[GUIDE] How to use Musicbee on Linux (Archlinux/Debian based distro)

[Mreve]

Disclaimer : English is not my native language. Feel free to correct me if I'm not clear.

Hi,

I lost a LOT of time tinkering with native linux music managers, trying to make them suitable for me. I should have directly tried to use Musicbee through wine. Musicbee is clearly the best music manager out there !


I'm not the only one to try this out but some posts I read on the forum aren't really updated and they encourage people to install useless wine dependencies.  


I run Archlinux but I don't think it really matters. Here is what I've done :


1) Install wine-staging and winetricks. If you're on arch, I think you know how to do this...  

Code

sudo pacman -S wine-staging winetricks

Note : wine-mono package is useless (it just downloads wine-mono.msi but doesn't install it for wine) and you don't need wine-mono for Musicbee anyway.

Archlinux is easy.  

For Debian-based distro, it's a little bit more annoying : https://wiki.winehq.org/Ubuntu



2) MS .NET 4.8 doesn't work with a 64bits wineprefix yet so you'll need to create a new 32bits wineprefix for MusicBee ! It's better to use distinct wineprefix than just one wineprefix for all your windows softwares because if you mess up with wine components, you can simply delete the wineprefix and start again.

Code

WINEARCH=win32 WINEPREFIX=path/to/whereYouWantYourWineprefix/ winecfg

Note: If you're new to Linux, you of course need to change path/to/whereYouWantYourWineprefixwith a valid location. For example, I created this wineprefix in a hidden folder in my music library:  WINEPREFIX=/home/mreve/Musique/.wine32MBee/

Note 2 : If you have a 4K screen, I suggest you to change the screen resolution to 240ppp in the tab Display.


3) Install Musicbee dependencies

Code

WINEPREFIX=path/to/whereYouWantYourWineprefix/ winetricks -q dotnet48 xmllite gdiplus 

4) Download the latest Musicbee version (take the full download) : https://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?board=6.0

5) Unzip and install Musicbee

Code

WINEPREFIX=path/to/whereYouWantYourWineprefix/ wine MusicBeeSetup_3_3.exe

Et voilà !


You can then create an alias to easily launch Musicbee. Here the command line to do this :

Code

echo "alias Musicbee='WINEPREFIX=path/to/whereYouWantYourWineprefix/ wine path/to/whereYouWantYourWineprefix/ /drive_c/Program\ Files/MusicBee/MusicBee.exe'" >> ~/.bashrc

Close your terminal and open a new one to use the new alias. Don't be afraid of all the errors in the terminal. It's normal when using Wine. The main thing is that Musicbee is perfectly running !

Current issues (WINE staging 4.20 - Musicbee 3.3) :

1) Error when dragging playlists into a folder from the left panel
WORKAROUND : Arrange the playlists from the file manager (in the Musicbee library folder)

2) Crash when trying to change settings in File converters section
WORKAROUND : None but It is still possible to use the format conversion feature (Menu-->Tools-->Convert Format)

3) You say to me

[StfN]

Hello!

First off, I have to say, very good guide. I was coming here to post my own after finally figuring out a way to get MusicBee up and running, but found yours to be more complete.

Maybe you, or someone else who is more experienced with wine or linux, can help me with one little problem though, that I had when I installed MusicBee with my method, as well as with your guide:
So, I'm using Linux Mint 19.3, and Wine 5.0. I had to install .NET Framework 4.6.1 with winetricks, because the highest available version is 4.6.2 (which is broken), 4.6.1 works, and is also what MusicBee uses.
Anyways, everything seems to work well except that during music playback I get audio skips every one to two minutes. Usually just a very small skip, maybe a tenth of a second, sometimes a longer one. I have already searched the internet for audio playback skips in wine, but found nothing that worked for me. I have tried using pulse audio as well as alsa, have tried every possible output in MusicBee preferences, 32 bit output on/off, increased buffer, but none of it makes any difference.
Does anyone have any ideas?

[Iaith]

I followed the steps and everything works so far (except the mentioned bugs). I am running Manjaro 19.0.2. I have the problem that MB doesn't recognize my with cable connected device, while manjaro does.  MB-remote also doesn't seem to find a connection, not sure if they are related - something about them not beeing able to look outside the box? Anyone had a similar problem, if - how did you manage to solve it?

PS:Audio blips i also sometimes encounter, though much more rarely.

[jeroni]

It works pretty well on Arch. But it takes about a 20% of CPU (with an i7-8700K). Is it normal or am I doing something wrong?

[Durhammer]

Hello!

First off, I have to say, very good guide. I was coming here to post my own after finally figuring out a way to get MusicBee up and running, but found yours to be more complete.

