musikCube // DocTriv's semi-official Repository

musikCube was a clean, lightweight music library player for Windows.
It was actively developed by Casey Langen between 2003 and 2006.

Since 2016, a new version is under (sporadic) development and can be found on GitHub.
It is now a cross-platform, terminal-based (!) audio engine, library, player and server written in C++.

"Now's not the time for another music player,
I'm just trying to finish what we started all those years ago."

A short history

MusikCube was my favorite Windows music library player for many years. Unfortunately, after the overhasty 1.0 release there was not much progress made anymore over the following years. (I finally discovered that MusicBee got the most wanted features of musikCube like filter boxes and a Now Playing playlist and so I migrated to it, although it's a cluttered application.) Then Casey "avatar3d" Langen started the development of the all new musikCube 2 (deleted), but it never left an early stage. Over time the official website got more and more outdated, so I started this small webpage in 2007 to collect the most important information and files in one place. The meanwhile quite deserted official forum was under spam attacks and after it went down for unknown reasons, Casey pulled the plug in March 2012: The old website and the forum are gone forever, a basic "tombstone" page is all that is left. So I overhauled this page, too (it is officially linked on musikCube.com); the previous version with more old stuff and forum links can still be found here.

What is musikCube?

MusikCube has its roots in the programs wxMusik and Beatbox and is based on SQLite and the BASS audio library system. MusikCube plays MP3, OGG, WAV, MPC, APE, WMA, M4A, FLAC, and streams. Supported tags are Title, Artist, Album, Track, Genre, Year, and Comment. MusikCube offers a more or less iTunes-inspired GUI, but with a "Now Playing" playlist. Built in are also a burst CD ripper, dynamic playlists support and a tag editor. MusikCube has quite some bugs and missing features, especially from today's perspective (no album art, no album artist etc.). But for browsing your music via different filters and playing music, it was a very good software.

Which version should I use?

Together with the musikCube.com shutdown, Casey released a quickly compiled and final version 1.1, "which contains all the random small fixes made by various contributors over the years". After a short test I cannot recommend it! So instead use musikCube 1.0 (Mirror) with the Unofficial Bugfix.

Unofficial Bugfix

These modified versions of Casey Langen's original musikCube.exe and musikCore_u.dll by Jooles incorporate ObsidianX's "Smart Previous" patch and Jooles' multimedia keyboard fix. "Smart Previous" behaviour means that musikCube goes back to the real last played song and not the song one higher in Now Playing when in "Random Playback" mode and you press Previous Song. With the multimedia keyboard fix you get rid of the annoying multimedia keyboard hijacks musikCube tends to. It also adds the checkbox "Multimedia keyboard volume keys control musikCube volume" to the Global Hotkeys preferences (File => Settings => Preferences or Ctrl+P, Interface => General). Replace the files in your musikCube installation directory with the ones in this 7z archive.

Alternative: "Times Played" patch

With this modified version of Casey Langen's original musikCore_u.dll by Vigylant, a song's "Times Played" counter is only increased by 1 if the song is fully played and not just started. Not compatible with the Unofficial Bugfix. Replace the file in your musikCube installation directory with the one in this RAR archive.

Are there any plugins?

MusikCube ships with two plugins (configurating/starting via Plugin Manager: File => Settings => Plugins or Ctrl+M): A Winamp Emulator (musikCubeAmp.dll) and miniPlayer (miniPlayer.dll). MiniPlayer opens a small window for fast accessing the most important functions, but doesn't run fully featured nor stable on at least Windows 7 x64. The Winamp Emulator is a "Winamp window event emulation plugin", so it doesn't enable Winamp format plugins in musikCube.

cubeScrobbler

This plugin offers support for Audioscrobbler/Last.fm. Place the files from this ZIP archive like this: cubeScrobbler.dll into the plugins subfolder of your musikCube installation directory, libcurl.dll into your musikCube installation directory. Insert your Last.fm account information via Plugin Manager.

