Install MediaMonkey on Linux using Wine

Intro

These are notes about installing MediaMonkey on Linux. This information should be valid for Debian, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Linux Mint, and other distributions.

Some of this information is from MediaMonkey’s wiki page Linux, Wine & MediaMonkey which is now rather outdated.

Make sure wine, winetricks, and winbind are installed

sudo apt install wine winetricks winbind

On some distros the name of the Wine package may be different. It may be named ‘wine-stable’ or something else. Note that for MediaMonkey we are using 32-bit Wine, not 64-bit.

You can also download and install winetricks from the project’s repo.

Once Wine, winetricks, and winbind are installed the process to install MediaMonkey is as follows:

Alaya MediaMonkey setup script

For the remaining steps I have created the following script: mediamonkey-setup.sh. You need to edit the script to change the values of the installation path and the location of the MediaMonkey setup file.

The script assumes that you already have a directory ${HOME}/.wine If not, you need to create it:
mkdir ${HOME}/.wine

This script will first set up the installation directory by running winecfg. You will see the winecfg window open. In this window you can change any settings you want, for example I like to go into the Graphics tab and increase the screen resolution from 96 to something higher like 120 or 144.

Once you click OK to close the winecfg window the script will proceed to run winetricks to install the following components:

vb6run vcrun6 vcrun6sp6 wsh57vb wmp10 corefonts

When wmp10 installs it will install and launch Windows Media Player. The only reason this is installed is to get the codecs. In the privacy settings window that appeared I unchecked everything. Do not try to uncheck the file type associations however as it will freeze the installer.

After Windows Media Player finishes the MediaMonkey setup should then run and complete normally. Note I did not install MediaMonkey as a portable installation and I left skinning support enabled.

Install the MAD plugin

Without this plugin MediaMonkey won’t play mp3 files. Download the plugin from the MAD plugin website and install it:

WINEARCH=win32 WINEPREFIX=${HOME}/.wine/.MediaMonkey wine "/path/to/MAD plug-in 0.14.2b.exe"

It will ask for the path to install the plugin. Rather than the default path C:/Program Files/Winamp instead install it to C:/Program Files/MediaMonkey.

Verify that the MAD plugin is installed in MediaMonkey by going into Tools -> Options -> Input Plug-ins.

Installing skins

To install any additional skins choose Tools -> Extensions from the menu and navigate to your the skin .mmip file. My favorite skin is VitreousDark.

Possible issues

If you experience issues with sound not playing make sure you have the MAD plugin installed. You can also go into Tools -> Options -> Output Plug-ins -> [select plugin type] -> Configure and try disabling “Enable hardware acceleration”.

Other issues

If you experience freezes of MediaMonkey you can use the xkill command to kill the window and restart it. In a terminal type xkill and click on the MediaMonkey window.

Using playlists from Windows

If you have a MediaMonkey instance running under Windows you can choose to export playlists as m3u files. However you will likely need to do a little slicing and dicing of the pathnames in order to get the playlist to work with your new MediaMonkey running under Linux.

At my home I have all my music on a network drive which is mounted one way on Windows systems and another way on Linux systems.

Here is a typical entry from a m3u playlist that was exported from a Windows machine:

..\Music\07 - Other Music\VA_-_Some_cool_music\a_track.mp3

In MediaMonkey on Linux select the File menu and then Open URL or File. Navigate to a file on the same drive as your music collection and open it. When the file is loaded right-click on it and select Properties and note the pathname of it. It might look something like:

Z:\home\user\storage1\Music\07 - Other Music\VA_-_Some_cool_music\a_track.mp3

On the Linux system I have mounted my network drive under /mnt/storage1 and then I created a symlink to /mnt/storage1 in my home directory: /home/user/storage1

Notice that that the paths are the same from Music until the end. It is just the beginning of the paths that needs to be modified. You can use Notepad++ to do a global search and replace or you can use Perl to perform an in-place regex substitution which I show below.

First, make a copy of the exported playlist.m3u. In this example I use playlist_copy.m3u:

perl -pi -e 's/^\.\./Z\:\\home\\user\\storage1/g' playlist_copy.m3u

[I know this might seem complex but here is a good reference on Perl regular expressions.]

In the modified playlist file the entries should now look like:

Z:\home\user\storage1\Music\07 - Other Music\VA_-_Some_cool_music\a_track.mp3

Now you can open the modified playlist from the File menu of MediaMonkey (File -> Open URL or File). All the songs should load and play normally. Note that this just loads the songs into Now Playing, it does not actually import or save the playlist. To save it follow the steps below:

Saving playlists

To save all the songs loaded in Now Playing first create a new playlist by right-clicking on the Playlist entry in the Media Tree in the left pane. Select New Playlist. Now on the right at the bottom of the Now Playing pane select List and Save Playlist. In the popup window select the playlist you just created and click the Save button.

Note that if it is a really long playlist it might take a very long time to save. One playlist I have with over 2,000 entries took almost 10 minutes to save. For some reason the file writing process is slower under Wine.

Crank it up!

Don’t forget about the excellent program PulseAudio Volume Control which allows the volume to be cranked up above 100%. I find it essential on my laptops.

sudo apt-get install pavucontrol

Uninstalling

If you want to completely remove MediaMonkey from your system, just remove the directory it was installed in and also any menu and filetype association XDG entries created under ~${HOME}/.local/share/applications/ You can use the following command to find the entries:
grep -ril mediamonkey ${HOME}/.local/share/applications/

Final thoughts

It’s pretty mind blowing to have MediaMonkey installed and running under Linux. I love it!

As I mentioned in the previous article about installing Photoshop under Wine, I truly hope that this article will encourage people to ditch Windows and make the switch to using Linux.