Development [LWN.net]

The Banshee Music Management and Playback Utility

By Forrest Cook
March 19, 2008

The Banshee project is creating a music management and playback utility for the GNOME desktop. The Banshee home page states:

Import, organize, play, and share your music using Banshee's simple, powerful interface. Rip CDs, play and sync your iPod, create playlists, and burn audio and MP3 CDs. Most portable music devices are supported. Banshee also has support for podcasting, smart playlists, music recommendations, and much more.

Version 1.0 Alpha 1 (0.98.1) of Banshee has been announced. New features in this release include:

A code rewrite with an emphasis on performance improvements and better resource usage.
A new Album Browser feature with the ability to display album artwork.
A Play Queue feature for building on-the-fly music playlists.
New search capabilities for locating artists, albums and song titles.
Integration with the Last.fm music sharing service.
A built-in 10 band audio equalizer.
The new ability to play from a playlist while browsing new sources.

The version 1-0.98.1 change log file has more detailed information on the new release.

This 1.0 alpha release of Banshee is missing a number of features that were present in the earlier 0.13.2 version. There is no support for hardware devices yet, so it is not possible to import or burn CDs, talk to iPod devices or deal with USB or MTP devices. Numerous plugins have also been left out, so it is not possible to access podcasts, internet radio, music sharing services, etc. The release announcement states:

Do not despair, these features will be added back before the final 1.0 release. Many hardware related features are projected to land in the Alpha 2 and 3 releases of Banshee 1.0. We expect releases in quick succession leading up to the final 1.0 release.

Banshee 1-0.98.1 was installed on a system running an Athlon XP 1700 processor and 512MB of RAM. The operating system was the alpha 6 release of Ubuntu Hardy Heron for i386. The following steps were required to get the software running:

#apt-get install gnome-common automake1.9 monodoc
#apt-get build-dep banshee
The banshee-1-0.98.1.tar.bz2 source file was downloaded,
uncompressed and untarred.
$./configure --prefix=/usr
$make
#make install
$banshee-1

Banshee fired up as expected. Your author converted a few CDs to flac files and copied them to the system for testing. It did not take much effort to figure out how to play individual tracks and build playlists. The standard play/pause buttons and skip to previous or next track buttons worked as one would expect. The built-in equalizer worked, although it tended to produce audible clipping if a frequency band was turned up too high.

Unlike earlier versions of Banshee, the only internet music channel shown in version 1.0 was Last.fm. It was possible to use the standalone last.fm binary to access the site, but Banshee was only able to list the selections, not play them. The error message: don't know how to handle audio/mpeg... led to the source of the problem. The installation page was consulted, a large collection of gstreamer0.10-plugins were installed with the Synaptic package manager, and Banshee was restarted. Last.fm content came through loud and clear. One final issue was noticed with Banshee. When the application was run from the command line and exited using the GUI, it left the GNOME terminal in a locked-up state.

Future releases of Banshee will likely include fixes for some of the aforementioned issues. Banshee is an interesting application that can be used for combining a wide variety of audio listening functions into one place.

Comments (8 posted)

System Applications

Database Software

DbUnit: 2.2.1 released (SourceForge)

Stable version 2.2.1 of DbUnit has been announced. "DbUnit is a JUnit extension targeted for database-driven projects that, among other things, puts your database into a known state between test runs. The DbUnit Framework team is pleased to announce the dbunit-2.2.1 release! Changes in this version include: New features: Created H2 data factory Issue: 1897612. New point Datatype on MySqlDataTypeFactory Issue: 1798605.Thanks to Vera Wahler. Fixed Bugs".