Author Topic: [GUIDE] How to use Musicbee on Linux (Archlinux/Debian based distro)  (Read 55669 times)

mattjones

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


When inputting that command, do I keep it as "WhereYouWantYourWinePrefix" or should I change it? If so, what do I change it to? I just installed Manjaro today and I'm trying to get a decent music player working.

Secondly, are commands in the first post all that I need, or is there something missing?

pivAd

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


When inputting that command, do I keep it as "WhereYouWantYourWinePrefix" or should I change it? If so, what do I change it to? I just installed Manjaro today and I'm trying to get a decent music player working.

Secondly, are commands in the first post all that I need, or is there something missing?

1. No need to. I'm using Manjaro KDE, and I placed my prefix to: ~/.local/share/wineprefixes/.WineBee

I kinda changed the '.WineBee' to win32-mb though, seems cleaner to me. if you plan to change the name, don't forget to change in the other commands as well.

2. Yeah, everything works after religiously following the instructions (other than personal name changes to files)

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On the other hand, I have a personal question of mine. Has anyone tried making .mp4 or other video files play on MusicBee through other applications, such as .vlc?

I have tried pretty much everything to try and get it working, the problem seems to be mainly on MusicBee, which always ends on 'Unable to play this file - it has an unsupported format or is corrupted'. It kinda worked on .m4v, but VLC failed to play it.

Pretty much tried regedit as suggested in WineHQ, and every other wacky stuff suggested in other forums


Apparently, somehow, it started working for me all of a sudden. Phew! More than happy with Musicbee works in Manjaro KDE, don't have any problems with it so far other than Theater Mode / Visualizer, which aren't really a concern for me, and that Right Click > Search > Locate in Windows Explorer doesn't work.

---

I really do hope MusicBee either gets open-sourced, or gets a Linux support in the future. It's a media player I can never ever replace--it's really amazing, and packed-full of features I can't seem to find anywhere else. (foobar2000's too much of a mess to personally customize the way I want it to be like in MusicBee)

vvv Apologies to the mod below. I've already read what the creator thinks in the FAQs. Just wishing for an official port. But hey, Musicbee works really great without any dealbreaking problems in Manjaro KDE, so there's that. :D
Last Edit: December 10, 2020, 05:24:57 PM by pivAd

phred

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I really do hope MusicBee either gets open-sourced, or gets a Linux support in the future.
Please see the FAQ for open source and Linux
https://musicbee.fandom.com/wiki/FAQ
Download the latest MusicBee v3.5 or 3.6 patch from here.
Unzip into your MusicBee directory and overwrite existing files.

----------
The FAQ
The Wiki
Posting screenshots is here
Searching the forum with Google is  here

tralph3

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Anyone else can't run this command:
Code
WINEPREFIX=path/to/whereYouWantYourWineprefix/.WineBee winetricks -q dotnet48 xmllite gdiplus

on Manjaro XFCE? I could get this running on Mint, but on Manjaro it gets stuck repeteadly on a lot of "fix me" lines, always repeating the same, never advances, after a while my whole system hangs (yes I created the prefix beforehand and changed the command to point to it). I also tried with dotnet46 and nothing, this shit ain't working.

gregsanz182

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Anyone else can't run this command:
Code
WINEPREFIX=path/to/whereYouWantYourWineprefix/.WineBee winetricks -q dotnet48 xmllite gdiplus

on Manjaro XFCE? I could get this running on Mint, but on Manjaro it gets stuck repeteadly on a lot of "fix me" lines, always repeating the same, never advances, after a while my whole system hangs (yes I created the prefix beforehand and changed the command to point to it). I also tried with dotnet46 and nothing, this shit ain't working.

I don't know why, but it seems the installation of dotnet48 via winetricks is broken. You can install only xmllite and gdiplus, and then download the official dotnet 4.8 from microsoft page, and proceed to install it in the prefix just like you install musicbee.

Durhammer

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Hey folks,

I'm back (see earlier in this thread, back in May), now on Linux MX 19.3. I got MusicBee working mostly on Linux Mint but it nearly fried my machine in doing so. Maybe Mint 20 has better performance, but I'm not going to bother with that, nor am I going to try again to get MB working under Wine on MX.

Let me suggest to you to look at Cantata and not bother Steve any more about porting to Linux (though, if he did, I'd jump for it in a heartbeat!).

If you want a Linux music player that's beautiful, low resource, and does most anything you want it to, download and install the latest release (2.4.2) of Cantata. Even though the developer isn't updating/upgrading it with new features, he keeps fixing bugs (and sometimes the effect is like getting new features). It does it all for me, managing my music files, playing most any radio station I want (I have some that won't play on Guayadeque, Clementine, and others), search for, find, and manage podcasts, scrobbling, fetch artist Wiki info, images, album covers, and lyrics. Etc., etc., etc. In other words, pretty much anything MusicBee can do (and do soooo well on Windows, when I use Winders).

I've tried VLC (works great as a player only, hard to use, no user interface frills and thrills like MB and Cantata), Clementine (also not really being supported, but can't play some stations and IIRC the podcast support was limited), Guayadeque (again, can't play my favorite internet radio station, so why bother with the rest of it?), DeaDBeeF -- low resource, seemingly 'cause it doesn't have the functionality of MB and Cantata, and sooo many others that I'm tired of listing them. :-)

So stop bugging Steve to port MB to Linux (too much dependency on Microsoft proprietary stuff like .NET Framework) and get Cantata.

But yeah, if MB DID get ported, I'd be there in a heartbeat!

baconneggs15

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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.

