Trying to install from a tarball, got right to the end of the instructions and got stumped.

(Huge newbie with tarballs, but this app - goggles music manager v.1.2.1 - doesn't appear to be available on the .deb side anywhere - Manjaro has it but I don't know any other way for ubuntu boxes.)

These are the last lines of the Install file:

Earlier I had made sure make was installed - but it gives the error:
I'm in the right directory, but I couldn't find a file "make" so I found it in /usr/share/bash-completion and copied it, and made it executable. Didn't work.

What have I done wrong here, and how do I fix it?

When you call a program by name without specifying where it is, such as "make" it will look in the directories specified in $PATH variable. (echo $PATH)

The /usr/bin/make binary looks for a file by default, named Makefile, in the current directory.
It looks like you are trying to use the Ubuntu 14.04 instructions from the INSTALL file. Above those instructions are another parallel set of instructions for an unspecified platform. I was running this on Devuan Linux, and the cmake command worked just fine for me. I suspect your ./configure execution failed to deploy a Makefile. Why don't you try the cmake command, and then see if a Makefile exists?

Also, there is a set of packages for gogglesmm for Ubuntu: https://launchpad.net/~s.jansen/+arc...untu/gogglesmm

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I suspect I'm a bit dumb sometimes - I left out some critical info - actually I forgot about it when I was writing the question - but I'm running a brand new install of Ubuntu Cinnamon 20.04 (Focal Fossa ?) that I found.
Couldn't resist, and it's running well and fast so far, so I wanted to try my fave music player.

means there was no file named Makefile or makefile found. There was no any problem with the utility make itself. Usually that means ./configure failed. Did you check the result? I don't think cmake will help.

When I ran ./configure it just went to back to prompt - I guess that's not good?

It depends. Sometimes, a project changes its preferred toolchain, but vestiges of the old toolchain will still sit there in the source tree for long time and slowly bitrot. In this case, their installation instructions explicitly mention CMake, so I guess this is the preferred way to build it now.

@OP. As bgstack15 said above, instructions involving ./configure specifically target Ubuntu 14.04. For a newer system, use CMake.

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the ./configure utility (and I suppose now cmake) usually goes through the effort of drafting a Makefile with various options hard-coded, basically, based on the flags you pass to ./configure or cmake. So cmake will look for what gcc version to use, and do all sorts of validations like do you have the dependencies. Probably 50+ lines will be output, and will say things like, "Found gcc... 7.3.3" or whatever. When testing, I had to go install libtaglib1-dev and sqlite3-dev before cmake would return 0 (aka "normal"). And then I could run make.

I checked every file in there; unfortunately that has just created frustration.

This Ubuntu Cinnamon is a dual-boot, to see what it was about, cuz I don't like VM's. I can wait and take my time figuring this out. I don't read code well enough yet to really appreciate what's up.