Share Your Banshee Library With Contacts On Empathy

By , Published November 22, 2009

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

empathy

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

contacts_menu

 

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 €œnow 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

Article originally appeared on omgubuntu.co.uk

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  • steve

    There were so many complaints about empathy being the default IM program in Ubuntu. Hopefully this will start to change peoples opinions. I think this is just a drop in the ocean for what we can expect from telepathy in the future.

  • http://twitter.com/explodingwalrus Carl Draper

    Now all they need to do is find out why banshee uses up appalling amounts of RAM to play music. Seriously it’s using 942MB of ram right now!

    • Anonymous

      file a bug

    • Anonymous

      I have about 400 Albums [NOT SONGS] loaded into Banshee atm and I am using about 94MB Ram at present!? Are you sure that you are not looking at Virtual Memory, thats cached? I am using Banshee 1.9.0, the daily build.
      Piers

  • Anonymous

    This sounds cool! Just a shame that Empathy is absolutely terrible, at least it is for MSN support. It can’t support file transfers, yet it can support sharing music libraries? Think priorities are mixed up here.

  • http://www.bazinga.it/ marco bonomo

    I don’t like banshee so much, I prefere rhythmbox, so i googled for a similar plugin for rb and there it is: http://alban.apinc.org/blog/2009/09/05/share-your-music-to-your-im-contacts-with-rhythmbox-and-telepathy/

    • http://omgubuntu.co.uk/ d0od

      Thanks for that! I’ll write that up as well so people have a choice.

  • Anonymous

    Wow, I must admit that is way cool!

    Jess
    http://www.ultimate-privacy.br.tc

  • http://www.kilobitspersecond.com/ Jay

    Where does one get a version of telepathy-gabble >= 0.9? The Telepathy PPA only has it up through 0.8.7-1

    • http://omgubuntu.co.uk/ d0od

      I had to build it from the telepathy git @ http://git.collabora.co.uk/

      • sudhir

        Can you please explain how did you build Telepathy-gabble 0.9 ?

  • http://sabini.ch vadim s. sabinich
  • Gagan Naidu

     how can i download my friends’ Banshee library metadata..??