Messages

1

Tips and Tricks / Re: MusicBee now works under wine

« on: December 12, 2019, 08:54:19 PM »

Ok.  So far my tests are going pretty well.  If it continues to go like this I'll be sticking to wine musicbee.  Not sure if it's just the latest version of wine is better with mac audio or whether there are improvements in Musicbee but this is very usable.  The only hiccups I have had are making sure to use WASAPI exclusive.  Buffering doesn't seem to work on my FLACS (haven't tested MP3).  But that hasn't been an issue.  The main ugly thing is when it is first downloading artist pictures for my 12000 songs.  Get's a bit crackly if playing whilst it's doing that.  But since the first burst of doing that it's been pretty stellar.  Still to early to call but I've even got subsonic working and tested playing through bluetooth speakers.  Fingers crossed.  I'll run it for a week then report back but day 1 get's a 9/10 once I got my library loaded up over the network which was v slow on AFP.  BTW it's worth noting even on the previous wine mac version I posted instructions to playing files locally was no problem but that is no good for me.  I store all my tunes on a raspberry pi server that runs 24/7.  Has to be a little pi one so my wife doesn't complain!  So I've been dealing with 2 bottlenecks... wine and a low powered server.  Shame Musicbee isn't a native mac app... it has absolutely no competitors.  The music players I've seen on Mac are politely put terrible.

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Tips and Tricks / Re: MusicBee now works under wine

« on: December 12, 2019, 02:51:10 PM »

Just as a heads up.  After quitting using musicbee due to it not working nice over my network with a PI server and SMB through wine when playing FLACs.  I've updated to the latest version of Musicbee and had a eureka "that might work" idea of trying AFP (Apple File Protocol) as opposed to Samba.  It seems to be playing nicer from what I can tell but I need to do more intensive tests.  If this pans out I will share how to get it up and running for those of you with similar needs to my own.  I'll be back with reports. PS I am getting the impression the latest version of Musicbee works better with FLACs over the network as well.  Had no issue with MP3s but try to keep my MP3s to minimum and only use CD quality FLACs for most of library.

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Tips and Tricks / Re: MusicBee now works under wine

« on: February 15, 2018, 12:43:22 AM »

I've just updated to the latest version of musicbee on Wine for macosx.  It's all looking improved for me over samba network with the new option (since I last checked) to preload tunes.  I'm still fine tuning to see how well this is performing but if tests continue to go well I'll share the version I have (Musicbee 3.1.6590).  I did manage to get some visualisations working (Milkdrop looked cracking!) but I'm not sure if it causes conflicts having it included and since I can't get the app to go fullscreen so far... I don't see the need to keep them in.  The same issues are present from earlier version for the mostpart but if you are wanting to access files over the network via samba this is much improved.  Will report back when I get the chance.

@Lorenzo - I don't know if this will work for linux and I can't see from the screenshot whether your fonts are lacking anti-aliasing but one thing that made my version for mac looks SO much better was this:

winetricks settings fontsmooth=rgb

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Tips and Tricks / Re: MusicBee now works under wine

« on: May 08, 2017, 03:37:05 PM »

Sorry for v v late reply.  I don't use wma as a format and wasn't able to find anything to properly test it out.  It's not looking like it's working as far as the small tests I did.  For mac users this shouldn't be a big deal as it's a pretty windows format to work with.  As a Windows user myself I've never liked it much.  Best bet is just to convert it.  I'm in the middle of doing some trials on using ALAC (.m4a) format for network streaming and I am liking the look of it so far.  I also am aware I need to update the version I uploaded for my own posterity and for anyone else needing it.  For networking, you'll need to use SMB.  I've tried other options but is the best one. Cheers.