You ever find a solution? Same issue running Linux Mint & WINE for me.

Iaith

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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.

You ever find a solution? Same issue running Linux Mint & WINE for me.

From what i could gather, linux with mtp devices is complicated in general and does not always work, so it's not really a music bee issue. What i did was dual boot windows and manjaro copy the linux settings to windows, boot into windows sync with my device so it is registered, then boot back into linux copy ALL the music bee setting files from music bee back to linux(careful if you are not copying  some it won't work) and then use music bee Wifi sync.

Rotom

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stop bugging Steve to port MB to Linux (too much dependency on Microsoft proprietary stuff like .NET Framework) and get Cantata.

But yeah, if MB DID get ported, I'd be there in a heartbeat!

Don't think people here are nagging Steve about porting MusicBee to Linux. It's probably a better idea to nag the WINE devs and provide debug info if you're going to nag anyone.

For native Linux music players, though, I'm going to suggest gmusicbrowser - especially those that are handling large music libraries as most MusicBee users are likely doing. It's old, but it does most of what MusicBee does in my experience (outside of maybe things like MTP device and radio support but I don't use either) and it does it pretty fast. It even does weighted shuffle too, and you can customise the algorithm based on your own criteria. If more people used it and it got the attention it needed, there would be more incentive to keep it updated. For the record, I looked for a music player that supported ID3v2.4 (with multi-value tags) and a rating system similar to MusicBee's (a 1-10 or 0.5 - 5 rating system, supporting half stars), and gmusicbrowser handles both scenarios really well. Other players... not so much. Some have issues with Opus gain, some have an incompatible/more awkward rating system, some have issues with ID3v2.4 tags, you get the idea.

Anyhow... I still need MusicBee for tagging (the tag hierarchy feature is so god damn useful, especially as a guy invested in genres, and it's something I want other players to have tbh), but sometimes I wanna just play something in there. For last.fm and other Internet-related things, install lib32-gnutls.

For users who use PipeWire as a PulseAudio replacement:
If you use PipeWire as a PulseAudio replacement, be sure to install the 32-bit libraries for it otherwise WINE will try to use the sound card exclusively through ALSA. On Arch Linux, lib32-pipewire is the package you want. Once that is installed and it thinks it's running under PulseAudio, you're good to go!

For users who want Discord Rich Presence:
If you want to use DiscordBee, be sure to download and run wine-discord-ipc-bridge (https://github.com/0e4ef622/wine-discord-ipc-bridge) on the prefix MusicBee is installed in first, then run MusicBee. It basically links the two pipes so Windows apps running under WINE will show Rich Presence on Linux versions of Discord, and I can confirm that DiscordBee just works with it (running 3.4.7805). Maybe someone could make a similar thing for MPRIS?

For KDE users:
Also, if you use KDE Plasma with MusicBee on a standalone window, you may run into the issue with the MusicBee window flickering when seeking. This is likely due to the tooltip taking the focus away from the main window (X.Org or KDE treats the tooltip as its own window). Giving MusicBee its own virtual desktop is a workaround but can be awkward to use. What appears to have fixed it for me is setting focus protection to high on MusicBee in KDE's Window Rules setting. The tooltip may go a bit weird but that's nothing to do with the fix I did - I think that's WINE being WINE.

Here are the settings I used:
Window class: musicbee.exe (match whole class not required)
Window types: Normal Window only should work - I don't think WINE discriminates "normal windows" in Windows and tooltips
Focus protection: Force/High
Last Edit: April 03, 2022, 01:12:25 PM by Rotom

LiamsNotABot

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This works perfecty on arch, other than one small issue i have, the skin background fails to load at all, so does a custom background, instead musicbee defaults to a solid grey/white. Anyone here by any chance have a solution?

Rotom

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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.

Deerhound

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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.

I have been using Windows 8 on my now rather old laptop for several years. I have recently wanted to try Linux and I chose Linux Mint (20.3), which I have set up to dual boot with Windows. Maybe I'm being foolish and getting too out of my depth but I wanted to give it a good try and push through the steep learning curve as best as possible.

Unfortunately, I have found nothing that comes even close to MusicBee available for Linux. The closest I might have found was Rhythmbox with Coverart Browser, but I have had problems trying to install Coverart Browser (and have found that others have had the same issue) and I really want to browse by covers (it just makes it much easier for me). Anyway, Rhythmbox is of course outside the remit of this forum so I won't go into that here. What I'm hoping for is some help installing MusicBee using Wine.

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.

I've also tried installing through Play On Linux.

Have I done something wrong? I've looked repeatedly through more than one past thread on here about installing MusicBee in Linux (but may have missed something) and have tried doing things in different ways (for example following the different instructions for installing .NET, as detailed in the WineHQ wiki). .NET appears to be installed, it's like MusicBee just isn't finding it?

Although I'm asking for help/advice, I'm also nervous of trying things because I'm kind of feeling around in the dark with Linux, but it would be good to know whether there are any other possibilities. Or should I just accept that this isn't going to work for me?

Thanks for any help/advice.

Rotom

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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.
Last Edit: May 19, 2022, 02:15:26 PM by Rotom

danejur

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I finally found how to get the File Converters section to work in settings! Using winetricks, select:
Quote
Install a Windows DLL or component
and then
Quote
wmp11 - Windows Media Player 11
. I'm not sure if it matters, but I also have my wine prefix set to spoof Windows 7.

Rotom

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I finally found how to get the File Converters section to work in settings! Using winetricks, select:
Quote
Install a Windows DLL or component
and then
Quote
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.