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.
InstallationI. Wine- You will need a working linux box with wine. If you do not already have one I suggest reading
this tutorial about installing wine under Ubuntu with CJK support.
- 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 machine, there are significant limitations when running as other OSs such as Vista or Win95.
winecfg> Applications> "Windows Version:"- 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:
QUOTE
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:
QUOTE
wine foobar2000_0.9.5.exe
- DO NOT install "Audio CD support"
- DO NOT install "Shortcut icons"
- DO NOT install "Enable per-user settings"
- Install to the location
z:\home\YOURNAME\.foobar2000\ which translates through wine as
~/.foobar2000III. Shell Script- Let's build a shell script to execute foobar like a normal Linux program
QUOTE
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 for CJK or other international support, 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:
QUOTE
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
QUOTE
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.
ComponentsNot all components work well under wine. Components written in .NET are particularly problematic.
- foo_converter - In order to convert songs using lame, you must use a win32 version of lame.exe.
- foo_discogs - This component requires gdiplus.dll to be copied into either your foobar directory or ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32/
- foo_run - This component appears to load fine but nothing seems to run.
- foo_ui_columns - Newer versions of this component work well, however double right click is needed for many context menus.
- foo_ui_panels - This component requires gdiplus.dll to be copied into either your foobar directory or ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32/. This component frequently crashes when trying to save configuration data under a non-english locale.
- foo_uie_queuemanager - Requires MSVC++ but also .NET 2.0. Does not load and crashes foobar.
- foo_uie_vis_egoh - This component does not appear to work under wine and crashes foobar.
- foo_uie_vis_projectm - Requires MSVC++ and libmmd.dll. Avoid using fullscreen mode.
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".
