Hi, apologies for yet another “help me replace my Windows app 😭” post. I am attempting to move to Linux and have been mostly successful - day-to-day stuff, programming, games, it all works great! The biggest deal-breaker so far has actually been a music player… Is there anything that comes even close to MusicBee? I have yet to find it and am surprised there is such a gap in the space considering Linux seems full of data hoarders and collectors. Before you ask, I have tried running MusicBee through Wine but I just don’t think it will work - Everything is 3x slower than in Windows, there are little bugs everywhere, pressing the wrong dialogue may crash the program, and some pages just don’t load… So! Let’s get into my pipe-dream of what I would want to keep from MusicBee:
Must-haves (deal-breakers):
- Multiple artist tags!!! All my files have artists tagged separately, with a display artist tagged separate. I can change the internal tags I use, but I can’t go without any form of multi-artist support.
- Browsing and searching by various tags, such as Album Artist and Genre.
- Support for volume levelled (replay gain) playback.
Features that I feel I need:
- Scrobbling.
- Auto playlists that support any combination of tags and preferrably allow referencing other playlists.
- Registering external tools to send files to via shortcuts or context menus, to supplement the features that I inevitably will miss.
Nice-to-haves (could be replaced with another app or script or by re-organising my library):
- Tag editor
- Support for custom tags.
- Conversion to other file types including playlist re-labelling.
- File moving and re-organisation based on user-customisable formats, i.e
<Album Artist>/<Album>/<Title>. - Tagging of volume levelling (replay gain).
Yeah, I don’t think it’s happening either. But I figure I should ask before I just give up. Web apps would be fine too, btw! If you’re wondering why I want custom tag support, it’s because: I’ve found it much easier to use for auto-playlist creation, and I have found it more resistant to data loss and file moves since I don’t have to rely on the music players internal library. It could be replaced by transferring that data into the Comments or Keywords tag, but that still requires very strong auto playlist support.
So my question is this:
Are there any Linux-native music players that fit some of these criteria? If not, what is your favourite that comes close? And as an additional question, if you were to extend an open source player to support any of these features, which do you think would be the best basis to build upon?
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Strawberry perhaps?
It’s the closest we’ve got, but it does not have multiple tag support that I can see. :( I am not surprised that it lacks multi-artist, that is niche, but even the genre only supports basic strings. So to create an auto playlist that only matches the “Rock” genre, you have to use
containswhich then matches Hard Rock, Alternative Rock, etc etc. I know I’m picky lol, but worth documenting this to save time for anyone else as picky as me.Ah ok, bummer
I couldn’t find anything comparable with Musicbee…
I too was having the issues you described with wine. Here’s how to fix it. Uninstall musicbee , install .NET Framework 4.8 via winetricks , and then install musicbee again. And it should work.
After doing the initial library scan, I don’t see any significant slowdowns in my 30,000 song library. Album art is sometimes a little slow to load in when scrolling but that’s all I really noticed
I followed this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AO7thSZbg4A
MusicBee is one of the programs I miss the most. My son told me he still runs it through Wine with some fiddling so it seems possible. Personally I’ve settled on Lollypop. I’m not in love with it; it’s fine. It’s quite minimalist… maybe too much for some. I use Puddletags for editing tags and Syncthing to sync music from my PC to my phone.
Strawberry perhaps? I found it a very in depth music app.
I’m in the same boat! Musicbee was my replacement for Winamp when that went away, and it did everything I wanted, tagging, podcasts, playlists. I still ajve it on my work PC, but I’m missing it at home. Thanks for making this thread, hopefully you find something that works
Have you tried MusicBrainz Picard? I think it should be able to do most of the things you need.
I’ve used it a lot on Windows! Quite handy for preliminary tagging. I haven’t used its file organisation though, but it could do the trick. I found the scripting language so obtuse though that I decided I’d rather tackle Python’s Mutagen library jank instead >_>
Can’t remember any native programs, and the ones I use have very few of the functions you need. And not quite a solution, but while you don’t find a replacement, maybe you could try to run MusicBee through Wine?
I’m using gmusicbrowser. It’s unmaintained since long time ago, but still has a working migrated branch to gtk3. I have forked and fixed some issues that were bugging me, able to compile a deb package on my own. I wish I had more energy in my life, I’d love to code a bit more and maybe reintroduce it back into Debian repos
@IronKrill@lemmy.ca
Hey, out of curiosity I installed musicbee portable (aside: it’s not very portable) using wine in cachyos (latest cachyos with latest wine).
I set a custom install directory and imported my music. It appears to have worked and I have it playing music right now.
Amarok and Rhythmbox are close. Most players you’ll find are less on the media management side as they want to be low-profile, where Musicbee seems to intentionally be both.
Edit: There’s Strawberry as well, which is cross platform
Rhythmbox unfortunately does not support multiple tags, that I can see. It combines genres into one and any artist tag beyond the first is completely ignored and unsearchable.
Amarok is a similar story, artists and genres are combined into one string. You can search them via “contains” but that is very imprecise.
Have you tried this?