Maybe you, or someone else who is more experienced with wine or linux, can help me with one little problem though, that I had when I installed MusicBee with my method, as well as with your guide:
So, I'm using Linux Mint 19.3, and Wine 5.0. I had to install .NET Framework 4.6.1 with winetricks, because the highest available version is 4.6.2 (which is broken), 4.6.1 works, and is also what MusicBee uses.
Anyways, everything seems to work well except that during music playback I get audio skips every one to two minutes. Usually just a very small skip, maybe a tenth of a second, sometimes a longer one. I have already searched the internet for audio playback skips in wine, but found nothing that worked for me. I have tried using pulse audio as well as alsa, have tried every possible output in MusicBee preferences, 32 bit output on/off, increased buffer, but none of it makes any difference.
Does anyone have any ideas?

Amen to that, regarding thanks to all that led the way on this! And thanks to the marvelous developers of Wine and Winetricks who make it possible!

I am running Linux Mint 19.3 with Cinnamon 4.4.8, Linux kernel 5.3.0-53-generic, Wine 4.0 and Winetricks 20180217. I'm sorry that Wine doesn't really support .NET and thus MusicBee in 64 bit mode, but so far it's working for me. Installed MB 3.3.7367 after installing .NET 4.6.1 (the most painful part of the whole setup) with WINEARCH=32 set.

I wasn't all THAT familiar with MusicBee except when I booted into my Windows 10 machine. I have been using Cantata 2.2.0 on Linux and at some point, found its port to Windows. It's great, but Mr. Drummond isn't developing it anymore, and there are newer things out there. Steven is still developing and maintaining MusicBee, so now I'm happy to be onboard with using it on Linux. I've got a lot to learn!

One thing I'd like to figure out is how to size the main window so I can move the player controls to the bottom. Right now, if I try that, I can't see it. Really can't see the bottom of the window, period! Might just be a Wine issue....

Anyway, thanks to all who have contributed to making this possible!

[Durhammer]

Okay, now there's an issue. I manually set up all the radio stations I have in both Cantata on Linux and in MusicBee 3.3.7367 on Windows 10. They all work well in both environments. However, I have ONE station that won't run in MB under Wine on Linux Mint. Wonderful station, "That Station" (thatstation.net), stream URL is

https://live.wostreaming.net/direct/capitolbroad-wclyamaac-ibc1

I keep getting the dreaded "Unable to open stream (ERROR=BASS_ERROR_UNKNOWN)." Not a bit of problem on Windows 10, not a bit of problem in Cantata on Linux (or Cantata in Windows, for that matter). Originally, MB marked it as having an unknown bit rate. I tried setting it to 128k, 192k, and finally after checking MB on Windows, which showed it as 64K, to that. Same result.

Any ideas? Thanks in advance!

[Steven]

i expect its an AAC stream and you need bass_aac.dll for that (aac decoding is included in windows)

[Durhammer]

DUH! Oops, so sorry! I think I'd actually seen that elsewhere in the forums and stupidly thought it was something that was incorporated into the newer releases. I found the latest download link in the forums and put in in, and SHAZAM!

Thanks, Steven!

And thanks for the reminder that there's lots of solutions buried in the forums if you search 'em. I'm going to go back and review the newbie details about searching now.

[Durhammer]

Well, crud. I need to stay away from "Playing Now"! Probably too graphic intensive under Wine. Overheated my old Samsung RF711 laptop and Linux crashed. Started monitoring CPU usage with the "same" streams (not entirely the same at the same time, nature of the beast) running Cantata (MPD component mostly) and MusicBee. Linux "top" command shows MB and Wineserver still taking 24% and 11% even when paused, running Cantata (MPD logging ~3%). When MB runs, it's more like 43%. When I click the "Playing Now" tab, top shows MB using 98-103% CPU! Sheet!

My Psensor app shows the overall CPU usage (and temps) and when MB is running, the CPU% is ~13, and when Playing Now is active, it goes up to ~25%. Even when playing is paused, CPU% is around 20%. Take MB and Wine out of the picture, and Cantata+MPD running, it's stable at ~7%. Pause Cantata, it drops to 2-3%. Granted, Cantata doesn't have the same cool album art and visulalizer displays. It has an "I(nfo)" icon that shows Wikipedia (etc.) text about the track and lyrics, so just text. Might be a plugin for that, but I've never used it. Guess I can at least do without the album art -- off to find out how to turn that off...

Any other hints at how to minimize resources would be appreciated, folks!

[Durhammer]

Okay, things are MUCH better when disabling the (sigh, unfortunately, REALLY cool) Visualizer on the Now Playing tab. Temperature and CPU% much more stable and reasonable!

Guess I can live without that cool cuteness....

