Rock out on Linux with the Banshee 1.0 beta 2 media player

Cyrus_the_virus · 28-05-2008, 01:21 AM

By Ryan Paul | Published: May 27, 2008 - 08:46AM CT

It has been almost a year since we got our first glimpse of the next-generation Banshee media player. The latest beta, which was released on Friday, offers a wide variety of impressive features and a highly polished user interface.

The entire music player has been extensively re-engineered from the ground up to provide a better user experience. Banshee's startup time and memory footprint are impressively low in 1.0 beta 2. Performance improvements have eliminated the long waits and profoundly frustrating loading screen that plagues the 0.13 series. Many of the features are also more responsive and less resource-intensive.

The most significant new feature in Banshee 1.0 is support for video. Users can import video files into the program, filter them based on search parameters, organize them into playlists, and play them just like audio files. When a video is playing, it is displayed in Banshee's new Now Playing view, which also supports a fullscreen mode. Banshee uses the GStreamer multimedia library for audio and video playback, so it supports all of the same formats as Totem. Although video support seems to be integrated very well with Banshee's library system, there are still a lot of important video features that haven't been implemented yet, like support for configuring subtitles, changing aspect ratios, and choosing between multiple audio streams. In time, Banshee could eventually be used as a full replacement for Totem.

Banshee's much-improved podcast manager supports video content too. I tested this feature extensively by watching numerous videos from the Onion News Network (it was a tough job, but somebody had to do it!). Podcasts can be automatically downloaded to the local drive for later playback or streamed directly from the remote server.

Banshee 1.0 beta 2 also offers tight integration with the Last.fm social music site. Users can see their top artists and other Last.fm information directly through the Banshee user interface. It will also provide easy access to Last.fm stations including recommendations, groups, and tags. Menu items are included that allow users to toggle Last.fm reporting and jump to their profile page.

Banshee's user interface also got a big overhaul. The new media browser supports much more elaborate filtering and allow users to select multiple items at once. It has some nice aesthetic enhancements such as support for displaying automatically downloaded album art in album listings. The browser can be displayed horizontally along the top of the program, or vertically between the source list and the track list.

There are a bunch of other features that are worth noting too, like Banshee's new built-in equalizer, support for integration with the Brasero CD burning program, and the play queue. New features can be added easily by third-party developers with the plug-in system and Boo scripting interface. Banshee also exposes much of its internal functionality through D-Bus so that external programs can interact with it and take advantage of its functionality.

There are many well-designed audio players available for Linux that I have used over the years, including XMMS, Juk, Rhythmbox, and Muine. Although there are plenty of choices out there for users with specific requirements and expectations, it seems like Banshee and Amarok are emerging as the most powerful and complete audio players for GNOME and KDE respectively. Banshee 1.0 beta 2 has replaced Rhythmbox as my player of choice on the desktop.

Source

praka123 · 28-05-2008, 01:22 AM

banshee is good.but I dont want .net mono to be installed

Charan · 28-05-2008, 01:50 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by praka123

banshee is good.but I dont want .net mono to be installed

I guessed your reply before entering this thread .. and my guess was right.

CadCrazy · 28-05-2008, 01:56 AM

^^ Welcome back monkey

sorry forget to add code

**MetalheadGautham** · 28-05-2008, 02:18 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by praka123

banshee is good.but I dont want .net mono to be installed

since when does banshee need .net mono ?
I thought banshee was a native Gnome application ?

praka123 · 28-05-2008, 02:24 AM

answer:

