Clementine runs w/o interruption on MX-L 23.3

After Ubuntu Mate developed musicus-interruptus (see previous post), I faced the prospect of a couple of weeks without being able to play any music, until I could get an Android tablet with bit-perfect playback [1] and the ability to drive an external DAC via a USB port. The  Neutron music player is very interesting because it offers bit-perfect playback, although the developer considers it to be irrelevant due to the quality of the processing. However, high-quality processing might place significant demands on the CPU, and might consume a significant amount of power. The Neutron also offers POLARITY ("phase") INVERSION, which I thought was forbidden by the audio mafia.

Then I remembered that I didn't have any problems with music being interrupted when I was using Clementine, which I had written off because it degrades the audio with hidden processing. Fortunately, MX-Linux 23 includes Clementine by default, so I fired it up and listened to hours of background music without interruption. It seems to me that the message is that we can have degraded playback without interruptions, but if we want bit-perfect playback without interruptions, we have to go elsewhere.

Notes

[1] "Bit perfect" is generally understood as the ability to play unaltered data from the source-file. Some people apparently confuse bit-perfect with lossless, when lossless actually means the lack of lossy compression, which is a type of compression that cannot be reversed to re-create the original waveform. FLAC means "free lossless audio compression," which allows .wav files to be compressed for storage and transmission, and restored to their original state for playback.