Playlist Import/Export

These plugins let you import to and export playlists in simple or extended M3U (exporting absolute paths only at the moment), PLS, XSPF (XML) and HTML (export only) format (credits: martind; HTML by rajivm; simple M3U, XSPF and 1.0 compatibility by Jooles). Source code is included, but XSPF import does not work. Importing will add the songs from the playlist file to Now Playing and the actual library (so select Collected before when you don't want the playlist's songs in your main library). But it won't create a new static playlist in musikCube (you can do that manually afterwards)! To avoid problems, playlists for importing should contain absolute paths. You can export every playlist displayed in musikCube (but unfortunately musikCube has some Unicode problems which causes wrong filenames with foreign characters). Put export_playlist.dll and/or import_playlist.dll from this 7z archive into the plugins subfolder of your musikCube installation directory.

What's up with the mentioned bugs? - Ignore the tag editor!

All releases of musikCube have bugs - I suggest you check the bugs section here. Mostly it is more or less annoying misbehaviour, for example musikCube will show your whole library as Now Playing on startup if you had songs in the Now Playing playlist from last use of the program (then just click on Library and again on Now Playing to usually see your real playlist) or tends to forget the content of Now Playing on startup. The use of musikCube is save for your computer and your audio files, except for the integrated tag editor - don't use it! It has quite invisible bugs and will mess up some tags (esp. genre)! Try e.g. mp3tag instead for tagging. If you have used musikCube for tagging and you want to fix the now wrong tags, you should use this mp3tag action file by Pluto2 to clean up wrong tags. If you change song tags outside of musikCube, you have to reload them in musikCube manually (context menu: Tags => Reload Tags from File).

Where does musikCube save its settings?

MusikCube creates a folder called .musikproject (yes, with a dot at the start) in the user folder of your Windows partition, e.g. on Windows 7 the path is C:\Users\[your username]\.musikproject. This folder contains the two library database files (musik_u.db for the main Library, musik_collected_u.db for Collected library) and the settings file musikCube_u.ini. The databases contain your static and dynamic playlists, your song statistics (e.g. last play dates or ratings) etc., the INI file the stuff you set in musikCube's Preferences. If you have any problems with song playback etc., try to delete your INI file and restart musikCube (but don't delete your DB files).

Can I move my songs and keep my library statistics?

Yes, but you have to keep the organization/structure of your local music and you need to edit the library files mentioned above. These are SQLite databases, so you can use e.g. the neat SQLiteSpy (no installation needed) to open and modify the database files (musik_u.db and/or musik_collected_u.db). You have to use SQL queries, so move your music files to the new location and open then the musikCube database files in SQLiteSpy (backup recommended, and do not start musikCube). Adjust the following query to your needs and copy it into the top right field of SQLiteSpy:

UPDATE songs SET filename = REPLACE(filename, '[drive:\your old path\]', '[drive:\your new path\]');

Example (no square bracket!):
UPDATE songs SET filename = REPLACE(filename, 'e:\my music\', 'f:\files\music\');

Then hit F9 and a split second later the paths should be replaced. You can control it by double clicking on songs in the left tree view. Close SQLitySpy (no need for saving anything), place the database files in the .musikproject folder if needed and start musikCube. You should be able to play your songs and still have all your statistics.

Can I get the sources to continue development?

The sources for musikCube 1.1 are here. The sources for musikCube 2 were on Google Code (deleted). Sources for musikCube 1.0 were here (deleted). MusikCube 1.x needs Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 for compiling.

Can I get in touch with you and the other developers?

I am not a developer, but you can reach me via mail. Casey Langen and some other old time users and/or contributors of musikCube used to idle at the old official IRC channel #musik at irc.freenode.net.

What is 7z and RAR? I only know WinZip.

7z and RAR are archive file formats which both are far more effective than ZIP. You don't need their main programs 7-Zip or WinRAR for these archives, most file archivers these days can at least extract these formats.