5

Tips and Tricks / Re: MusicBee now works under wine

« on: February 16, 2017, 12:20:23 AM »

Just as a note I am currently testing out an improved version (specifically for music held on NAS type storage) but that may have implications for all versions.  I've been battling with Samba problems (nothing to do with MusicBee) which I will also share some tips on as it's been causing me maximum headaches as you must use Samba shares for MB to work over network for the Wine versions.  Mac is rubbish with Samba though and I have found all naming convention issues as well as other problems which has prevented my files from being scanned properly.  I think I have just about cracked those issues.  I'll be updating all files and the 2 posts above this in the next few days.  So please check back and I'll have a better version available.  Another important issue I have hopefully addressed is some stuttering i noticed on audio files while playing back from NAS (Samba).  Fingers crossed if this is good I will roll it out to the upload location.  So far it seems vastly improved but I have extensive testing to do still!

UPDATE:  Only just finished setting up my new Pi NAS.  Has eaten my time but now done.  Have been testing but want to do some more testing.  So far so good though streaming over network can occasionally stutter if you are doing lots of stuff in Musicbee and playing music at teh same time.  Playing attached external HD or internal HD works v v well... it's just the streaming via NAS part I am exhausting.  That said... if you're just playing and browsing (After your library is setup) it's pretty damn smooth and I am in process of deciding if smooth as butter or not.  MP3s are pretty much perfect via NAS... FLACs seem to be a bit more of job for teh wine version.  Can't tell as I have been updating my library via musicbee a LOT while listening so really just want to listen once library is finished.  That's teh next job!  That said... I think I am going to roll out the new version tomorrow if all continues to go well.  I can carry on testing with that version being live.  It's still an improvement.  Quite a big one since I installed some neccessary audio dlls that I had missed.  I love how even the wine version stays at front if in mini player mode and also notifications of next tune showing in wine version.  Very nice experience.  Let's be honest most of time when listening to music it's not in full screen but while doing other stuff.

6

Tips and Tricks / Re: MusicBee now works under wine

« on: February 14, 2017, 10:51:45 PM »

And for posterity if anyone wants to know the way the files were setup (You don't need to do this if you download the files I've uploaded), the settings I used for Wine for Vanilla version and Precompiled are (install one by one using winetricks):

dotnet45
gdiplus
mfc42
msxml3
msxml6
vb6run
vcrun6sp6
wmp9
wmp10
windowscodecs
win7

And in winecfg I used these DLL Overrides:

cscriopt.exe (native, builtin)
gdiplus (native)
jscript (native, built in)
mscoree (native)
scrrun (native, built in)
vbscript (native, built in)
windowscodecs (built in, native)
windowscodecsext (buit in, native)
wscript (native, built in)
msxml6 (native)

For precompiled i used Wineskin Winery 2.6.2 and Engine WS9Wine1.9.24.  For Vanilla I used Homebrew Wine.  Hats off to ColCh for making this possible.  I have no idea how he worked out which items to install in the first place but it gave the required leads to work things out.  Cheers all.

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Tips and Tricks / Re: MusicBee now works under wine

« on: February 14, 2017, 10:46:59 PM »

Ok.  I've uploaded all the neccessary files for both a pre-compiled version with issues I already mentioned earlier in this thread and for the Vanilla version of Wine which works near enough perfectly on mac minus the issues I've mentioned.

For my Unofficial Mac MusicBee Vanilla (Homebrew) Wine version (Recommended but is slower to install and requires use of Terminal) you can download here

For the ColCh Unofficial Mac MusicBee precompiled version (Easy to install but I really recommend the Vanilla version) you can download here

Included with both versions are instructions in the root of download folders.  Hopefully those make installation pretty easy.  Hope this helps someone and have fun with MusicBee for Mac.  It's not without issues but it's in a very very usable form.  Maybe someone can completely eradicate the issues from the precompiled version.  For now though its the quickest route to musicbee heaven and maybe someone will work out the issues in future or better still MusicBee will officially arrive for Mac. Important: These versions are totally unsupported and are very unofficial.

