Running Foobar in Linux, Alien Cats crossbreeding with Penguins Options

[Yotsuya]

I have had several people ask me about making foobar work under linux. There are several threads mentioning it is possible however it is hard to find much detail about it. I have foobar running rather stable on my linux box and have created this thread in an attempt to provide a central place for questions and answers for running foobar under linux. Peter has indicated he will not develop a linux version of foobar so I thought it would be proper to keep these sorts of questions out of the main threads. I intend to update this post and polish these instructions as discussion reveals more information. I have pieced this together from various other sources and applied them to my own configuration. If you have a better approach to running foobar under linux please share with the rest of us.

* Wujek_Bogdan has provided instructions in Polish, you can find them here.

Installation

I. Wine
- You will need a working linux box with wine. Under Ubuntu you can use the command:

sudo apt-get install wine

- If you intend to use multilingual support, I suggest winelocale.
- This tutorial assumes you have a wine drive z: mapped to your filesystem root "/" directory. This is the default setup with most wine installs.
- Be sure to configure wine as a Windows XP or newer machine, foobar does not support older OSs such as Win95 or Win2k. Also be sure to install windows fonts so everything looks pretty. To do this with winetricks:

sh winetricks winxp allfonts

- To correct audio stuttering problems during CPU spikes, set wine audio acceleration to "Emulation" instead of "Full". From the Wine Application DB entry for foobar2000:

The beta version of foobar2000 uses Directsound by default, which can cause some problems when playing music. In order to get the program to play music properly, you must set the Hardware Acceleration to emulate Directsound. Go to a terimal and type in "winecfg". A window will open with options for you to modify. Click on the Audio tab, and then look for "Hardware Acceleration". It is currently on "Full". Click on it, and you will have a list of options. Click on "Emulation", and then click on "Apply". foobar2000 should now be able to play music. Note that this will make foobar2000 version 0.8.3 give out an error when you try to play an audio file. Just change it back to "Full" in winecfg when you're done using foobar2000 version 0.9 beta.

II. Foobar2000
* If you have an existing copy of foobar, copy your old foobar2000 folder to ~/.foobar2000 and skip this section.

- Download the foobar installer from the main foobar homepage.
- Run the foobar installer with wine:

wine foobar2000_0.9.6.3.exe

- Use the "Portable installation" Type to avoid mucking about with user profiles.
- Install to the location z:\home\YOURNAME\.foobar2000\ which translates through wine as ~/.foobar2000

• DO NOT install "Audio CD support", wine does not currently support direct access to optical drives.

III. Shell Script
- Let's build a shell script to execute foobar like a normal Linux program

gksudo gedit /usr/bin/foobar2000

CODE

#!/bin/sh
cd ~/.foobar2000/
if [ "$1" != "" ]; then
filename=`echo z:$1 | sed 's/\\//\\\\/g'`
wine foobar2000.exe "$filename" &
else
wine foobar2000.exe &
fi

* If you are using winelocale, replace "wine" with "wineloc -l ja_JP" or something similar for your region.

- Close gedit and save the file.
- Make the file executable with the following command:

sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/foobar2000

IV. Application Package
- Pick an icon for foobar, I rather like this one by Byan. Save it as /usr/share/icons/foobar2000.png
- Let's build a .desktop application package so we can launch foobar from the gnome main menu

gksudo gedit /usr/share/applications/foobar2000.desktop

CODE

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=foobar2000
GenericName=Plays Music
Version=1.0
Encoding=UTF-8
Terminal=false
Exec=/usr/bin/foobar2000
Comment=Plays Music
Icon=foobar2000.png
Categories=GNOME;GTK;AudioVideo;Audio;Player;

- Close gedit and save the file.