Code:

debian:~# apt-cache depends banshee
banshee
  Depends: libc6
  Depends: libglib2.0-0
  Depends: libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-0
  Depends: libgstreamer0.10-0
  Depends: libgtk2.0-0
  Depends: mono-runtime
  Depends: libboo2.0-cil
  Depends: libcairo2
  Depends: libgconf2.0-cil
  Depends: libglade2.0-cil
  Depends: libglib2.0-cil
  Depends: libgnome2.0-cil
  Depends: libgtk2.0-cil
  Depends: libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
  Depends: libmono-addins0.2-cil
  Depends: libmono-cairo2.0-cil
  Depends: libmono-corlib2.0-cil
  Depends: libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
  Depends: libmono-sqlite2.0-cil
  Depends: libmono-system-data2.0-cil
  Depends: libmono-system-web2.0-cil
  Depends: libmono-system2.0-cil
  Depends: libmono2.0-cil
  Depends: libmtp7
  Depends: libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil
  Depends: libndesk-dbus1.0-cil
  Depends: libnotify0.4-cil
  Depends: libpango1.0-0
  Depends: libtaglib2.0-cil
  Depends: libx11-6
  Depends: gstreamer0.10-plugins-base
  Depends: gstreamer0.10-plugins-good
  Depends: gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
  Depends: hal
  Recommends: gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly
  Recommends: gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad
  Recommends: gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg
    gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg-full
  Recommends: podsleuth

mono is not at all liked by many in FOSS community.like it or not,it is controlled M$haft.I personally hate mono and some distros making mono as dependency.

Hitboxx · 28-05-2008, 02:24 AM

Just got it from the (Fedora 9)repo and first impressions are very solid, I love it. So much improved and fast, a far cry from the old Banshee

**MetalheadGautham** · 28-05-2008, 02:37 AM

what is the reason banshee of all things is made from mono ?

I remember that it loads very fast and is a much better overall media management suite than Rhythembox for Gnome. But I uninstalled it because I find such things useless.

And you could actually select open a file with banshee, a feature rhythembox lacks

Faun · 28-05-2008, 02:50 AM

yeah i uninstalled it too, exaile do the job well and if somethings missing then rhythmbox is there

navigation part is dumb

praka123 · 28-05-2008, 02:52 AM

there is "Listen" player too there.

**MetalheadGautham** · 28-05-2008, 02:55 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by T159

yeah i uninstalled it too, exaile do the job well and if somethings missing then rhythmbox is there

navigation part is dumb

the problem with media management software is that they are too dumb for my liking.
we definitely need more cleverer programs that can organise in better ways, similar to what we want, not what we are asked to get.

ray|raven · 28-05-2008, 08:38 AM

^Try Quod Libet, allows you to search through your library using regular expressions,
provided you are geeky enough

**MetalheadGautham** · 28-05-2008, 09:05 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rayraven

^Try Quod Libet, allows you to search through your library using regular expressions,
provided you are geeky enough

heard of it. But its still not satisfactory.
because my media collection is very much different from anything else out there.

I have a mix of formats, with there occasionally being a song in multiple formats, with both video and audio, some live and some studio records. I arrange stuff under folders with the artist name, and albums and shows under the artist. Special catogaries are often created by me for the perpose of organisation. I divide songs by languages into English(containing 95% of my collection), Hindi(containing a tiny fraction of my collection), Spanish(one song), Tamil(for my mom; folder has 134 mp3s) and German(a few rammstein songs). In each there is a different way to organise stuff. for example, hindi has two catogaries, pop and bollywood.

I will be more than happy to get a "media management" utility that just plays every single format under the sun and treats my /media/sda6/music as the root library and assumes the folders inside it to be playlists and folders inside folders to be sub-playlists and play what ever I double click upon. Plus, ability to add items to custom playlist or just continue playing in folder order will be welcome. I want to be able to browse through /media/sda6/music as if it were both a giant playlist and at the same time a set of folders I can navigate through.

Neither banshee nor rhythembox, neither AmaroK nor Windows Media Player, neither Real Player nor iTunes can do what I need them to do. They are simply not functional enough for my needs. Instead they contain rubbishes like online stores.

Hopefully songbird will be good when it comes, seeing that its atleast bringing in some common sense related tweaks, like creating option to ignore "The, A, etc from the begining of artist name or song name, so that "The Beatles" will come under B, etc and ignoring case, number of spaces/other characters between words, etc.