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 - Tarc

Pages: 1
1
Tips and Tricks / MusicBee 3 with Wine and dual boot
« on: November 10, 2016, 01:03:20 AM »
Hello. I’m a MusicBee user and avid music listener and recently switched to using dual boot, with Windows 8.1 and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, both 64-bit. I couldn’t for the life of me find a music player for Ubuntu that could allow me to use it like I use MusicBee (all of them didn’t have at least one of: library, album covers view, album and tracks view, album shuffle, playlist importing, and user friendliness), so I switched to using MusicBee on Wine. I found a tutorial here, but it is from 2012. Using info from WineHQ's rating page, I managed to get it working so I figured I’d make a new tutorial. It is mainly for Ubuntu, but other distros shouldn’t be too different.

INSTALLATION

First off, you need to install the experimental Wine builds (1.9+) and winetricks:

Code
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:wine/wine-builds
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install --install-recommends wine-staging
sudo apt-get install winehq-staging winetricks

Then, create a wine location to store MusicBee and configure it following the information from WineHQ. Some windows may appear about missing packages (wine-mono and wine-gecko), just cancel and go on.

Code
WINEARCH=win32 WINEPREFIX=”$HOME/.wine-musicbee/” wine wineboot
WINEARCH=win32 WINEPREFIX=”$HOME/.wine-musicbee/” winetricks win7 remove_mono

 This will create a Windows 7 32-bit emulation without Mono, so .NET 4.0 can be installed.
 The download the MusicBee installer, extract it and run throught:

Code
WINEARCH=win32 WINEPREFIX=”$HOME/.wine-musicbee/” wine MusicBeeSetup_3_0_Update3.exe

 Install it normally and let it install its own .NET. When it finishes, allow it to create a desktop shortcut and to run. If there is an error about a “machine.config”,
Run:

Code
WINEARCH=win32 WINEPREFIX=”$HOME/.wine-musicbee/” wine uninstaller

And uninstall .NET, then run:

Code
WINEARCH=win32 WINEPREFIX=”$HOME/.wine-musicbee/” winetricks dotnet40

And run it again. It should run as normal and create its configuration folders.

CONFIGURATION

 If you want, you can putyour skins, plugins and AppData folder on the new installation and it will work as normal (The AppData on Wine is $HOME/.wine-musicbee/drive_c/Users/<Linux username>/Application Data/). For the library there is a problem: you can’t share a library, as the .mpl file lists files in absolute path and with Windows’ file path convention. Windows and Ubuntu treat their root path differently, so the library would have to be rewritten every time you switched OS. So, for Ubuntu, create a new library and point MusicBee to scan your library folder and update on startup, so it keeps updated to the  songs. If you use MusicBee to auto-organize your folders, I recommend doing so only on Windows, as the app is native to it, making it less prone to errors. If you plan on using mainly Ubuntu, then you can probably invert the configuration (make Windows only scan and Ubuntu organize).

 I couldn’t manage to make MusicBee use the exported playlists directly, so I made MusicBee export it as Unix and them replaced the file paths with their equivalent on Linux. It may be possible to not have to do it and use it as-is using relative file paths but I couldn’t do it, so for now I will update it manually.

 Hope it was useful. If there is anything more you know, please share!

Edit: also, just to complement, MusicBee remote works, so other plugins will probably work too.

Pages: 1