I highly recommend trying mpv in the terminal. It is extremely configurable and has a great --help command that can assist you if anything needs to be tweaked.
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Sounds like you solved your own issue.
I use Lollypop because it does not lag with album covers, unlike Amberol.
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Aside: I’m using Lollypop with MP3 music files on the uSD card and without any problems.
A compromise might be … master copy is lossless format on your “server” … converted to a lossy format copy for the uSD card. That way, there is no permanent loss and if and when whatever is causing problems with M4A gets fixed then you could convert again if you want.
I’m using 320 kbit/s MP3 - so while that is technically a lossy format, I’m a bit unconvinced that under the circumstances anyone could hear the difference.
To be honest the main reason for having MP3 (for me) was for use in the car that I had at the time. With the less than great listening environment in the car I am doubly unconvinced that anyone could hear the difference.
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A terminal for everything guy ay? There is always one. And to be honest, I wish I was one too. Tried to be, but it is hard. Still, I think I could be happy in a guiless world. Maybe not on my phone though.
Thanks but as long as ffmpeg converting my songs properly I should be fine. Plenty of space, on my sdcard that is.
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I’m using clementine as a music player when I want an UI, and moc when I don’t need one
- moc is a non graphical music player, you have to do everything by shell commands, and is not compatible with dbus (meaning music controls don’t show up in the notification screen)
But its CPU usage is very low (~4%), so very good for power saving - clementine is a QT graphical player with a very powerfull search bar, and is more adapted to a PC than a screen phone, it’s still usable on the phone, is compatible with dbus, and you can set the size of the buffer in the preferences
But the CPU usage is high (~19% when Lollypop is around ~10%)
You can try those 
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I know you said you’re not a terminal guy, but I have to recommend cmus anyway.
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Say what?!
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Yeah I don’t know what is taking up that much space, my home dir only takes up 5gb and I only have 5gb free out of 32gb. I assume that the flatpaks will be included in the system, and I have waydroid installed but that shouldn’t be more than 3.5gb. Thing is I don’t have many apps installed. So ether flatpaks are huge or the system is.
I actually love the terminal. But due to inexperience (I actually have a lot of experience but when you compare that to how much you need to master the command line, it isn’t much) I often find it faster to use a GUI for most things. But I’ll take a look. Thanks
Thanks I had considered Strawberry (an updated clementine fork that was updated more recently than 2016) but it didn’t look like it would work well at all on a small screen, but I might give it a go. Thanks
Showing music playing on the lock screen is important to me, but so is battery life, so I might give it a go.
Even after converting my collection to flac, Lollypop still has some audio glitches. They are much more infrequent, as appose to about twice every song, the glitch is only about once per half hour now. My other issue is that all mobile friendly music players are ether slow or have a bad design. Bad design seems to be prevalent with music players for some reason.
As far as I can see it, the only solution is to build my own, so that is what I am going to do. Might take me awhile but I’ll let you know when it is ready. I’ll be building it in rust. My goals will be:
- Speed
- Low CPU usage
- Lots of Customization
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Wait a minute. Mine is the same size. I thought it was a lot smaller, but it isn’t: I only have 11 gigs left. But, I have to add, this hasn’t changed much since I received and set up the phone.
And I never had any issues with playing music from the sd-card - using Amberol which I like a lot.
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I broke my install so I re flashed the phone according to the instructions Purism gives. Now I have 27gb free… Hmmmmm… What is going on here?
But then I did an OS update through the PureOS Store and my phone is broken again. Black screen after decrypting the storage.
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See:
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If you don’t have ssh set up. You can use a usb keyboard (directly or through a hub). More on this in the thread on the ‘major issues’ mentioned above.
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I haven’t tried recently but never had any problems with Lollypop and it has a gorgeous UI. However music playback on the Librem 5 in general is pretty janky and will stop randomly, especially if you have the phone set to auto-suspend. I wouldn’t recommend anything other than Lollypop for music on any Linux distro - nothing else compares.
Regarding the format issue, try mp3 in lieu of flac if size is a concern. It’s much more widely supported than m4a, and smaller than flac. You’re not gaining any quality from m4a to flac so it’ll just be a waste of space from that perspective.
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I have a 245GB music library on my uSD card and the only smartphone music player that I have been able to successfully use to buffer and play it is cmus.
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I’m surprised no one mentioned the quality and speed of microSD cards vary greatly from one brand and model to the next.
For the large capacities anything slower than Class 10, U3, V30 tends to be junk. From the PinePhone forums I have read the Samsung Pro Endurance and Evo Plus lines both have decent application performance.
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Yes! And I pray… no Qt!
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Hi @aaronrolls
I use Silverjuke as player on the L5.
At the moment my library is over 600 GB in size. All stored on a 1TB memcard.
I had problems getting it working without stuttering, but thanks to this community, that is no longer the case.
If you have some time I suggest reading this thread: Issue with playing music from Micro SD (Solved)
My files are stored in .wav format.
I have adjusted the skin to have it fit on the screen of the L5.
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Better keep those old records 
so you have someting to fall back to.
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On my desktop, I use mpv for playing music. But I tried on my Librem 5, I think the problem was that suspend kicks in, which doesn’t happen with the GUI app I’ve tried (Lollypop, Cozy). And then you have to remember to disable suspend every time you play music, which gets old 
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Yes, I can’t figure out how Lollypop is supposed to work, even after using it for a year and half 
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