MediaMonkey 5 for Debian / Linux

[BenRad]

I thought I'd give Ubuntu and Wine a try again and see if I could get MM 5 running. I am able to install and start it up, but no text appears in the UI. Menus show icons, but no text. I am able to get into Options, where I can see text. I've tried all the different skins, along with disabling hardware acceleration. Using Ubuntu 25.10 and Wine 11.
Has anyone seen this behavior?

[Denton]

I thought I'd give Ubuntu and Wine a try again and see if I could get MM 5 running. I am able to install and start it up, but no text appears in the UI. Menus show icons, but no text. I am able to get into Options, where I can see text. I've tried all the different skins, along with disabling hardware acceleration. Using Ubuntu 25.10 and Wine 11.
Has anyone seen this behavior?

Did you do a portable installation? That seems to work better for me than the normal install.


Well... I wiped my installation and did a fresh install of the latest version to see if that fixed the problems that I'm seeing. Now I can't see any text either.

I wiped that install and rolled back to the version I was previously on and have the same problem.

I guess we're back to square one.

[BenRad]

ooof, my apologies, but I appreciate the troubleshooting. I tried portable and local and both times the GUI did this.

[Bakoes]

It might be because of Wine.

Disclaimer, I have no experience with Linux or Wine.
But I read that you can change settings in Wine.
Maybe that would help...
But an update of Wine could mess up your software again...

Therefor it's better to use "Bottles" of "Wine".
With Bottles you also use Wine for every software and it's settings stay the same,
just as if your software would be inside it's own bottle.

So Wine updates won't change what's already "bottled".
If I remember correctly

[Denton]

I have tried Bottles and have been unsuccessful in getting MediaMonkey to work there.

I expect that the current issue is simply a missing font. Does anyone know which fonts MediaMonkey requires?


Edit:

Never mind, I installed Arial, Courier, and Times. One of the three was it. Looks like we're all good now.

In fact, it fixed the problem that I was having with input fields being too small to read. Happy day.

[SeigneurAo]

Please, if you could make this happen before Win10 ends its extended support, it would save a lot of people a lot of pain.

Delphi Linux compiler and some libraries are not is not yet fully stable on Linux, but they are getting close, but I doubt it will be till Win10 extended support ends. Also I really wonder why updates do not work on normal version, but still work when you pay for extended support and no system files have been changed.

Oh I haven't paid a time. There was a period of time during which you could enroll for a 1-year extended support for free, and I grabbed it happily.

Long time gold subscriber here, future Linux user (I'm not switching to Win11 ever). I have installed Clementine as a tentative replacement, but it doesn't come any close to the level of functionality MM offers, not by a mile, and the other audio managers I've tried are even worse.

If you ahve issues with playback try switching Output plugin to WAVE OUT and see if that fixes your problem.

I've not yet made the switch to Linux. I saw several people, both here and on social medias, report that they weren't able to get MM working, whatever they tried, so I'm just pushing back for as long as I can, since there's no realistic way to either make MM work or find a decent replacement.

[Denton]

I've not yet made the switch to Linux. I saw several people, both here and on social medias, report that they weren't able to get MM working, whatever they tried, so I'm just pushing back for as long as I can, since there's no realistic way to either make MM work or find a decent replacement.

I know that I'm just a sample size of one, but I have MediaMonkey running at nearly 100% functionality on Manjaro Linux. So I can tell you that it is possible.

[SeigneurAo]

I've not yet made the switch to Linux. I saw several people, both here and on social medias, report that they weren't able to get MM working, whatever they tried, so I'm just pushing back for as long as I can, since there's no realistic way to either make MM work or find a decent replacement.

I know that I'm just a sample size of one, but I have MediaMonkey running at nearly 100% functionality on Manjaro Linux. So I can tell you that it is possible.

Thanks for the feedback, I'll look into Bottles when the time comes.

[Kodijack]

I expect that the current issue is simply a missing font. Does anyone know which fonts MediaMonkey requires?

Try winetricks corefonts. That should do it.

I have MM running (CachyOS, so Arch not Debian. Portable install (first freshly, then overwrote it with my win10-version), remote database). But after a LOT of tinkering to make it work it's not really smooth UI-wise. It's slow, sluggish and laggy. But at least it works somehow reliably.

Not sure how strict wine on Debian is with global hotkeys, but in case someone would like to actually control playback, i made this tiny "remote control":

Code: Select all

#!/usr/bin/env python3
# ~/.local/bin/mm
import sys, json, urllib.request, websocket

actions = {
    "play":  "app.player.playPauseAsync()",
    "next":  "app.player.nextAsync()",
    "prev":  "app.player.prevAsync()",
}

ws_url = json.loads(urllib.request.urlopen("http://localhost:9222/json/list").read())[0]['webSocketDebuggerUrl']
ws = websocket.create_connection(ws_url)
ws.send(json.dumps({"id":1,"method":"Runtime.evaluate","params":{"expression":actions[sys.argv[1]]}}))
ws.close()   

It could simply be called with play/next/prev as argument. If it's stupid but it works, it ain't completely stupid

[radiojadeo]

Now it would be interesting to know how other users think about this topic and to see how great this need would be.
Would you also be willing to pay for such a version?
If I were me, I would be willing to pay a price of up to $30 for it. And now it's your turn, I'm looking forward to your comments.

Hi there,

I created an account just to say: I would pay a full $50 USD for a Linux version that just works out of the box. Any distro too, I would switch to a distro *entirely* so I could get MM to work with all its audio features.

I switched to Linux full-time after Windows decided to go full stupid with 11 back in October. I have since been trying, across multiples distros, to get MM to work...tried Bottles, Lutris, virtual machine, etc, and all seem to struggle. Admittedly I'm still a pretty big beginner at Linux, but I keep running into errors at every turn, quite often with few guides (and often poorly documented) on how to overcome them. NONE of the alternatives I can find working native on Linux seem to have the features I like from MM.

If anyone is working on a system to actually implement MM on Linux, I'd even lend my support. I really only know Python and Bash at this point, but I'd learn a whole dang language if it meant making MM work!

And of course, I've been trying solutions throughout this thread, but struggling. If anyone has a solid solution to run MM on any Linux Distro (currently trying Mint/Cinnamon and Ubuntu, but down to try others), please let me know. I'm so dang tired

[Kodijack]

I created an account just to say: I would pay a full $50 USD for a Linux version that just works out of the box. Any distro too, I would switch to a distro *entirely* so I could get MM to work with all its audio features.

Me too. Except switching the distro

But see my post above, i have it running basically. Just performance sucks a bit. But i can access my vast library, play everything (not tried videos, but that's not important to me) and do anything. As it's "just" wine, i'd say that the distro isn't overly important.
You could even try "bottling" it with bottles.

so basically:

- create a mm-prefix so you can tinker however you want
- wine boot
- winetricks corefonts
- wine config to adjust dpi and "disable theming" (let mm do the theming)
- fresh mm install, copy over your working installation
- use directaudio or the other option, not wsapi

only things not working is global hotkeys (but that's a kde plasma thing i think) and integration into the os as a mediaplayer.

Hope you'll succeed as there probably will never be a linux-native mm