Seldom without a computer of some sort since graduating from the University of British Columbia in 1978, I have been a full-time Linux user since 2005, a full-time Solaris and SunOS user from 1986 through 2005, and UNIX System V user before that.
On the technical side of things, I have spent a great deal of my career as a consultant, doing data analysis and visualization; especially spatial data analysis. I have a substantial amount of related programming experience, using C, awk, Java, Python, PostgreSQL, PostGIS and lately Groovy. I'm looking at Julia with great interest. I have also built a few desktop and web-based applications, primarily in Java and lately in Grails with lots of JavaScript on the front end and PostgreSQL as my database of choice.
Aside from that, I spend a considerable amount of time writing proposals, technical reports and - of course - stuff on https://www.opensource.com.
Authored Comments
Thanks very much for your comments, Tim. I've added LXMusic to my list of players to evaluate. I really appreciate your suggestion!
As to Audacity and Audacious, as you say Audacity is a sound file editor, and a wonderful tool as you note, whereas Audacious is a really decent and small music player. Unfortunate the two names are so similar! I don't think I wrote "Audacity" meaning Audacious but if I did, I apologize to all!
Thanks for your detailed and clear comments, Mitja.
I will try to address your points.
First, for sure if you use MPD as your player on your laptop, and say Sonata as your music browser / control, you can
- configure MPD to pass your music through ALSA in pure format;
- configure MPD and your laptop to permit you to control it through say MPDroid on your Android phone or tablet
You will need to manage ripping, tagging etc separately in this context. I would recommend looking at Asunder to manage your ripping and EasyTAG to manage your tagging.
For reference, this is exactly how I manage my home music server which is connected to a good DAC and thence to the home stereo.
As to cracks, pops and static noises in the music - this sounds to me like driver or kernel issues. A good place to go to resolve this kind of problem is the ALSA User's List at https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/alsa-user where you can search for similar problems and if no solution is found, subscribe to the list and post a question about your problem (a warning - there is a way to post a question, involving providing detailed information on your configuration, that creates the maximum likelihood of receiving help).