Basic Use Guide

Tauon Music Box is a playlist based music player that makes that assumption that folders are albums.

The words album and folder are often used interchangeably throughout the interface and documentation.

Playlist based is meant as opposed to a library based player where you select specific folders to monitor, and view tracks using temporary filters, rather, in Tauon Music box you import tracks into playlists directly and changes to playlists are permanent.

Playlists are intended to be easy to create and delete. While playlists can be used as traditional playlists. They are also intended to function as a kind of workspace or to keep different music collections separate.

For best experience you should have an organized and structured music library, ideally made of albums with each album in its own folder.

Suggestion: If you have a large and varied music library, try keeping artists/albums in different folders based on genre in order to group similar music together.

Importing Tracks

• Drag and drop files and folders from your file manager to the center of the window. Tracks will be appended to the end of the actively viewed playlist.

• If you want to quickly import all music from your home music folder, you can also select Import ~/Music from the main menu.

Tip: Try importing all your music to a single playlist to get started

Updating Tracks

Updates to your playlists need to be done manually as there is no background file monitoring.

There are two ways of doing this:

• Simply clear a playlist and re-import.
• Select Rescan Folder from the playlist tab menu.

  Explanation: The folder re-scanned by this function is the first folder ever imported into the individual playlist. To take advantage of this feature, you should import just the single top level folder of your music collection after making the playlist (rather than importing multiple lower level folders simultaneously).

Playlist Scrolling

• The playlist scroll bar is to the left of the playlist, hidden until moused over.
• Click above or below the scroll bar to scroll quickly in that direction.
• Right click anywhere in the scroll field to jump immediately to that location.

Feature: Each playlist remembers its position individually

Show playing

• Right click the play button to jump the view back to the currently playing track after scrolling or switching away.

Super Feature: If there is an identical track of the playing track in the viewed playlist, it will be jumped to instead and set to be the current active track instance and playlist.

Track Navigation

• Forward and Back buttons play the next and previous tracks as they appear in the playlist.

• With shuffle mode on, Back plays songs from playback history.

The Top Panel

Extra UI Functions

Gallery View

• To enter gallery view, click MENU then click the second icon from top or press mouse button 4 (The one on the side closest to you if you have a 5 button mouse (Mouse button 5 opens and closes the side panel)).
• Click an album picture to play the album. (You can change this to a double click in settings in the 'view' tab)
• To select an album using the keyboard only: Press Tab to toggle gallery keyboard control mode.

Playlist Management

• Playlist tabs can be rearranged by dragging them.
• If shift is held when mouse is released, the playlist will be appended onto and merged. (Notice the blue/green indicator)
• If there isn't room on the top bar to show all the playlists, you can view them all by opening the playlist side panel (The button in the far top left corner). From here you can also hide playlists from the top panel by clicking the toggle switches.

Enqueuing Tracks

You can override what tracks will be played next by adding them to the queue.

• Add single tracks by middle/wheel clicking a track
• Add an album/folder by right clicking the folder title and selecting Add album to queue

You can view the queue by opening the left side playlist panel (button in top left corner). From this view you can:

• Re-arrange the order of queued items by dragging
• Remove individual queued items
• Pause the queue (Use to temporarily stop the queue from having effect)

Note Right click empty area below to reveal context menu

Feature: Queue takes priority over auto-stop, therefore auto-stop will activate once queue has finished.

Feature: You can force a stop after any items in the queue by right clicking an item and selecting Auto-Stop.

Moving Tracks

• A single track can be quickly copied to the end of another playlist by dragging it onto a playlist tab.
• Single tracks can be re-positioned within a playlist by holding shift while dragging.
• To move a album block section, click the title and drag.
• To make a selection of tracks, click the first track, then hold shift and click the last track.

Advanced playback modes

• Album Repeat Mode: Repeats from beginning of album once end is reached.

  • Right click the repeat mode button and select Repeat Album from the menu.

• Album Shuffle Mode: Starts a random album after the current one finishes.

  • Right click the Shuffle mode button and select Random Albums from the menu.

• Shuffle within a single album: Plays random tracks within a single album.

  • Enable both Album repeat mode as above and the standard single track shuffle/random mode

Extra functions

• Radio Random: Plays a random track with a random starting time.

  Useful for helping discover songs you may have previously disregarded.

• Revert: Resumes from the previous position of the previous track played.

  Useful if you accidentally change track and want to return immediately back where you left off