So: (1) I was lurking on a convo between @marrus_sh and @KitRedgrave about music players, and (2) Amarok has this multi-second lag when playing some songs, not to mention updating my music collection index.

The above got me motivated to try something else, and so far I've been a lot happier with mpd + cantata:

https://www.musicpd.org/
https://github.com/cdrummond/cantata

Gapless playback, fast indexing, album art support. So far, seems nice.
https://mastodon.social/media/XdoW1dll8y3DZ_Mvi5k