Messages

1

Tips and Tricks / Re: MusicBee now works under wine

« on: April 18, 2023, 11:28:21 AM »

the .NET Core on Linux is different from the .NET framework being used by Windows and WINE, if I recall. And while possible, if Steven wanted to port everything to a cross-platform UI framework, it would take a lot of his time when he could just be perfecting the player as is. I would love for a Linux-native, feature-rich client like MusicBee, hell if I had the expertise I'd do it myself.

One can still dream, but if anything it might be worth more your time sending some bug reports to the WINE developers, to fix the bugs present when running MusicBee in there. The thing with open-source (and also one-man projects like MusicBee) is that you can basically talk to a human to get something fixed, almost immediately. A recent example is that drag and drop issues on MusicBee seem to be getting/gotten fixed in the latest staging builds of WINE - so I'd say, focus on reporting bugs to WINE rather than nagging Steven to port MusicBee to cross-platform.

2

Tips and Tricks / Re: MusicBee now works under wine

« on: November 21, 2022, 02:19:50 PM »

Anyone here having issues with their MusicBee library on a native Linux filesystem (in my case, ext4) and the automatic retrieval for new files? On both Arch and Fedora, it kept removing then adding back existing songs, seemingly at random. I've had to move to Quod Libet as a result.

EDIT: I think I know what the issue might be? I think it might be my files having characters that are incompatible with NTFS. Even though my file system is ext4, .NET and by extension MusicBee might still have those NTFS-related limitations. I'll test this theory later.

3

Tips and Tricks / Re: MusicBee now works under wine

« on: November 01, 2022, 06:03:55 PM »

Okay I managed to make it work, but the sound is super laggy, the cover art do not display in playlists for some obscure reason, and japanese characters are all messed up.

The Japanese character thing is certainly a WINE issue, unhelped by .NET's handling of certain fonts.

Use Meiryo UI, Microsoft Yahei or WenQuanYi Micro Hei (whichever works) if you want CJK.

4

Tips and Tricks / Re: MusicBee now works under wine

« on: June 30, 2022, 02:03:58 PM »

Someone told me about https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=33888&iTestingId=111465
so I fully reinitialized wine and tried to run MusicBee with only winetricking

Code

dotnet48

and

Code

gdiplus

. I fell back on the initial error I had :

The main difference I have is that I use wine's latest version (7) and the last tested one is the 6th. I'll try with the 6th to check if it is indeed a version compatibility issue.

This error occurs when it can't find a valid card to play on. Check your winecfg, and if it says winealsa.drv, then you need to install the 32-bit PulseAudio/PipeWire libraries.

5

Tips and Tricks / Re: [GUIDE] How to use Musicbee on Linux (Archlinux/Debian based distro)

« on: June 04, 2022, 12:32:21 PM »

I finally found how to get the File Converters section to work in settings! Using winetricks, select:

Install a Windows DLL or component

and then

wmp11 - Windows Media Player 11

. I'm not sure if it matters, but I also have my wine prefix set to spoof Windows 7.

Nice!

Windows 7 seems to be the best OS to spoof for MusicBee on WINE. I've noticed a lot of lag when the prefix is set to Windows 10.

As for CJK fonts, I've raised the issue on WineHQ, however a workaround is to use WenQuanYi Micro Hei. It supports a lot of non-Latin symbols, including East Asian languages. IF you use other languages, it might not work though, hence me raising the issue on WineHQ.

6

Tips and Tricks / Re: [GUIDE] How to use Musicbee on Linux (Archlinux/Debian based distro)

« on: April 03, 2022, 01:10:22 PM »

Hello all and thanks for having me here, and thanks to the developer for the fantastic program that is MusicBee and for making it freely available.

[...]

What I have done (with many mistakes and starting again) so far is:
1. Installed Wine (5.0.3).
2. Set up a 32 bit Wine prefix.
3. Installed Winetricks.
4. Installed .NET 4.6.1 (I have tried other, higher versions too) in the 32 bit Wine prefix.
5. Run the MusicBee exe file (current version, have tried both types) in the same Wine prefix.

I am still getting the error that .NET 4.6.1 or higher needs to be installed.