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Tips and Tricks / Re: MusicBee now works under wine

« on: February 13, 2017, 02:29:58 AM »

I took a look at ColCh's version and it had the same issues as mine.  Using a vanilla version of Wine (installed via homebrew) I've got it all working now minus theatre mode, visualisation (full screen), and cd ripping.  Might have missed something but I've been testing this for a while now and it's streaming all my music from NAS via SMB without issue (once buffer amount set in MusicBee).  Font issues are fixed and stability wise this seems so far to be absolutely rock solid.  Tried on Sierra, El Capitain and Yosemite.  Not going to be able to provide a beautiful installer for this though since it requires homebrew.  I can bundle the hard to install wine files which can be extracted once that is setup.  ColCh's version is super simple to install.  So I'll offer that version plus the vanilla one which requires a more work thanks to installation of homebrew wine.  I'll document the steps for how to install.  Then people can pick whats right for them.  ColCh's version is v good if you don't care about thumbnails, music explorer, album art (in main window not in right panel with track information... that works) and play count.  

I tried everything possible to get my version into a container but all the available wrappers aren't playing right.  What I have instead is a script which sits in my dock (with the musicbee icon) and I just click on that and it launches musicbee once installed.  It's pretty transparent and works like any other app.  Have setup for my wife and son so it's pretty easy to use once setup.  Anyway.  I'll document the steps (might be useful for me if I forget them!) and ask one of the mods here how to host the files.  I've done all the hard work for the home-brew "vanilla" approach.  All the necessary windows stuff/options is all included in files I have.  My next post sometime this week will include all steps to setup things.  Of course, @mods... you guys said you were okay with hosting files on forums?  If not let me know and I can whack up somewhere else I guess.  Installer files are not possible but saving the Mac users a lot of brain ache is.  Let me know if this is desirable.  I was using the crossover version prior to this and the version I am currently using blows that older version of Musicale away.  I know you're not supporting this wine version but tbh it doesn't need supporting once setup.  It's rock solid.  If i could get my vanilla version working nice in a wrapper/container it would be amazing but that is for someone else to figure out.  Time for me to actually just have some fun listening to my music now.  Cheers!

What works in the "vanilla" wine Mac version:

wavebar
all artwork
music explorer
All player modes
File conversion
Browsing xbox store stuff
"Minor" visualisations (i.e. little bars bouncing up and down but no fullscreen stuff)
Layout changes
95-99% working
Very stable - in 99.9% of cases crashes only occur when trying to use theatre modes or fullscreen visualisation.  Am sure this could be fixed with some graphic drivers but I don't want to bloat the files any more and am not v interested in fixing it anyway.

What doesn't work in the "vanilla" wine Mac version:

Full Screen Visualisation
Theatre Mode
CD Ripping (not a problem - use free XLD app instead which works great)
Prob some other features I don't use or need but I haven't seen anything

In short its a Mac port that I've used to replace iTunes.  And if you loathe iTunes like me it blows it away.  I prefer it to all other Mac music players I have seen (Clementine, VLC, Vox etc) which just don't have complete enough feature sets.  I need network streaming of FLACs&MP3s as well as good filtering/genres and a way to search through thousands of audio files, tag them and search for other music too.  Most players are fine with a few files but once you have a large collection start being horrible to work with.  IMHO this unofficial MusicBee port is top contender for Mac too.  Only real competitor is Kodi which is a better cross platform option (requires a lot of setup time to make look nice and tag things right) and I personally use to stream music all around my house on raspberry pis.  I only hope one day MusicBee officially arrives on Mac.

9

Tips and Tricks / Re: MusicBee now works under wine

« on: February 12, 2017, 03:00:48 PM »

Well I have gotten musicbee working with artwork using wine developer and command line but it's not a contained package.  Trying to work out if there is a way to put this into a file that can be launched by anyone but ColCh told me it is working fine for him on Sierra so.. maybe just a yosemite thing or way I installed.  Will keep posted as I am v close here.  Now I have a font issue (anti aliasing not working properly) but the app works pretty much perfectly otherwise (Except for visualisation).

10

Tips and Tricks / Re: MusicBee now works under wine

« on: February 11, 2017, 09:36:32 AM »

That would be a no .  It was late when I posted that.  I had copied and pasted a portion of that while my internet was doing weird things and pages were hanging... I'm assuming it picked up the size from whatever doc I temp pasted into and then copied back from.  Anyways.. apologies and it's fixed!

