Banshee

Release Date: November 10, 2008
Source Tarball: banshee-1-1.4.1.tar.bz2
Release Information: NEWS, sha1sum, ChangeLog

New Features

Vastly Improved Device Support

New to Banshee 1.4 is automatic library synchronization. Of course you can also continue to manually manage content on your portable device. Additionally, playlists are now supported on media devices, including MTP/PlaysForSure and iPod devices, and even mass storage devices, if configured correctly. You can even configure cover art support for your mass storage device now!

Support for HTC Android G1

The new HTC Android G1 phone (currently being offered by T-Mobile) is supported out of the box, including the ability to recognize and import music purchased from the Amazon MP3 store application on the G1. Cover art is also supported out of the box.

First Preview of Mac OS X Support

For the first time, Banshee is now available on Mac OS X. This is a beta-quality technology preview for OS X since there are known stability issues and full feature parity to the Linux releases has not yet been met, but we welcome your testing and feedback. Please file any issues you find. We intend to fully evolve and support the Mac OS X releases.

For installation instructions for Mac OS X, see our download page.

Shiny Updates to Now Playing

The Now Playing source, where video is played, now includes a more appealing cover art and track information display featuring fading transitions. This display in Full Screen Mode is particularly appealing during parties and times when interacting with Banshee’s management interface is undesirable.

New Track Editor

Banshee 1.4 features a newly designed and rewritten track editor. The editor allows for easy editing of more advanced metadata details, and is more usable now for editing compilation (“Various Artists”) albums.

The editor also features easy keyboard navigation between tracks (try pressing enter or ctrl+enter in the Title field) to facilitate quick editing of albums. Metadata common to an entire album can also be copied to all tracks in the album, further simplifying editing.

In addition, the editor is fully extensible, making it easy for developers to add new functionality with just a few lines of code.

Rescan Library Tool

A new tool was added that will rescan your media collection on disk. It will remove files from your library that no longer exist, and add new ones that may have shown up since your last import.

Banshee 1.6 will feature a collection monitoring feature that can perform these housekeeping measures automatically, but in the mean time this tool is one click away.

Automatically Update File Names

To help with keeping your media collection on disk named in a consistent and appealing way, Banshee can now automatically fix paths/file names when changes are made to metadata.

This feature can be enabled through the Preferences dialog.

Banshee can be configured to display a number of columns in its track list. By default only a few common ones are chosen, but columns can be added or removed by right clicking on any column in the track list.

While this is not new, the menu was split to make it easier to choose which columns you’d like to see. In other media applications, this list often scrolls off the screen.

We think this is just a small example of how attention to detail helps create an enjoyable end user experience.

Banshee has a lot more to offer! Check out the previous major release notes…

Other New Features

When finished playing from the play queue, play the song after the song we left off from (and stop playing if we weren’t playing anything before).
Column widths should be much more reasonable: Sensible width ranges set for time, dates, year, etc; Some shorter labels used in column headers
Flat-file playlists can now be opened from the command line or file browsers like Nautilus
Podcasts can now have playlists and smart playlists
New podcast columns: downloaded; description; new
Refresh podcasts every hour
Other various improvements to the Podcast support
Support for ReplayGain level correction during playback
Improved album and podcast browser speed
Offline mode - control whether Banshee is able to access the Web for extra metadata and other features
Support for BPM, Bit Rate, Conductor, DiscCount, and “is compilation” reading, writing, columns, and searching
Collection indexer service and DBus API - allows third party applications like GNOME Do, Beagle, and Tangerine to create their own queryable indexes of Banshee’s collection, or query Banshee’s collection in real time
Allow queuing files via DBus API

Notable Bug Fixes

196 bugs were fixed since 1.2.1!