Have you tried installing a staging version of WINE? For Ubuntu (which Linux Mint is based on), you should look at WineHQ.

The staging version includes patches that may fix your problems. It should be noted though that WINE 7.3 was notorious for giving MusicBee problems, someone here suggested Arch users use Valve's version of WINE until 7.4 fixed it. EDIT: Try installing .NET without Winetricks. It sometimes just... doesn't work. The .NET installers work fine on 7.5, but Winetricks has issues with it. I have .NET 4.8 in my prefix.

If you are willing to look for a Linux-native music player, gmusicbrowser could use some support. IMO it's the closest to MusicBee as an organiser/player.

Also, I know of a solution to the CJK font problem but I don't know how to go about it. Basically, the custom font needs to have the relevant language script for the language you need. I've tried to do this with Fontforge but it crashes whenever I try to import CJK symbols into a font. Really, though, it's an issue with WINE's implementation as well as Windows' way of dealing with fonts, nothing to do with MusicBee itself.

EDIT 2022-04-09: Want to use this space to answer something someone on the MusicBee forums asked in another thread: why, when Linux is considered the programmer's distro, is there no proper MusicBee equivalent on Linux? The answer to that is, Linux has been shedding that reputation for some time. If there was a time when that reputation had shifted, it'd probably be when Valve unveiled Steam Play and Proton, which was allowing Windows games on Linux to run just as good as, if not better than on Windows natively. And with Windows updates constantly getting worse and more people seeking alternatives, more people with little to no programming background will inevitably choose Linux... or Mac, which will still result in users wishing for MB on non-Windows platforms. Things like the Steam Deck and Windows 11's questionable to downright stupid will only bring more people to the alternatives.

Really, Steven doesn't need to do much, but if you (the user) want MusicBee to do well on Linux, I'd suggest sending some bug reports to WINE.

EDIT 2022-05-19: If Steven or anyone is reading this, would adding a keyboard shortcut for moving playlist items up/down (in list view, at least?) and tabs left/right be viable? It would help work around the dragging problems and maybe it'd be something the keyboard nerd types on the Windows side would appreciate, too.

7

Tips and Tricks / Re: MusicBee now works under wine

« on: March 12, 2022, 02:01:41 PM »

For anyone who is trying to get MusicBee to run with the current version of Wine (7.3) and having trouble, I found that the Valve fork of Wine worked out of the box with no modifications (https://github.com/ValveSoftware/wine). I'm using Manjaro and was able to install this with the wine-valve package in the AUR (https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/wine-valve). Just a note: this will probably take a while to build (around 45 minutes for me on a high-end machine), but YMMV.
The only thing I can't get working is skins, but everything else seems to be fine at the moment.

WINE just updated to 7.4 on mainline Arch and whatever was causing trouble has been fixed. MusicBee loads again, now.

8

Tips and Tricks / Re: [GUIDE] How to use Musicbee on Linux (Archlinux/Debian based distro)

« on: March 06, 2022, 10:25:06 PM »

Anyone managed to get CJK fonts working with this? I can't seem to get it working at all, even when I install all fonts with Winetricks.

9

MusicBee API / Re: Is there any way to open a console window from the API?

« on: February 20, 2022, 03:07:03 PM »

If it's for piping the output of one program to another, not really sure how I'd go about that, but if it's for debugging a plugin and you're using Visual Studio, you could use Debug.WriteLine(). Remember to import the System.Diagnostics namespace though:

Code

using System.Diagnostics;

10

MusicBee Wishlist / Re: Native MusicBrainz integration/support for MusicBrainz identifiers

« on: February 15, 2022, 09:38:17 PM »

It's worth pointing out MusicBrainz Picard's tag mapping. They try to use whatever is available first, then opting for custom tags if needed. Of note is the UFID ID3 tag which is used for the Recording ID, rather than TXXX. I've been working on getting MBIDs submitted with ScrobblerBrainz using ATL, and this had caught me off. AFAIK, this tag doesn't even show up on MusicBee for me, probably because it's identified as UFID:http://musicbrainz.org rather than simply UFID. jtpavlock linked this as well but I wanted to note that discrepancy just in case.

