Bongo music player won't play next track in sequence

Question

The new version of Totem removed the playlist feature, so I'm looking for a simple way to choose 2 or 3 podcasts from a selection of 12 or so recently cached to a ~/Podcasts directory.

The bongo music player looks simpler than EMMS, and although like EMMS it doesn't support sort-by-date in the library, it does hook into dired so I can sort most-recently-downloaded to the top in there.

Unfortunately I can't get it to play tracks continuously.

I queue a track to the playlist by pressing e in a dired buffer. I then press e with the point on another file in the dired buffer. There are now two tracks queued in the playlist buffer.

With my point on the first track I press RET and the track starts playing. When it ends, the audio stops. It does not start playing the next track in the playlist.

bongo-next-action is the default bongo-play-next-or-stop, but I've tried setting it to bongo-play-next, like so:

(setq-default bongo-next-action #'bongo-play-next)

I've tried C-u C-c C-n but that seems to makes no difference.

How do I make Bongo play more than one track without intervention?

I am using Emacs 24.4 on Linux, and mpg321.

Answer 1

When the audio is playing but also after the first track stops I can see that mpg321 is till running in the background:

$ ps aux | grep mpg
me       29748  6.8  0.0 2437324 6308 ?        Ssl  19:31   0:07 /usr/bin/mpg123 --skip-printing-frames 30 -R dummy

According to the man page -R dummy means run mpg123 in command mode. Looks like bongo is maybe waiting for it to exit rather than feeding it the next track to play.

Anyway, I fixed this by disabling all the backends except for mplayer, like so:

(setq-default bongo-enabled-backends '(mplayer))

And now bongo is playing all queued tracks in the playlist.

Answer 2

When you start bongo,

Type M-x bongo-playlist

not M-x bongo

If not,

Press C-u C-c C-n on bongo buffer

Do it again.