Show Posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.


Messages - raffraffraff

Pages: 1
1
MusicBee Wishlist / Re: Android app we can sync our music to
« on: October 07, 2013, 10:29:11 PM »
How about a DIY solution? My music is on a Linux based NAS, so this is what I've done:
1. Installed an rsync app on the android phone and copied its private key to the NAS for passwordless sync.
2. Configured MusicBee to export external playlists to a sync folder on the NAS.
3. Wrote a simple script that runs continuously on the NAS checks for playlists, parses them and copying the tunes to the sync directory.

What this means is that I can right-click on any MusicBee playlist and "export as external playlist". That's all. The phone automatically sync the directory down every hour. I installed a Media Refresh app (there are dozens) to force the Android to see the new tracks, but it's rarely required. When I want to quickly sync and go, I manually kick off the sync from the.

That's just one way of doing it. On Windows you could install freeSSHd or a free FTP app on your Windows box and get an Android app to sync from them. The only bit you'll have to figure out is how to parse the playlist and dump the relevant files into your sync dir. Shouldn't bee too hard. You could do it with VBscript, python or good 'ole batch files.  If you don't want to get your hands dirty, just select a bunch of tunes in the library and "Send To > Folder (copy)" and use one of these apps to sync from PC > Android:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.pcfilesync&hl=en
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.appricoo.android.tools.wifisyncr


2
Questions / Re: MusicBee for Linux (ubuntu)
« on: October 06, 2013, 10:18:27 PM »
OK, something for the Ubuntu people at least. The usual disclaimers apply "Never run something you downloaded from the internet without checking it"... yadda yadda.

#   wget http://www.theraff.net/musicbee-on-linux/musicbee_installer.sh -O $HOME/musicbee_installer.sh
#   chmod 755 $HOME/musicbee_installer.sh
#   $HOME/musicbee_installer.sh

Quick summary of what it does:
1. Adds the wine PPA so you can get the latest version
2. Installs: wine, winetricks, icoutils, p7zip, unzip
3. Downloads my musicbee.verb and installs it using winetricks.
4. Extracts the .ico from MusicBee.exe, converts it to .png
5. Creates a MusicBee launcher script and shortcut

If I get this working happily on a few different linux distributions without any serious hacking, I'll add a wiki item. I've spoken to the winetricks dev and he's cool with the idea of integrating my musicbee.verb and a function to extract icons and build desktop shortcuts.

This post is just FYI. I'm not going to edit or update, so if anything changes, it'll change here: http://www.theraff.net/musicbee-on-linux

EDIT: Making myself into a liar here: I've moved most of the functionality from the script to the musicbee.verb so that it can be more easily incorporated into Winetricks. Also added the latest 2.2 beta and IE is installed automatically.  Bugger-all testing done though.

3
Plugins / Re: Last.fm Similar Artists/Tracks
« on: October 06, 2013, 03:32:20 PM »
My wish was to be able to listen to similar kind of tracks, using the genre tags. The only thing that would need to be implemented is a function where we could indicate which genre is the "neighbor" of another.

I'd bet that the system you describe already exist, but the problem, as I see it, is that genres themselves are inadequate to describe music. There are some exceptions where a whole genre is pretty homogeneous in its sound and in its themes. To my ears, rap is one example. Its sound is generally beats + samples + rhyming speech. Its themes don't vary much outside violence, misogyny, self-importance or overindulgence. Aside from rap and a few other exceptions, genres pigeon hole bands too much. Most decent artists break free from their ascribed genre, sometimes several times per album. Therefore genres are useless.

LastFM tags for Karma Police as Indie, Rock and Alternative. What does that tell you? Nothing much really. My tags for Karma Police are: Piano, Male Vocals, Melancholy, Downtempo, Beautiful, Dark. However, very few other people tag their music using adjectives, so it's almost impossible for me to use them to discover new music that other people have tagged. I can, however, use them within my own collection to create a playlist that matches the mood I'm in. I'm willing to spend a lot of time tagging tracks - its is essentially a never ending task. But this is the only way I know how to listen to music. I would go as far as saying that if my NAS broke and my backups weren't working, given a choice between recovering my music files without metadata, or the metadata without the music, I'd take the latter. You can always get the audio files again, but years of meticulous tagging can't be replaced.