I'd like to see this get implemented in the future, so I thought I would mention it.

https://picard-docs.musicbrainz.org/en/appendices/tag_mapping.html

11

Plugins / Re: ScrobblerBrainz: a plug-in to scrobble tracks to ListenBrainz

« on: June 29, 2021, 04:06:12 PM »

v1.0.0 works with WINE too. Thought I should let anyone here using MusicBee via WINE know.

12

MusicBee Wishlist / Re: Native MusicBrainz integration/support for MusicBrainz identifiers

« on: June 29, 2021, 02:32:30 PM »

Gonna +1 this too.

13

MusicBee Wishlist / Re: Listenbrainz as alternative to last.fm

« on: June 29, 2021, 12:43:46 PM »

+1.

ListenBrainz now has features which puts it on par with Last.fm, such as the ability to see more detailed statistics (compared to early versions of LB), marking tracks as loved and hated, recommendations, and social activity. Karaluh's plugin is good to tide us over, but I think it would be better if MusicBee has officially supported integration for ListenBrainz.

Keep in mind that this will require MusicBee to support MusicBrainz IDs in tags, too.

No offense and I appreciate product/service evangelizing as much as the next guy (I evangelize MB often), but there is nothing about ListenBrainz that is "on par" with Last.fm. Any feature ListenBrainz has that is similar to a Last.fm feature is done worse by ListenBrainz.  You can't even click a listen to get a listen history for a song. You can't click an artist and get a profile of the artist or a history of your listens to an artist.  

Not to say that it won't ever be equal or better, but it's been years now and it's still a shell of a service that IMO isn't worth the effort it would take to integrate it.  If the plugin works, why bother?

The plugin is still limited right now, compared to the last.fm plugin.

Submitting "live"/now playing listens is one thing (considering implementing this myself), but the maintainer doesn't want to workaround the lack of MBID tags being exposed by using the Custom/Virtual tags. At the very least, it'd be a good idea for MusicBee to expose MBID tags natively.

Edit 14/02/22: Since I feel a bit like an ass for posting this (see below reply - apologies in advance), I'll just say that I've fully moved to ListenBrainz, as it's better for me personally in the long run and Last.fm really became unfit for what I want (e.g. freedom to change tags to how I want rather than how Last.fm wants) and because of that, I've since stuck my finger out and decided to contribute to ScrobblerBrainz. It's been fun, not gonna lie. I'm even working on grabbing MBID tags as of writing.

I still think MusicBee should expose MusicBrainz IDs to the player and the API, so configurations or plugins like ScrobblerBrainz that use them don't need a second library or custom tags to handle it, but that's on a different thread.

14

MusicBee Wishlist / Re: Listenbrainz as alternative to last.fm

« on: June 28, 2021, 11:53:53 PM »

+1.

ListenBrainz now has features which puts it on par with Last.fm, such as the ability to see more detailed statistics (compared to early versions of LB), marking tracks as loved and hated, recommendations, and social activity. Karaluh's plugin is good to tide us over, but I think it would be better if MusicBee has officially supported integration for ListenBrainz.

Keep in mind that this will require MusicBee to support MusicBrainz IDs in tags, too.

15

Tips and Tricks / Re: Tag Hierarchy Files

« on: June 22, 2021, 11:54:18 PM »

they do intend to implement an API

Yeah, but they have been saying that for a while now and not much seems to be happening on that front.
The fact that their genres can't be retrieved is the reason I have not included their genres in my sheet.
(I'm not very enthusiastic about manually adding genres, or experimenting with scraping workarounds that may or may not work, or will just stop working)

But then again, Discogs and MusicBrainz probably will be adding genres over time that are already in RYM's database, so I may consider adding all RYM genres to my sheet also.
It will probably make it more future proof.

Understandable. I chose RYM's genres personally because the site can be particularly thorough and strict with genre classification while also providing room to add new genres to their database when appropriate, and I don't mind manually tagging my library. Before joining RYM I used Discogs as my reference.

I do wish they would get the API stuff sorted though, even just having a simple read-only output in something like JSON would be nice (this was also suggested there before but struck down as a dupe of the API suggestion on their bugzilla)