Banshee 1.6.0

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Banshee 1.6 is a stable release, the culmination of a year’s work. There are so many new features, bug fixes, and polish in this release, we won’t be able to do it all justice in these notes, but we’ll try. These notes aggregate the highlights from the 1.5 series releases.

New Features Since 1.4

Play Queue Auto DJ keeps the tunes coming

Keep your Play Queue filled with endless music, selected randomly by artist, album, song, rating, or score mode.

screenshot of new auto dj feature, showing options of how to auto-fill the play queue

Alexander blogged more about this feature.

Sync Device From Playlist Option

screenshot showing sync device from playlist options

Either manually manage what files are added/removed to your device, or choose a playlist to sync from. You can make a size-limited smart playlist to sync just the right amount to your device.

Grid View

screenshot showing the album browser in grid mode

We are debuting a new grid mode for our custom list widget, visible in the modified Album browser. It will be used for Videos, Audiobooks, and more in future releases.

Banshee Community Extensions

A new sub-project named Banshee Community Extensions has been created. Its code is hosted on Gitorious, and its bugs tracked in bugzilla.gnome.org. It already contains 15 extensions, including Lyrics, Telepathy and Mirage, and has 19 maintainers. Its releases track Banshee’s. More information.

Type-ahead Find in Track, Artist, and Album Lists

screenshot showing typeahead find in the Banshee track list

An alternative to filtering, type-ahead find jumps you to the first track to match your query. Activate with shift+/, cancel with Esc, and jump to next match with F3. In track list it matches against artist, album, or title.

Automatic Scoring

Songs now have scores, updated as you play and skip. The score can be used in searches and smart playlists, and serve as a basis for ratings.

New Shuffle Modes

Shuffle by artist or album let you listen to everything by an artist or on an album before jumping to a new random artist or album.

Shuffle by rating or score lets you shuffle through your songs, with higher rated or scored tracks being more likely to play.

Alexander blogged more about this feature.

Audiobooks Library

screenshot showing the audiobooks extension listed in Preferences

Rough first version, main benefits are separating your books from your music and defining a different file system organization. In future versions we plan to add intuitive bookmarking and a better browsing experience. Enable in Extensions tab of Preferences.

Library-folder Watcher

screenshot showing Library Watcher extension listed in Preferences

Watches your libraries’ folders for added, renamed, or deleted files, and updates your libraries appropriately. Requires Mono >= 2.4.3. Enable in Extensions tab of Preferences.

eMusic Importer/Downloader

screenshot showing eMusic extension in the Import Media dialog

If you have purchased music from eMusic and have a .emx file, Banshee will download and import the music files for you. Select ‘eMusic Files’ from the normal Media > Import Media dialog. Enable in Extensions tab of Preferences.

GIO File Backend, Supports Non-local Files

This backend uses the GIO library to support importing local files and network-share files alike. Requires glib >= 2.22 and Gio#.

Internet Archive extension

Search and stream content from the Internet Archive’s vast store of media, including 70,000 concerts and 200,000 videos. Enable it in the Extensions tab of the Preferences dialog.

YouTube Extension

This extension shows YouTube videos in the Context Pane related to what you’re playing, and lets you watch them within Banshee. You can enable it in the Extensions tab of the Preferences dialog.

screenshot showing thumbnails of YouTube videos related to the playing song


Improved Metadata Handling

Banshee is now able to read and write rating and playcount information contained in your media files. Enable this option in Preferences.

Searching and smart playlists use unicode-aware case-insensitive search; i.e. n matches ñ and vice-versa, and similarly smart sorting.

Artist/album/track sort fields are now supported, the License URI field is now exposed and Creative Commons aware, and the BPM field is exposed with an option to calculate it for all songs.

Enhancements

  • Gapless Playback
  • Optional cover art in lower-left corner
  • Cover art editable via drag-and-drop and right-click
  • Playing song kept visible in the track list
  • Separate library locations for Music, Video, and Podcast
  • iTunes and Rhythmbox library/metadata importers
  • More devices supported: Android: Nexus One, Desire, Galaxy, Droid, Pulse Other: Palm Pre, Nokia N900
  • Improve search responsiveness on large libraries
  • Play Queue item count, size, duration now ignores old tracks
  • Muinshee fixes: disable Auto-DJ, allow reordering, hide previous song
  • Wikipedia context pane extension enabled by default
  • Add tooltip to playback error column
  • Enable ‘Delete From Drive’ action in File System Queue
  • Cover art for unicode artist/albums now supported
  • Dropped glade-sharp dep; GNOME 3.0 ready
  • Add columns showing track sample rate and bits per sample
  • Option to sort an artist’s albums by year, not title
  • Allow seeking in DAAP streams
  • Additional tokens for file system organization (bgo#489861)
  • Cleaner track change notification popup (bgo#565453)
  • Move Last.fm settings to the preferences dialog
  • Keyboard shortcut (ESC) to clear the search box (BGO #558938)
  • Expose LAME’s “preset” option (BGO #563303)
  • Better support for devices running Rockbox
  • Set video sync folder for Android and WebOS devices
  • Auto-completion for composer, conductor, grouping and copyright (BGO #592129)
  • Added the ‘comment’ search filter (BGO #380524)
  • Selectable song properties (BGO #586106)
  • Show a tooltip in track editor when the property is truncated (BGO #589782)
  • Support importing/exporting XSPF playlists
  • Support loading ASF playlists (BGO #545646)
  • Whitelist .spx, 669, it, med, mod, mol, mtm, nst, s3m, stm, ult, wow, xm, and xnm (BGO #580014)
  • Source-specific preferences, accessible via Preferences dialog and via sources’ context menu
  • Much improved child source sorting - live, persistent, with group-by-type option
  • Podcast espisode details tabs in track information/editor
  • Can rename podcasts
  • Can unsubscribe/download/refresh multiple podcasts at a time
  • New ‘Creative Commons’ default Last.fm station
  • New Refresh button for Last.fm stations
  • More accurate seeking with click/DnD, can use mouse scrollwheel
  • Make it easier to edit and reset ratings
  • Add mnemonics to track editor fields and import dialog
  • Make previous button go back if less than 4 seconds into a song

Notable Bug Fixes

265 bugs were fixed since 1.5.1!