[grymas]

Thank you for this guide.

I'm getting a weird issue, MusicBee will randomly freeze or hang, for a second or two, before resuming. The whole app is frozen for that time and I can't interact with anything. Something to note is that the music playing doesn't skip once the freezing stops, it just resumes exactly where it was.

Everything else works fine, and this freeze happens every few minutes (1,2 or 3 minutes in general).

I've tried on a 32 and 64bit prefix, i've reinstalled it on wine a few times. I was originally on the stable branch then switched to dev, same problem.

I've tried running in console to get logs or with the debug prefix, doesn't seem to be throwing errors. With the debug prefix the debug itself freezes when MusicBee freezes.

Has anyone else gotten this issue? It's frustrating because everything is working completely fine and I have no idea where this could be coming from.

On latest Kubuntu, latest wine-devel, latest MB version.

EDIT: I tried some more things, to no avail. Here's some more detail.

I have 16GB or ram, Intel i7 8700 CPU and a GTX1070 nvidia GPU, with proprietary drivers (440).

I uninstalled and reinstalled wine from scratch, switched to the staging branch. Tried both with 32 or 64 prefix.
I tried with a fresh MusicBee install with no settings touched.
I tried switching Nvidia drivers (to the open source version) just in case, no dice.
I tried disabling all player settings or switching audio output.
I tried increasing the buffer or the "entire file" option.
I tried disabling/removing any kind of visualizer.
I tried a few wine performance options related to CPU (such as threaded optimization).
I tried with different filetypes, mp3, flac, ogg.. it doesn't seem to affect it.
I went and got a different bassmix.dll file version (don't ask me why there was a mention of it on a thread somewhere) and used it, no effect.
I tried turning on event mode for WASAPI, no effect.

Here's a more precise description of the bug :
I start MusicBee, the first track plays fine (Tested this a bunch of times, can't be 100% sure though).
After playing at least 1-2 minutes of the first track, if I switch to another track (manually or not), and let if play a bit, then the bug happens.
The bug seems to be CPU related, I don't notice any rising memory or any memory change before, during or after the freeze, but I do see a CPU spike when it freezes, then the CPU usage resets on the process viewer.
The bug always seems to happen around the 1:00 to 1:30 minute mark of the track (It seems to always be around 1:10 or 1:15), and there's almost always a kind of warning sign : first there's a micro-pause that's barely noticable, then a few seconds after that the big freeze happens (musicbee stops responding for a few seconds before resuming).

Scratching my head here, would love any opinions on this.

[Wander]

Running it on Arch Linux and it's running well! A shame you can't just drag'n'drop but I'd settle for whatever workarounds I can do inside MusicBee, as the reason I use it over anything offered in the Linux ecosystem is how great it is as a playlist organiser.

Speaking of, another workaround for the drag error is to right-click and use the Add to Playlist option in the context menu. That still works until that particular drag'n'drop bug gets fixed in WINE. Only issues I have now are slight crackling in the audio and no AAC (missing bass_aac dll it seems).

Edit: AAC problems sorted. 👍

[grymas]

Well i'm happy to report that it all works perfectly now.

I can confirm this was NOT a musicbee issue, and probably not even a wine issue.

If anyone experiences anything similar, all that's changed since last time I tried is that a few updates went by. So it's probably a pulseaudio or ALSA problem (or some related sound library), and either a specific bug was fixed or the config of pulseaudio was changed (very likely).

I did notice before that I had rare sound issues on other music players, even native linux music players such as clementine. So yea, probably pulseaudio bad/weird config on KDE's end, or Ubuntu's end, because I didn't really touch it.

All's well that ends well

[tralph3]

This is working amazingly well on Mint 20! Honestly it's insane. It's also really lightweight and not laggy at all. I have an i5 3210m.. so nothing out of this world. Music Bee uses about 2% CPU on Windows and it's sitting at 6-7% with this method, and the visualizer is working fine too! Thanks a lot man, this was one big issue of moving to Linux that is now fixed.

[gregsanz182]

I've been using MusicBee in Manjaro KDE via wine for almost 2 years, and these are some tricks to solve some bugs that I encountered every once in a while:

- To enable internet access, install lib32-gnutls library with your distribution package manager. In Arch Linux can be found as lib32-gnutls in official repos
- Some times MusicBee crashes on startup, and throws a "Font ? not found". To avoid this, I disabled MusicBee's splash screen on start up. You can find the setting in General preferences
- I dont like the way fonts are rendered when using wine, so I changed MusicBee fonts to Noto Sans (the one used by KDE as default)

By coincidence, I happened to install MusicBee using almost the same steps from this thread, the only thing a wasn't aware of was xmllite.