Major stability and performance improvements
Drag and Drop to Nautilus works again (BGO #535128)
Fix performance bug with loading USB Mass Storage DAPs (BGO #548254)
Fix bug with the DAP usage bar being filtered (BGO #537366)
Fix performance issue with album and podcast browsers (BGO #547628)
Improved support for dark themes (BGO #544840)
Improved ASX support (BGO #545646)
Allow editing Audio CDs’ track info before ripping (BGO #532467)
Dialogs’ translation domain properly set (BGO #536268)
Fix a bug with the play queue stopping after every song (BGO #557386)
Allow both prepending and appending to the play queue; helpful for external applications wishing to integrate with Banshee’s playback, like GNOME Do (BGO #557526)

Dependencies

Mono 1.2.5 (.NET 2.0 Profile / gmcs)
SQlite 3.4
Gtk# 2.10
GStreamer 0.10.13
NDesk DBus (ndesk-dbus) 0.5
NDesk DBus GLib (ndesk-dbus-glib) 0.3
Mono.Addins (mono-addins) 0.3.1
TagLib# (taglib-sharp) 2.0
Required to build default feature stack:
- libmtp >= 0.2.0 (0.2.6 recommended)
- ipod-sharp >= 0.8.0
- mono-zeroconf >= 0.7.3
- boo >= 0.8.1
Run-time requirements for default feature stack:
- podsleuth
- brasero
- avahi

Community

Contributors For This Release

The following people directly contributed to the release of this version of Banshee. Without their help, there would be no release!

Aaron Bockover, Alan McGovern, Alexander Hixon, Alex Launi, Andrés G. Aragoneses, Benoit Boissinot, Bertrand Lorentz, Bob Copeland, Brad Taylor, Chris Howie, David Spreen, Eoin Hennessy, Eric Butler, FÃ©lix Velasco, Gabriel Burt, Iain Lane, Ivan N. Zlatev, Jakub Steiner, James Willcox, Marek Habersack, Maxim Ermilov, Michael Monreal, Pacho Ramos, Ruben Vermeersch, Russ Smith, Salah Coronya, Sandy Armstrong, Sebastian DrÃ¶ge, Wouter Bolsterlee

The following people contributed updated translations to this release. Without them, our project’s reach would be much more limited.

Alexandre Prokoudine, Ankitkumar Patel, BenjamÃn Valero Espinosa, Chao-Hsiung Liao, Daniel Nylander, Gabor Kelemen, Gianvito Cavasoli, Ignacio Casal Quinteiro, Ilkka Tuohela, Jordi Mas, Jorge Gonzalez, Kjartan Maraas, Luca Ferretti, Og Maciel, Oleksandr Kovalenko, Tomasz Dominikowski, Wouter Bolsterlee, Yannick Tailliez, Å½ygimantas BeruÄka, ç”˜éœ² (Gan Lu)

Contributors In Past Releases

Aaron Bockover, Alan McGovern, Alexander Hixon, Alexandros Frantzis, Alex Kloss, Alex Launi, Alp Toker, Andrés G. Aragoneses, Andy Midgette, Arthur Carli, Aydemir UlaÅŸ Åžahin, BenjamÃn Valero Espinosa, Ben Maurer, Bertrand Lorentz, Bill Dawson, Bob Copeland, Bojan Rajkovic, Brad Taylor, Brian Nickel, Brian Teague, Chris Howie, Chris Lahey, Christian Krause, Christopher Halse Rogers, Chris Toshok, Chris Turchin, Daniel Munkton, Dan Wilson, Dan Winship, David Spreen, Eoin Hennessy, Eric Butler, Fabian Jost, FÃ©lix Velasco, Fredrik Hedberg, Gabriel Burt, Hans Petter Jansson, Iain Lane, Igor Guerrero Fonseca, Ilya Konstantinov, Ivan N. Zlatev, Jakub Steiner, James Willcox, Jan Arne Petersen, Jason Conti, Jeff Tickle, Jorge Castro, Jo Shields, Juri Pakaste, Ken Vandine, Larry Ewing, Lauri Kotilainen, Michael Kaiser, Michael Monreal, Miguel de Icaza, Mike Urbanski, Nathan Palmer, Nicholas Parker, Oscar Forero, Pacho Ramos, Patrick van Staveren, Pepijn van de Geer, Peter de Kraker, Ruben Vermeersch, Sandy Armstrong, Scott Peterson, Sebastian DrÃ¶ge, Tim Yamin, Todd Berman, Trey Ethridge, Will Farrington, Wouter Bolsterlee

Reporting Bugs, Joining the Community

If you encounter any bad behavior with this release, please do not hesitate to file bugs!

We welcome new contributors - developers, translators, artists, writers, support gurus - to join our community. Join us!

Banshee 1.4