11

Tips and Tricks / Re: MusicBee now works under wine

« on: February 10, 2017, 11:49:40 PM »

Ok well bum is the operative word.  Basically I have tried a myriad of ways and I can't seem to get album covers working and this extends to the music explorer section.  Also with further testing... Artist images aren't being picked up properly (it's just grabbing album art from the first music file in an artists collection).  Also... play count doesn't appear to work nor does as of the visualisation, theatre view stuff.  These seem to be the main failings.

That said if you turn off hte thumbnails and largely forgo the music explorer section (or accept it won't have pretty album art on your own music BUT album art does show up art for exploring the store), you're still left with a pretty nice player for mac.  The "now playing" page looks great with all artwork as expected.  The compact player looks fantastic too.  It does play music fine and work otherwise as I would expect.  I even managed to install lame mp3 converter and did a test conversion and that works fine too.  Its so nearly there (not bothered by visualisation or theatre stuff) but the lack of proper artwork for artists or album covers thumbnails is such a shame... if that worked too it would be amazing.  You can see album art on tracks being played... just not thumbnails.

Anyway... time to call time on this.  Happy to share the version I have but be warned it isn't quite where I would like it to be.  And it does install by literally dropping the file into your applications folder and launching it (no wine installer required) but uncompressed it is 1gig so quite big (Compressed it's 400meg odd).  @Colch - Did you not experience the issues I reported?  Amazing find btw... you were a bit of a genius figuring this out as I have tried so many ways to get it to work yet none have worked like yours.  Will see if I can upload some images to photobucket to shwo what it looks like.  Cheers.

PS you can see some images here (ignore the genres you may see in one of the images as i am messing around with these... so there is no issue with these... if you're curious it's just the separator isn't compatible with musicbee but that is not a fault of the wine version (or any other version) and is easily fixed)

12

Tips and Tricks / Re: MusicBee now works under wine

« on: February 10, 2017, 02:50:36 PM »

Hi Steven,

Let me see if I can put together a generic version that anyone can just loadup and trial on their mac.  Or at least some noddy steps with associated files.  I am pretty sure in it's compiled state it should work standalone but I'll need to test on a macbook (my sons) which doesn't have a load of wine junk installed.  I've certainly downloaded pre-compiled apps before (i.e. mp3tag) that work just fine with nothing else installed. 

Re the album cover issue - I noticed some other people having issues with this on PC.  I think I will have to install musicbee on my windows bootcamp and see if it works out of the box that way.  Or maybe it will reinforce it's not an issue with the wineskin installation.  Further debunking to be done.  All embedded images do show just fine and it appears to be finding the correct folder (when I click save to on picture in edit tags)... just a bit of headscratching what I am doing wrong.  Music collection is on external hard-drive and is mostly using FLAC.  So a few other variables to throw into the mix!  Any pointers would be massively appreciated.  Stability wise (minus album covers) this seems rock solid and is likely to replace itunes for me!!!  Which I loathe as a user of multiple OS but mainly a mac user for daily driving.

Cheers! 

13

Tips and Tricks / Re: MusicBee now works under wine

« on: February 10, 2017, 02:05:46 PM »

Wow.  This works!  Have it running on Yosemite 10.10.5 on my macbook pro.  Seems to be quite stable so far.  Thankyou so much!  I did have to do the following also:

Set Screen Options > Tick "Use Mac Driver instead of X11"

You do need to install each winetrick one by one (I was in a hurry and got lazy... learnt from my error!)

That stopped juddering and clicking the files while scrolling on my macbook trackpad.  The only thing I have left to figure out is why I am not getting album covers but otherwise I have created a musicbee icon and the musicbee app is sitting in my applications folder working like a mac app.  Very very cool.  This should be shared with everyone.  Is musicbee opposed to having a version freely available for download from their site (A wine version of latest)?  Or are there legal issues with this?  Seems a bit unfair that only those of us geeky enough to fiddle with this can use but if that's the case no worries.  If anyone can help with the album covers issue I would be very grateful!

Thanks!