4
Questions / Re: MusicBee for Linux (ubuntu)
« on: September 30, 2013, 10:44:20 PM »
i dont have a problem with this and agree with raffraffraff
but if anyone did ask for help i would simply say i cant help them

Too late, I've changed my mind now. ...kidding, I'll see if I can put something together for winetricks first, and failing that, wiki.

5
Questions / Re: MusicBee for Linux (ubuntu)
« on: September 30, 2013, 07:11:58 PM »
Actually, I think I'll contact the developer of winetricks to see if MusicBee can be added in as a first class citizen.
I don't think Steven wants the exposure, due to increased workload, pressure that would result.

Actually, I meant the winetricks developer(s).
Edit: Never mind, I get your point. But this is unsupported, and as such, would have an obvious disclaimer. Besides, only a truly thick person would contact the developer of a Windows app to complain that it didn't work on Linux. If the exposure is unwanted, then perhaps an entry on the official wiki would be less desirable than a third party app that provides a quick install method? After all, winetricks is used to install Windows Media Player, but I doubt that Bill Gates gets called when it fails to work on Ubuntu.

6
Questions / Re: MusicBee for Linux (ubuntu)
« on: September 30, 2013, 06:54:37 PM »
Hmmm, it's a bit low-quality for a wiki page. It would be much better to put together a working how-to. I'll see what I can do. Actually, I think I'll contact the developer of winetricks to see if MusicBee can be added in as a first class citizen.

7
Questions / Re: MusicBee for Linux (ubuntu)
« on: September 30, 2013, 06:42:21 PM »
MusicBee works in Linux, it's just not particularly intuitive to set up. Here's a very brief explanation of how I did it:
- Install wine and winetricks
- Run winecfg to create a default .wine folder and change the Windows version to XP.
- Use winetricks to install the requirements (not sure if all are required: dotnet40, mfc42, xmllite, d3dx9, gdiplus, vcrun2008, wmp10, windowscodecs)
- Download the portable version of MusicBee + all extras (like bass_aac.dll)
- Extract to the wine C:\ drive
- Create a shortcut that executes: wine "C:\\MusicBee\\MusicBee.exe"

What can I say, except that it works? To make it look pretty, choose a suitable font - things can look a bit weird otherwise.  I have Linux and Windows computers in my house and they all use the same version of portable MusicBee. The MB library is shared between them on a NAS, along with the music files. Furthermore, my NAS monitors the location that "Export as external playlist" uses. If it finds a new file, it runs a BASH script that parses the playlist, creates a folder structure and makes hard links to music files. (Hard links take up no additional space, are created in seconds and can be safely deleted). My Android phone does a scheduled rsync when it's connected to the home wifi. So in case you didn't catch that, to get music onto my phone:  right-click the playlist and "export as an external playlist". Ass-kickery, without the cables.

8
Plugins / Re: Last.fm Similar Artists/Tracks
« on: August 16, 2013, 02:40:51 PM »
This plugin is an excellent idea, so it's really unfortunate that LastFM's recommendations are pants. No music service developer (in the whole universe) appears to understand that a similar track is not necessarily a track from the same genre or band. Or from a band that comes from the same town or genre. Yet that seems to be the only method used by LastFM.

Example: When I play "Tonight Tonight" by Smashing Pumpkins, I might add tracks that are uplifting, melodic, and maybe a little bit dramatic or 'athem' like. I could also throw in a suitable love song. Examples:

1. Bat For Lashes - Daniel
2. Elbow - One Day Like This
3. The Divine Comedy - Tonight We Fly
4. Aha - The Sun Always Shines On TV
5. INXS - Never Tear Us Apart

But instead it recommends:
1. The Smashing Pumpkins - Zero
2. The Smashing Pumpkins - Bullet With Butterfly Wings
3. Weezer - Buddy Holly
4. Beck - Loser
5. Soundgarden - Black Hole Sun
6. Weezer - Say It Ain't So

Now, you could put group 2 onto a playlist, but most of them don't really go with Tonight Tonight.  But the songs in the first group (which uses my own tags + algorithm) would have some hope of fitting together in the same playlist, perhaps with some judicial padding or editing.

9
MusicBee Wishlist / Re: Regular Expressions
« on: December 16, 2010, 10:04:18 PM »
Greetings.
I'm a very recent convert (coming from Linux/Amarok) and I absolutely love MusicBee so far. On the RegEx, I noticed (in the latest beta release anyway) that it's impossible to use RegEx with the Genre field - it still just gives me a drop-down menu list of Genres instead of a field where I can put my regular expression.

Pages: 1