What works
- Importing and listening to music
- Downloading and listening to podcasts
- Automatic imports to inbox
- ReplayGain volume analysis
- Creating playlists and auto-playlists
- Dragging and dropping into playlists now works
- Adding custom icons for playlists also works
- Now Playing/Theater Mode views
- Mini and compact player window modes
- Customising the player and its views
- Skins
- Plugin usage works, provided the plugin is installed when MusicBee is closed.
- As always if they work varies by what plugin is used. In my case, I used ScrobblerBrainz, which works mostly but does have issues with mangled submissions sometimes. Museexmatch works, too.
- Built-in visualisations
- DSPs and equaliser
- Editing tags, as well as using custom and virtual tags.
- File converter preferences, when the wmp11 verb is installed via winetricks.
What does not
- Font redirection is still broken, which leads to anything not in the current font's scripts being shown as boxes.
- This is prevalant in Chinese, Japanese and Korean scripts. See bug 53019.
- MusicBee will freak out if the filenames in your library don't stick to the constraints of NTFS (e.g. uses prohibited characters). This is visible by MusicBee asking to remove these files as it can't find them.
- When hovering over anything that activates a tooltip, said tooltip will sometimes steal focus from the main window.
- Dragging the tabs to re-organise them still doesn't work, throws up a System.NotImplementedException.
- Repainting issues - random black splotches and some UI elements will appear stuck unless "repainted". Example, the track details pane will get stuck, and switching between the lyrics and details on that pane will bring it back.
- Certain album covers also appear as not having album art even though they do when exported.
- Disabling skinning window borders or using the Windows skin will result in no borders being rendered at all
- MilkDrop visualisation plugin won't work. Would error out about being unable to detect Shader Model 2.0 support with a garbled GPU name. With dx3d9 installed, it will complain about DirectX failing to initialise, code 2154.
- This is a mixed bag on WinAmp and WACUP, too, so it might be a MilkDrop problem rather than a MusicBee one.
Workarounds
- Font redirection: Use a TrueType font that has all of the scripts you want. In my case, I used WenQuanYi Micro Hei.
- Tooltip focus stealing: (KDE Plasma only) Make a new window rule targeting MusicBee specifically that gives it high focus protection.
- Tab dragging: You'll have to just remove then re-add tabs in the order you want.
- NTFS constraints: No workaround, make sure your tagger has an option for "Windows compatibility" if it handles file naming (i.e. NTFS compatibility) and keep to NTFS' constraints even if you're using a non-NTFS filesystem.
- Window borders: No workaround, keep to the borders provided by the skins.
I'm not exactly sure on what the issue with the album covers is, I'll have to do more testing there. The repainting issue may be an issue with WINE rather than MusicBee itself.
What was not tested
- AAC playback.
- According to the developer, you need bass_aac.dll for AAC playback on systems that don't support it OOTB.
- CD ripping
- Last.fm scrobbling
- Filters
- Automatic import to library
- Import from WMP/iTunes
- Internet stream playback
- Plugin import via MusicBee (it's also quite finicky on Windows if I recall)
- Most of the options in the Tools sub-menu (having never needed to use them)
Hardware tested
Graphics:
- GPU: AMD
- Driver: open source
Additional Comments
- WINEARCH: win32
- Winetricks packages installed: gdiplus, xmllite, dotnet48, allfonts, wmp11, dx3d9, dxvk
- allfonts contains the relevant fonts needed to work around the CJK problem.
- Desktop environment: KDE Plasma 5.27.4
