Ever wanted to share your Banshee library with your Empathy contacts? Well so did Neil Loknath who took it upon himself to make this functionality reality at Google’s Annual Summer Of Code.
What does it do?
The functionality is simply provided by a telepathy-based extension for Banshee. Crazy, non?
The extension brings some crazy-cool features to the user, such as: –
- Download your friends’ Banshee library metadata and check out what they listen to, their ratings, favourites, etc.
- View & save your friends’ playlists
- Show your Empathy contacts what you’re listening to with a ‘Now Playing’ feature
And the two features most people will go GaGa over: –
- Download your friends’ music one track at a time or choose a selection.
- Stream your contacts music from their Banshee library. Pause, seek, skip, use the play queue, etc
The Catch?
Sadly this does only currently work with other users using the plug-in AND using a Jabber account.
Try it out
First thing to be aware of is that this isn’t totally polished and ready to go mad with; there are some bugs and fixes needed.
You will need: –
- mono >= 2.4.2
- banshee >= 1.5.1
- empathy >= 2.27.91
- telepathy-gabble >= 0.9
- telepathy-mission-control-5 >= 5.3.1
If you have these you can most likely install this fine.
You can find bleeding edge versions of mission control & empathy @ https://launchpad.net/~telepathy/+archive/ppa
Or you can build the telepathy requirements from source via git @ http://git.collabora.co.uk/
Download Source: –
You can grab the source via the github page @ http://github.com/nloko/banshee-telepathy-extension (you can download the source as a tar.gz if you prefer)
Open a terminal and navigate to the downloaded source and simply run
- ./autogen.sh
followed by
- make && sudo checkinstall/make install (depending on your preference)
Restart Banshee and the extension will auto-load up with it.
Usage
To enable “now playing” go to contacts > share what i’m currently listening to
If you have contacts using this plugin you can right click on their name in the contact list and choose your option.
You can find a more in-depth how-to, list of features and known issues over @ http://github.com/nloko/banshee-telepathy-extension