Components
Not all components work well with wine, here is a list of some components with special requirements:

• foo_bubble_coverflow - Requires an XP machine: sh winetricks winxp
• foo_chronflow - This component requires Windows Script Control (WGA Required) which is included with WiMP: sh winetricks wmp10 - Still won't load, complains about EyePos function missing.
• foo_converter - In order to convert songs using lame, you must use a win32 version of lame.exe.
• foo_discogs - This component requires GDI+: sh winetricks gdiplus
• foo_highlightplaying - Requires an XP machine: sh winetricks winxp
• foo_dop - This component loads fine however wine does not have usb support so it is not able to detect the ipod, even with the ipod mapped as a windows drive.
• foo_input_std - WMA support requires Windows Media Format Runtimes which are included with WiMP: sh winetricks wmp10
• foo_run - Newer versions of this component run fine. Example: Z:\usr\bin\firefox http://forums.foobar2000.org
• foo_ui_columns - This component requires GDI+: sh winetricks gdiplus
• foo_uie_elplaylist - This component will load and display a playlist but crashes foobar whenever the configuration is changed
• foo_uie_panel_splitter - I have had mixed results with this component. There is something fishy with the dotnet requirements.
• foo_uie_queuemanager - Requires MSVC++ & .NET 2.0 as well as an XP machine: sh winetricks winxp vcrun6 dotnet20
• foo_uie_vis_egoh - Requires MSVC++ & .NET 2.0: sh winetricks vcrun6 dotnet20
• foo_uie_vis_projectm - Requires MSVC++ & libmmd.dll. Rather buggy, foo_vis_shpeck is a better way to run MilkDrop and other vis.

Keyboard Shortcuts:
By default, wine should allow foobar to map multimedia keys if they are not already mapped by something else however these bindings will not be global (you cannot change songs when using a different program). To globally control foobar with your multimedia keys you may want to read through this post over on the ubuntu forums. To summarize:

- Press Alt+F2 to open a Run Configuration window.
- Enter "gconf-editor" in the box and either press <Enter> or click [Run]
- This should open the Gnome Configuration Editor.
- In the left pane navigate to /apps/metacity/keybinding_commands and define the following keys:

CODE

command_1 - wine ~/.foobar2000/foobar2000.exe /playpause
command_2 - wine ~/.foobar2000/foobar2000.exe /stop
command_3 - wine ~/.foobar2000/foobar2000.exe /next
command_4 - wine ~/.foobar2000/foobar2000.exe /prev

- In the left pane navigate to /apps/metacity/global_keybindings and define the following keys:

CODE

run_command_1 - XF86AudioPause
run_command_2 - XF86AudioStop
run_command_3 - XF86AudioNext
run_command_4 - XF86AudioPrev

Announcing Now Playing Information:
Many people like to announce what they are currently playing in foobar to other programs such as IRC or an Instant Meesenger. Most of the popular solutions do not translate well outside of wine. However I discovered foo_np_simple which basically dumps titleformatted text into an external plain text file that can then be processed by your external program (cat ~/.foobar2000/now_playing.txt). I have considered trying to mirror a nowplaying info file from another player such as quodlibet and then create an xchat perl script to parse the information nicely but I think that goes beyond the scope of this topic.

Other Comments:
- Wine tray icons are a bit buggy with both gnome and kde, To Avoid problems you may want to prevent foobar from minimizing to it in your Columns/Panels config.
- These instructions are written for a gnome environment. For KDE users replace "gksudo" with "kdesu" and "gedit" with "kate".

This post has been edited by Yotsuya: Mar 20 2009, 01:22

[hotzenpl0tz]

Do newer Wine versions fix the problem, that playback of audio starts to stutter when the CPU load caused by other applications is increased ? That problem has made foobar unusable for me, at least the playback functions - I only use it to replaygain and move files around with the masstagger.

[bubbleguuum]

Do newer Wine versions fix the problem, that playback of audio starts to stutter when the CPU load caused by other applications is increased ? That problem has made foobar unusable for me, at least the playback functions - I only use it to replaygain and move files around with the masstagger.

When I tried a few month ago , the problem you describe (audio stuttering on CPU load) made it unusable for me,even if the rest was working.
It's also annoying foo_ui_columns do not work due to a bug / unimplemented stuff in wine. This should be fixed in wine and to my knowledge it's not, even If i've seen (but not tested) an older pacth which was more a workaround than a real fix.

Next i'm going to try with wine configured to use JACK for audio to see if i can fix the stuttering.

If anybody have foo_ui_column running, I'd like to know

This post has been edited by bubbleguuum: May 18 2007, 21:26