But it's slow to start: there will be a short delay between pressing 'play' and the audio starting. Omxplayer has some advantages: it can play almost any kind of audio file and allows extraction of metadata. It is a simple GUI-wrapper written using Tkinter for omxplayer. The GUI PiPlay you see here is a cut-and-shunt job and a horrible piece of programming that already needs a re-write from the ground up.
It is based on PyPlay, a command-line Python program I wrote for Mac OS X that does a similar thing.
You do not want to know how it works, what it is made of. It copes with spaces in filenames but not, at the moment, with characters like brackets and ampersands. You would either have to edit the playlist.m3u file in another program or rename your audio files using numbers at the start to ensure they were in the correct order. Unlike CoolPlay, you cannot re-order, edit, delete or add tracks in the playlist. Only 17 tracks are displayed, you may need to scroll down or up to see more tracks. It will cue-up the subsequent track (shown in grey) by default, but you can click on any track you like to line it up to be played next.
Tracks that have been played in full turn blue. Currently playing tracks are highlighted in green, the next track to be played in grey. There is a large clock with the current time constantly displayed. It will tell you what time it will end if it carries on playing and if there is metadata with artist and tarck title information this appears below the tracklist. Highlight the track you want to play and press the PLAY button. If you don't aldeady have an M3U-format playlist in the folder, it will make one for you with the tracks in alphabetical order. Put this Python 3 program in the same directory as a bunch of audio files and run it. I designed the splash screen for BBC News CoolPlay (and possibly some of the help files) but none of the actual code. CoolPlay was widely used in BBC Radio News a few years ago in BBC World Service and also, I believe, in Radio 1 Newsbeat, Radio 5 Live and some Radio 4 programmes as well. The idea is based entirely on CoolPlay, a Windows app which does the same thing far better. You want to play 1 track at a time under your control. If you work in radio or theatre, this is not what you want. This may not sound like a big deal, but most GUI-front ends for audio players play though a playlist without stopping. (If you have access to a Windows computer – XP or later – I would strongly recommend using CoolPlay instead). It could be useful for school, student or community radio.
It runs from one Python 3 program on a vanilla Raspberry Pi running Raspbian and requires no other software or libraries to be installed. A simple Raspberry Pi audio playout system with GUI for radio or theatre.