Banshee Tile
Banshee Media Player

Like the follow up to a well received album, fans of the Banshee media player have had a long wait for a new release – well over 6 months, in fact.

But the development rockstars behind the Mono-based media app haven’t been idle in that time.

The release of Banshee 2.9.0, the first development milestone on the road to the next stable release (Banshee 3.0, fact fans), fixes 36 bugs, sees the app ported to GTK3 (not an easy undertaking by any stretch) and adds music sync for devices running Symbian.

All 3 N95 owners will be pleased. 

Other improvements include:

  • Support for GNOME Software Store listing
  • Quicker submission of successful Scrobbles
  • .amr file import
  • ‘More Accurate Seek’
  • Keywords for Unity & GNOME Shell search
  • DAP Sources now remembered between sessions

The timing of this release couldn’t be better. I highlighted Banshee in a post on music players that support album art browsing last week.

Getting Banshee 2.9.0

So far there’s no word on when this latest release will be available on Ubuntu.

But, if you like to be prepared, you can add the Banshee Team PPA. This should, at some point in the not-so-distant future, be updated with the latest version of Banshee and any updated dependencies required for it to run.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:banshee-team/ppa
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install banshee

Once installation has completed Banshee can be launched from the Unity Dash, GNOME Shell activities overlay, or Mint Menu.

Banshee musicplayers