. That directory structure can be copied directly onto my old Cowon player. It has no problems with subdirectories.

You can create playlists by genre, artist, album, etc by creating an empty playlist, renaming it, and using the "File -> Add Files" dialog. It can get tedious, though, with the amount of mouse clicks needed to make a bunch of playlists. I'm working on a script to build Audacious playlists without having to go through the Audacious GUI which should speed things up immensely.

This does not, however, get you a nice GUI viewing option to view music by artist, genre, etc. The scheme that I use does let me find music using the "Playback -> Jump to Song" to search for and queue up music.

I got lost on who what the OP on this one...

OK, but essentially audacious does not have a music library the way clementine or banshee has?
basically the reason I'm using this low spec laptop is because we let people come up and choose music themselves, and it usually stays at the venue. if it was just me DJing, I'd use my own decent laptop and this wouldn't be an issue to start with.
because we let people actually use the laptop, that means it needs to have a decent, intuitive library like clementine has.
dragging and dropping stuff into the player from the actual folders isn't acceptable, because people will definitely accidentally drag stuff into the wrong place, albums and songs will end up in the wrong folder etc. it pretty much needs to function like a jukebox.
so audacious is only going to work if there's some sort of library plugin available for it that gives it a decent visual frontend for people to be able to browse the music collection.
clementine looks and works the way I want it to, but seems to be too resource heavy to be able to cross-fade with a single core CPU.

maybe take up a collection for a better cheep laptop, I got a hold of a HP elitebook 8460p for $100 US i5 4cores, 8GBRam that is not a bad price and it works ( I actually put a i7 8core in it but that is besides the point). the point being you can get a good laptop cheep that will go beyond your requirements. Ebay is where I got that one. I seen them for 50 US with just a little bit of repair required, but for ~$100 US its a good price.

the one I am using now is
HP EliteBook 840 G2
Graphics Card [Intel Corporation HD Graphics 5500 (rev 09)
CPU Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-5300U CPU @ 2.30GHz
8GB RAM
1920x1080 60.05*+ 59.93
touch screen
$100 US Ebay special too.



A probook or lesser would work too, point being you can pick up a good 2nd or 3rd gen Icore for a little bit of the original price. $1500.00 and up laptop for under $200.00 US, that is still workable even with Windows 10, let alone Linux, can't beat that.

you got a spare HDD

a caddy is like 2 to 5 bucks.