On 12/17/2017 03:51 PM, D.M. Procida wrote:
[snip]

The Volumio software - well, it works. But the interface is very
rough, in all kinds of ways.

In just about every music transport interface since the dawn of
the CD, hitting the "back" button in the middle of a track sends
you back to its start; in Volumio, it sends you to the start of
the previous track.

Navigation through a music library is tiresome, and it's very
difficult to do basic things, like play an album starting with
a particular track.


Although not a music fan, I've been casually following this thread.
I happened to be doing some searches in the Debian package list and
came across "draai - manage playlists and play audio files", command
line tool which I suspect could be driven by a simple script.
https://packages.debian.org/stretch/draai.

The man page https://manpages.debian.org/stretch/draai/draai.1.en.html
says in part:
/begin quote

--noshuffle (no shuffle), {-S}

Do not shuffle tracks and leave random mode untouched (default is: do
shuffle and disable random mode). See also the script dr_unsort.

/end quote

HTH