Made some good progress on figuring this out...
I wound up using VLC on all my Android devices - Minix, smartphone and Samsung tablet.
Using VLC on the device I navigated, using the top rt hand Menu, to "Local Network - and set up a connection (needed to input Username and Password) to my Win7 PC. And once I was logged on to my PC I navigated to the folder where my mp3s were located.
First of all - I had set up some m3u playlists in my music folders (which I had used to play some selected songs on my PC) so I was curious to see if those m3u playlists would play remotely using VLC on my Android units - which they did !! At first it was a little hit and miss but the answer seemed to be to make sure that in the VLC file listing for the m3u's displays the actual number of media files in the playlist.
For example the listing could look like this;
Smooth Jazz.m3u
28 media files
For some reason a few of the m3u's showed up as 0 media files - so maybe they were corrupted, although they seemed to play OK from the PC using WMP.
To 'fix' those few m3u's I opened them in WMP then just saved them again as a m3u playlist with a slightly different name - and then refreshed VLC and they displayed and played properly.
Secondly - to play individual mp3's, as above I navigated to the PC folders with my music and clicked on one of the mp3's and it started playing on my Android device. To add another song(s) to be played next simply "long" press another mp3 and then click on the >+ icon at the top of the screen and the song(s) will be added to the 'playing list'...
The song that is playing will be shown at the bottom of the screen, and if you click on it you will view the songs you have queued up.... To return to the previous directory of mp3's swipe down from the top of the screen and you'll be back at your mp3 directory...
Hats off to VLC - gotta be one of the very best media players and it's functionality for playing LAN based mp3's was exactly what I was looking for!
Problem solved.
01-28-2019 10:21 AM