  • Fix device support on upcoming distros with DeviceKit rename
  • Restore equalizer preset correctly (bgo#614313)
  • Handle broken symlinks correctly (bgo#614065)
  • Allow overriding Android, Maemo, WebOS default settings (bgo#611991)
  • Fix crash deleting playlist on mass storage device (bgo#613734)
  • Fix issue with iTunes importer dialog sizing (bgo#613607)
  • Fix play count calculation with gapless enabled (bgo#613418)
  • Handle exceptions thrown by old plugins (Mirage, etc)
  • Use panel-specific (eg monochrome) icon in notification area
  • OS X build/bundle improvements
  • Fix Windows compilation issues
  • Fix gettext locale selection on Windows

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

Dependencies

  • Mono 1.9.1 (.NET 2.0 Profile / gmcs)
  • SQlite 3.4
  • Gtk# 2.12
  • 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) >= 2.0.3.7
  • Required to build default feature stack:
    • libmtp >= 0.2.0
    • ipod-sharp >= 0.8.5
    • mono-zeroconf >= 0.8.0
    • boo >= 0.8.1
    • webkit-sharp-1.0 >= 0.2
    • gdata-sharp >= 1.4
  • Run-time requirements for default feature stack:
    • HAL
    • podsleuth >= 0.6.6
    • 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, Alexander Kojevnikov, Bertrand Lorentz, Chow Loong Jin, Gabriel Burt, Iain Lane, Jeroen Budts, Jordi Mas, Julien Moutte, Ján Sokoly, Ruben Vermeersch

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

A S Alam, Andrej Žnidaršič, Aron Xu, Bruno Brouard, Christian Kirbach, Daniel Nylander, Gabor Kelemen, Gianvito Cavasoli, Inaki Larranaga Murgoitio, Joe Hansen, Jordi Mas, Leonid Kanter, Marek Černocký, Mario Blättermann, Miloš Popović, Pablo Garrido, Piotr Drąg, Wouter Bolsterlee, Žygimantas Beručka

Contributors In Past Releases

Aaron Bockover, Alan McGovern, Alex Bennee, Alex Kloss, Alex Launi, Alexander Hixon, Alexander Kojevnikov, Alexandros Frantzis, Alp Toker, Anders Petersson, Andrea Cimitan, Andreas Neustifter, Andreas Nilsson, Andrew Conkling, Andrés G. Aragoneses, Andy Midgette, Arthur Carli, Arun Raghavan, Aydemir Ulaş Şahin, Ben Maurer, Benjamín Valero Espinosa, Bertrand Lorentz, Bertrand Lorentz, Bill Dawson, Bob Copeland, Bojan Rajkovic, Brad Taylor, Brandon Perry, Brian Lucas, Brian Nickel, Brian Teague, Chow Loong Jin, Chris Howie, Chris Jones, Chris Lahey, Chris Toshok, Chris Turchin, Christian Hergert, Christian Krause, Christoph Burgdorf, Christopher James Halse Rogers, Cody Russell, Cosmin Banu, Dan Wilson, Dan Winship, Daniel Munkton, Daniel Siegel, David Spreen, David Stone, Diego E. Pettenò, Eitan Isaacson, Elena Grassi, Eoin Hennessy, Eric Butler, Erik Schmidt, Fabian Jost, Felipe Almeida Lessa, Fernando Casanova, Florent Thoumie, Fredrik Hedberg, Félix Velasco, Gabriel Burt, Garrett LeSage, Götz Waschk, Haitao Feng, Hans Petter Jansson, Iain Lane, Igor Guerrero Fonseca, Ilya Konstantinov, Ivan N. Zlatev, Jack Deslippe, Jakub Steiner, James Willcox, Jan Arne Petersen, Jason Conti, Jason Taylor, Jeff Tickle, Jeff Wheeler, Jensen Somers, Jeroen Budts, Jo Shields, Johannes Kuhn, John Millikin, Jordi Mas, Jorge Castro, Julien Moutte, Juri Pakaste, Ján Sokoly, Jérémie Laval, K. Vishnoo Charan Reddy, Ken Vandine, Kevin Duffus, Konstantin Oshiyko, Larry Ewing, Lauri Kotilainen, Lukas Lipka, Marijn Ros, Matt Enright, Michael Kaiser, Michael Martin-Smucker, Michael Monreal, Michael Monreal, Miguel de Icaza, Mike Urbanski, Moritz Schallaböck, Nathan Palmer, Neil Loknath, Nicholas Doyle, Nicholas Parker, Nicolò Chieffo, Nils Naumann, Oben Sonne, Olivier Duff, Oscar Forero, Pacho Ramos, Patrick van Staveren, Paul Lange, Pavel Antonov, Pepijn van de Geer, Peter de Kraker, Pratik Patel, Przemysław Grzegorczyk, Roderich Schupp, Romain Tartière, Ruben Vermeersch, Ryan Collier, Sandy Armstrong, Scott Peterson, Sebastian Dröge, Tim Yamin, Tobias Mueller, Todd Berman, Travis Glenn Hansen, Travis Reitter, Trey Ethridge, Valentin Sawadski, Will Farrington, William Pettersson, 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!

Copyright 2014 Banshee contributors. Banshee is a registered trademark of Novell.