Author Topic: MusicBee now works under wine  (Read 85377 times)

sirprancelot

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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.
Last Edit: February 14, 2017, 11:10:19 PM by sirprancelot

sirprancelot

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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.
Last Edit: February 14, 2017, 11:11:59 PM by sirprancelot

sirprancelot

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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.
Last Edit: February 14, 2017, 11:01:04 PM by sirprancelot

sirprancelot

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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.
Last Edit: February 18, 2017, 11:45:04 PM by sirprancelot

jaume

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Amazing work, Sirprancelot. Thanks for sharing.

It is working like a charm. However, it appears that WMA tags are not being read. Do you know a solution to that?
Last Edit: March 08, 2017, 06:42:10 PM by jaume

sirprancelot

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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.

Anja87

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Thank you very very very much  :-*  :-*  :-*
This solution works really well.

I will try to update musicbee on the normal way, and I hope this won't break the solution.

You saved my music experience on the mac  8)

Yummychickenblue

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@SirPranceALot, I'm running MusicBee under Wine 2.14 Staging (Linux.)  I've gotten it to run with just the dotnet framework MB pulls itself and gdi+. What are the extra packages for? Granted right now I haven't tried much, just playing, tagging, theming, and manipulating layout.

EDIT: Theatre mode doesn't work, may need some extra packages.
Last Edit: August 23, 2017, 05:12:19 AM by Yummychickenblue

BobbyWibowo

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I also managed to get MusicBee 3.0.6335 working with Wine 2.16 (Staging) on a KDE neon 5.10 (Ubuntu 16.04 LTS) machine.
I had to install codecs to get the bee play M4A files. I also had to forcibly change the fonts by manually editing the configuration file since the bee kept on throwing error about the selected font not supporting "underline" (which was kinda weird since I used the same font as the one I previously used on my old Windows installation - I'm assuming this is on Wine's end). Other than that, the bee played the music just fine. There were no stutters or the likes. I didn't try things like CD ripper, file converters, equalizers, etc. since I had never used them with my old Windows installation either.
My current issue for now is that unicode letters aren't being displayed properly (Japanese letters and whatnot). I could get the bee to display them just fine with the same font on my old Windows installation file though.
I'm kind of satisfied with this for now, but I'll try to see what I can do with the unicode issue thing in the next few days.

Here's a sneak peek of my desktop (as well as the unicode letters not being displayed properly thingy): https://a.safe.moe/N3Rop.png
Ps. Ignore the CPU temperature.

EDIT: I had to disable "Skin Window Borders" to completely eliminate the issue of the skin suddenly breaking after minimizing the bee for a while.

EDIT 2: Running MusicBee with:
Code
LC_ALL=ja_JP.UTF-8 wine /path/to/MusicBee.exe
seem to have solved the Japanese letters not being displayed properly.
Last Edit: September 09, 2017, 09:02:19 PM by BobbyWibowo
Discord: Bobby#4400

megalithic

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Hello,
I have MusicBee 3.1.6446 installed and working on OpenSuse 42.3 (latest). I installed via PlayOnLinux as that adds some nice features to Wine such as virtual drives for installs. The only change from default was to switched the Wine Windows version to Vista - it didn't work on the 'Windows 7' setting.

Only problem I have is that MusicBee crashes when trying to play .wma files (as mentioned above)
I installed the Packman codecs and .wma play works fine in VLC etc.

But I can avoid WMAs generally - a hangover from someone elses files I inherited!
Thanks
Andy

username

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thanks to SirPranceALot, i got it working almost perfectly.
the only problem i found is that i can't drag and drop, at all. not in the playing tracks panel (it just selects the tracks), and in the main panel it gives me an error related to .net, i didn't see anyone else mentioning this so it might be that i did something wrong during install.

jazbo8

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@sirprancealot - thanks for the ZIP file, it worked like a charm, I installed MB on OSX Maverick without any problem. But I don't know how to set up my network drives so MB can see them. All my music are stored on my server, and have the format "\\Server\disk#\Music\Files" in Windows.

Any suggestion will be appreciated. Thanks!
Last Edit: December 09, 2017, 03:45:17 PM by jazbo8

Lorenzo

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MuiscBee was one of the reasons that kept me on Windows but I've finally got it working fine on Antergos (so basically, Arch). Used PlayOnLinux and the portable version of MusicBee 3 on Wine 3.0. I did a x86 prefix (Windows 7) and only needed to install dotnet40 in order to make it working. In order to play m4a files I followed this.
As for the problem of Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters I imported fonts from my Windows partition folder in the MusicBee virtual drive's fonts folder (drive_c/windows/fonts). The font rendering isn't the best probably due to CJK Windows fonts that suck, but it's still better than nothing. I tried to manually change fonts in the MusicBee settings but for some reason fonts like the Adobe's ones or the Google CJK's ones are not showing up.
A thing that is not working, at least for me, is the "auto-pick panel colors" option. Instead of picking the color from the album's art it directly shows the album's cover in a stretched way. So I needed to turn it off and keep the gray color background.
I also wish keyboard's multimedial keys would work, but unfortunately are not. I'm sure there's a workaround but at the moment I still haven't looked into it.
MusicBee remote (my life saviour) is also working fine, so I'm really happy of the result!

Here's a screenshot from my screen:
Last Edit: January 09, 2018, 07:50:39 PM by Lorenzo

Yummychickenblue

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MuiscBee was one of the reasons that kept me on Windows but I've finally got it working fine on Antergos (so basically, Arch). Used PlayOnLinux and the portable version of MusicBee 3 on Wine 3.0. I did a x86 prefix (Windows 7) and only needed to install dotnet40 in order to make it working. In order to play m4a files I followed
As for the problem of Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters I imported fonts from my Windows partition folder in the MusicBee virtual drive's fonts folder (drive_c/windows/fonts). The font rendering isn't the best probably due to CJK Windows fonts that suck, but it's still better than nothing. I tried to manually change fonts in the MusicBee settings but for some reason fonts like the Adobe's ones or the Google CJK's ones are not showing up.
A thing that is not working, at least for me, is the "auto-pick panel colors" option. Instead of picking the color from the album's art it directly shows the album's cover in a stretched way. So I needed to turn it off and keep the gray color background.
I also wish keyboard's multimedial keys would work, but unfortunately are not. I'm sure there's a workaround but at the moment I still haven't looked into it.
MusicBee remote (my life saviour) is also working fine, so I'm really happy of the result!

Here's a screenshot from my screen:

Did you install GDI+? I had that problem but installing GDI+ via Winetricks made the colors display properly.

Lorenzo

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Did you install GDI+? I had that problem but installing GDI+ via Winetricks made the colors display properly.
How did you get it working? Installing GDI+ makes my MB crashing when I start it.

EDIT: looks like it's a problem with PlayOnLinux. Tried to use Wine alone and it's working fine.
By the way I still haven't found a way to make keyboard multimedia keys working...
Last Edit: January 31, 2018, 06:03:58 PM by Lorenzo