MusicBee 3 with Wine and dual boot

[Tarc]

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.

[r2h]

I'm using MusicBee with dual boot too (Windows 10 64 bit and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS 64 bit).

I'm using ONE portable version of the program which I installed on my hard disk. This installation I use with Windows as well as with Ubuntu/Wine.

I found a solution for the library path: A virtual drive letter M: points to the folder where the (mp3) files are. This virtual drive I created in Windows 10 and in Wine/Ubuntu. In MusicBee the library path is set to "M:\"

So there is no problem switching between the OS.

[haggers]

Of no use to me but a very cool guide, I'm sure people will find it helpful

[shepard]

Do you also have these two issues?

1) Album thumbnails are always blank in the main panel, if you check the files (e.g. /drive_c/MusicBee/AppData/InternalCache/AlbumCovers/NUMBER/B1234_5678.png) they have 0 bytes.

2) When you edit tags manually or from the internet, using Auto-tag by Album, the files often cannot be saved. You get an error like File exists [C:\users\shepard\Temp\01. filename something~0000003.mp3].

It's the only issues left afaik, and I don't want to bother MusicBee's author after reading the FAQ, but if anybody solves this it would be great. I have tried using even the most verbose wine debug options and I get no error messages.

[LR7]

The file exist error also happens if I want to edit a file in any way, for example change the rating. Sometimes I have to wait a few seconds after playing another file and it will write, often enough not. I tried switching off and on several settings, analyzed the tags and mp3 files for error with eyed3, mp3val, mp3 Diags and mp3tag - no clue.

[KiraTM]

I've got a workaround for using MusicBee on Linux, but you'll need to install a virtual machine with a Windows system. With a few tweaks (on Mint Cinnamon, but probably works on other distros too) you can make the VM look like a standard application. I even got WiFi sync working. However, there are downsides like no global hotkeys from outside.
A recent update made MusicBee way smoother, so there's little to no difference in using it through the VM.



Yeah, this is no solution for the given problem. But as long as WINE won't run MusicBee well, I can live with that. If you want, I can write a guide.

[LR7]

Changing the temp directory seems to work, at least for me

How to set a custom Temp folder

You can make MB use a custom temp folder instead of the default Windows Temp folder when your C drive doesn't have enough free space for a task you're about to perform. Add the following with the proper path into MusicBee3Settings.ini file.

Code

<ENV_TempFolder>E:\temp</ENV_TempFolder>

[shepard]

I've got a workaround for using MusicBee on Linux, but you'll need to install a virtual machine with a Windows system. With a few tweaks (on Mint Cinnamon, but probably works on other distros too) you can make the VM look like a standard application. I even got WiFi sync working. However, there are downsides like no global hotkeys from outside.
A recent update made MusicBee way smoother, so there's little to no difference in using it through the VM.



Yeah, this is no solution for the given problem. But as long as WINE won't run MusicBee well, I can live with that. If you want, I can write a guide.

You really don't want to use virtual machines for that. It's a pain in the ass no matter how much you automate or even if you use the best stacks like KVM. Big waste of resources too since there's no such thing as a lightweight windows vm, not even the images MS created just for that.

Changing the temp directory seems to work, at least for me

How to set a custom Temp folder

You can make MB use a custom temp folder instead of the default Windows Temp folder when your C drive doesn't have enough free space for a task you're about to perform. Add the following with the proper path into MusicBee3Settings.ini file.

Code

<ENV_TempFolder>E:\temp</ENV_TempFolder>

Nice, that solved the problem for me too. Only one issue to go now! I wonder if an ENV for the artwork cache would also solve that problem (it's the resized artwork from internalcache/albumcovers)

[KiraTM]

You really don't want to use virtual machines for that. It's a pain in the ass no matter how much you automate or even if you use the best stacks like KVM. Big waste of resources too since there's no such thing as a lightweight windows vm, not even the images MS created just for that.

Yes, it was an overkill solution, but by far the easiest one. I have an i7 and 16 GB of RAM, so resources never were a problem for my VM.

However, I tried to run MusicBee through WINE (Stable 4.0) now and it kind of works. I had to install .NET 4.8 manually for the MB environment and simply copied my Windows VM Library and AppData folder to the installation folder.

- The missing covers were no issue, but MusicBee can't play AAC files bought from iTunes. FLAC and MP3 seem to work fine. I had to manually add the "Bass AAC Encoder" to my application directory. This is described in the FAQ.
- Non-Latin characters are squares, but I guess I need to install a font for this. Installing "cjkfonts" through winetricks did the trick.
- In Grid View, album covers are not displayed as a blurry background, they're just an pixelated upscale. Here I had to install gdiplus through winetricks.
- Crossfade doesn't work either. It works now but I can't say why. Maybe one of the above added libraries did something here. Gapless playback works well too.
- Music sometimes stop for a fraction of a second, happened to me twice while playing four songs. This seemed like a temporary problem since it didn't happen again one day after.
- MusicBee is crashing when I select "File Converter" in Options dialog.
- Drag & Drop inside MusicBee is not working, it's a pain to edit playlists. According to the console, this interface is missing. SOmeone on the web fixed it by installing gdiplus_winxp but this breaks MusicBee completely, since it removes the new gdiplus.dll.