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The Banshee Music Management and Playback Utility
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.
![[Banshee]](/images/ns/bansheelogo.png)
Version 1.0 Alpha 1 (0.98.1) of Banshee has been announced. New features in this release include:
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. (Log in to post comments)
The Banshee Music Management and Playback Utility Posted Mar 20, 2008 12:36 UTC (Thu) by BenHutchings (subscriber, #37955) [Link] GNOME already has Rhythmbox. I wonder whether it is really necessary to reinvent it in C#.
The Banshee Music Management and Playback Utility Posted Mar 20, 2008 16:27 UTC (Thu) by Frej (subscriber, #4165) [Link] Exactly, personally I never quite understood why banshee was started - for any choice of language. It could be some of: It pays. It's fun!. It gives acceptance @ work. I think they are all valid reasons.
The Banshee Music Management and Playback Utility Posted Mar 20, 2008 17:00 UTC (Thu) by debacle (subscriber, #7114) [Link] With banshee you don't need to spend much money on music, because the HD is already filled with mono packages: # apt-get install banshee ... Need to get 15.3MB of archives. After this operation, 47.9MB of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue [Y/n]? n Abort.
The Banshee Music Management and Playback Utility Posted Mar 24, 2008 8:46 UTC (Mon) by deleteme (guest, #49633) [Link] Oooh flamebait... But the same can be said about the GNOME or KDE musicplayers, so I think I can spend 1.2 cents on the storage costs of a good musicplayer.
The Banshee Music Management and Playback Utility Posted Mar 27, 2008 16:57 UTC (Thu) by ketilmalde (guest, #18719) [Link] On my X-less server install: # apt-get install banshee : 0 upgraded, 153 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Need to get 34.3MB/34.3MB of archives. After unpacking 150MB of additional disk space will be used. # apt-get install amarok : 0 upgraded, 180 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Need to get 65.1MB/65.1MB of archives. After unpacking 219MB of additional disk space will be used. # apt-get install rhythmbox : 0 upgraded, 125 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Need to get 31.5MB/31.5MB of archives. After unpacking 148MB of additional disk space will be used. # apt-get install mpg123 : 0 upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Need to get 148kB of archives. After unpacking 406kB of additional disk space will be used. -k
The Banshee Music Management and Playback Utility Posted Mar 28, 2008 21:45 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] Hah, try installing EMMS. It'll pull in all of Emacs! Look at that bloat! ;}
The Banshee Music Management and Playback Utility Posted Mar 20, 2008 20:59 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] Well, Rhythmbox boots in about a second cold so there's no time for a splash screen. Banshee, however, allows you to relax to a pretty About graphic and watch a launch progress slider fill up. It's nice. Banshee takes you back back to the 90s when your marriage was great and you still had your hair. Besides, why did you buy all that memory if you didn't intend to use it? Banshee's got your back there too!
The Banshee Music Management and Playback Utility Posted Mar 22, 2008 9:26 UTC (Sat) by socket (guest, #43) [Link] I'm curious. The release notes seem to say that most of the features listed on the project's home page aren't actually implemented in the release announced here. It doesn't actually do anything with CDs or iPods, is missing support for podcasting, etc. What's left from the list of quoted features looks like... Creating playlists.Seriously? That's it?
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