Drag&Drop & wine, both Gnome and KDE desktops - MusicBee

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Hi folks!

To make it short, I am not exactly a linux noob, I had a long break (10 years +) in which I used windows for my daily needs (browsing, movies, music). Before that I used to be quite knowledgeable with Gentoo Linux. It just became a pita to maintain as a pure hobby. Lately I was thinking to switch to Linux again, because we all know Windows isn’t getting any better. So I installed latest MAnjaro with KDE and Gnome on two of my machines. Configured it, everything works quite well. But, and that’s a real showstopper “but” for me: I installed the Windows app MusicBee under wine, so far so good. Until I figured out, no drag and drop is possible. At all. Nothing. I browsed through the internet, found many posts regarding this. Suggestions were switching back to Xorg, but even that doesn’t work at all. Am I missing something? Is it a lost cause?

I would be happy hearing your feedback and suggestions.

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Hi @martux, and welcome!

From: MusicBee now works under wine:

A recent example is that drag and drop issues on MusicBee seem to be getting/gotten fixed in the latest staging builds of WINE

But other than telling you to make sure you’re using the latest wine-staging, I can’t give you any advice.

Edit:

Also see:

https://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=17074.msg220145#msg220145

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hello martux,

wine had always some flaws and i’m not sure if this is a bug or not but it doesn’t matter. if you really have to have a ms-win-application to run in linux then check out the internet,youtube,etc.. for “WinBoat”. this is the most “hottest” solution for a lot of users. even applications like photoshop will run with it. winboat can be installed direct from the aur.

needless to say that the best solution if you want to run win-apps with linux is to create a virtual-machine with a origin windows from where you access needed win-applications. in this case search the internet for “qemu/kvm/libvirt and ms-windows”.

something like this one:

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Possibly

What do your research tell you?

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Thanks for all your constructive input. In the meantime I figured that if I also install Total Commander, drag and drop will work from there (wine to wine so to speak). Of course this is not what I want, but it’s better than nothing for now. A lot of work has already gotten into this. I will review everything that was mentioned here too. Thanks

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Did you use the AUR?:

pamac search -a musicbee
musicbee  3.5.8698-4                                                                             AUR
Advanced, feature-rich freeware audio player (uses Wine)
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Of course if WINE is an issue for you, the best bet is to install Windows into a VM, or use Winboat.

I would also encourage you to look for an Open Source App that you can replace the Proprietary software with.

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re this:

The package in AUR is flagged as out of date since May this year - likely because of the changes to the current wine in Manjaro and Arch, which does not support 32 bit prefixes anymore.

The software (see the PKGBUILD on the AUR web site)
not only depends on wine itself, but also on
winetricks
wine-mono
lib32-libpulse

Not sure whether the lib32-libpulse is still needed with the current wine version - perhaps not.

You could delete the old wine prefix and create a new one,
or use Bottles to manage and use an older wine version which still can use 32 bit prefixes
and is also not dependent on the system wide wine version from Manjaro repos.

If I have time I will test installing it using the current wine in a dedicated 64 bit prefix - you could try that as well in the meantime.

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I’m curious… why is this such a “showstopper”?

I mean, yes, MusicBee is a nice Windows application; I’ve revisited it many times over the years; and installed it yet again a month or two ago, and it’s looking better than ever…

…and here’s another dramatic “but”…

…there are many Linux music players available (admittedly, some with varying levels of finesse) but any of these are likely to be more desirable in terms of native performance.

Are you familiar with Strawberry, DeaDBeeF, Audacious or Museeks? They were only the first few that came to mind, but I’m starting to warm up to a relative newcomer Tauon Music Box (Windows, MacOS and Linux).

  • Tauon is available via the AUR
    pamac build tauron-music-box

Other possibilities (a matter of taste) also include Amberol, Elisa and Sayonara. What? OK, bye!

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Hi Guys! Wow for all the replies.

I try to adress all issues. I am quite a music junkie with an excessive collection. MusicBee has this very nice feature called auto or dynamic playlists. Basically I can define parameters for playlists, eg play only genre xyz. I also heavily depend on the rating, but that’s a minor issue, because the ratings are stored within the tags. Basically MusicBee is just the best audio player I have found so far.

We, I tried winboat, but it’s pretty slow and kind of too much for just having an audio player running.

And guess what… No drag&drop either.

I figured that from another wine app, eg explorer or total commander it will work.

Wine-staging also doesn’t allow d&d, neither under Gnome or KDE. But this is for now my best shot.

Everything works, except that. As I play files mostly already in my collection, I don’t need d&d too often, only when hearing new songs not yet in my library.

The mentioned audio players are all completely unknown to me. I had Amarok and Clementine installed, but both lack plenty features that I got used to. I will have a look in all the mentioned apps, but that might take a while.

Thanks so far for the helpful replies. This is what I used to love in the Linux community, you’re never really alone.

BTW, does anyone know if 24bit/96Khz sound is possible in Manjaro? I couldn’t find any way to set it manually and output through HDMI seems to be 48Khz PCM “only”.

Cheers and have a nice evening!

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When I had a massive music collection stored on my old PC a couple of years ago, I used strawberry which had an excellent dynamic playlist feature. If I recall correctly, playlists could be set up using any combination of parameters such as rating, genre, not played in at least XX days/weeks/months etc.

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Of course, we’re talking Strawberry for Linux.

Off-topic (slightly):

I personally used Strawberry Music Player on all platforms until (maybe a year or two ago) when the maintainer decided to charge a fee.

Now, it’s open-source software; charging a fee is generally frowned upon; instead it has been disguised as a “donation” – a forced donation – on principle, this annoys me greatly.

If one desires to use Strawberry for either MacOS or Windows, there is no choice but to pay the price or setup the necessary build environment(s) to roll your own.

Don’t get me wrong, everyone deserves to be rewarded in some way for their hard work in maintaining software, but a donation is (and should be) voluntary; and not a prerequisite for obtaining open-source software.

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