Wine and iTunes, Fedora

[cheezit]

I recently followed the instructions on this page to get iTunes 6.0.5 working on fc6.

After installing everything I opened iTunes. The program itself ran very nicely but whenever I opened it it caused my desktop to turn black. After dragging a window or something over the desktop it restored everything, but it's still annoying to have to do that every time I start iTunes. I'm a noob so I'm pretty clueless as to what the problem is and whether it's iTunes or wine that's screwing things up.

Please help!

[Thrillhouse]

iTunes is known to not run well under Wine. This sort of emulation can often produce weird behavior like that. Unless someone has had this exact problem and found a way to fix it, I don't know how you'd go about troubleshooting this. Is there a specific reason why you're using iTunes instead of some of the other media players that are native to Linux? Rhythmbox is a very iTunes-esque music player. So is Songbird. I doubt you'd encounter any of the same problems with either of those two.

[techieMoe]

AmaroK also looks and behaves similar to iTunes.

[cheezit]

The main reason I'm trying to get iTunes is for m4a support.
I'll check out Amarok and those other players.

Thanks!

[Thrillhouse]

AmaroK also looks and behaves similar to iTunes.

Woops. Left out the media player I use on a daily basis.

The main reason I'm trying to get iTunes is for m4a support.

AmaroK supports m4a. Not sure about the others, though.

[techieMoe]

The main reason I'm trying to get iTunes is for m4a support.
I'll check out Amarok and those other players.

Thanks!

I'm not sure you're going to have much luck with that. Are we talking about DRM-encoded music from the iTunes store here?

[cheezit]

I'm not sure you're going to have much luck with that. Are we talking about DRM-encoded music from the iTunes store here?

No, most of my music files are m4a 'cause I ripped them off my CD's with iTunes or 'cause I converted them so I could put them on my ipod easily.

AmaroK supports m4a. Not sure about the others, though.

I installed Amarok but it says xine engine wont play mp3 files and that there is no m4a codec installed. I've spent forever googleing for an m4a codec but I can't find one for the life of me.

[Thrillhouse]

You're on Fedora? Go to this site, follow the directions on how to install mp3 support and then scroll down to the section that describes Amarok specifically. I followed it on my FC6 install and am now playing m4a files without any problems. You'll need to set up either the livna or freshrpms repository to do it but that can be done by following the directions in the Setup yum section. Try that out.

[cheezit]

Thanks for the reply.

I followed your link and installed realplayer and set it up with helix and now I'm getting farther but I'm still not there. Now Amarok will see all of the m4a files and display the track names, album art, artist, etc. However, whenever I try to play a file Amarok will pop up with a message saying that the song is a corrupt file and another message saying "Helix Core returned error: Missing Components". Then it starts going through my entire library really fast trying to play each song in turn and throwing an error message for each one until I have a huge mess of messages and I have to quit the program.

Any ideas?

[Thrillhouse]

Try installing and using gstreamer:

$yum install gstreamer-plugins-ugly ffmpeg libmad0

Then change to it in Tools -> Configure Amarok -> Engine.