The Banshee project is proud to announce the release of 1.8.0.
What’s new?
Ending 6 productive months of development for the Banshee team and bringing 230 bugfixes as well as a sleeve of new features to users including integration with Ubuntu’s SoundMenu, Amazon MP3 store integration, completely new and improved hardware support and other goodies of which have been reported here on OMG! Ubuntu!.
Readers interested in the full set of feature additions since 1.6.0 can read our coverage of Banshee over the past 6 months for in depth pieces on these, or read the NEWS files.
Since the announcement of 1.7.6 no major features have been added, but users will be happy to know that we fixed several high profile bugs. Most importantly is a double race condition in the .NET DBus implementation which has been worked around in Banshee, this problem was causing a lot of random hangs for people. A number of fixes to the iPod and MTP support have also appeared, bringing with it correct support for the media capabilities on your iPod (e.g. podcasts should now correctly go in the podcast section on your iPod) as well as playlist support on Apple devices, along with multiple hardware detection and handling enhancements which should all lead to Banshee 1.8.0 providing the best media player experience for users of portable players on Ubuntu. (That being said reports indicate that iOS 4.1 devices are not yet supported by libgpod due to a database change by Apple and thus will not function correctly with Banshee either.)
Finally 1.8.0 sees fixes to the file handling which removes a number of crashes in the default gio backend. All of which should make this the most reliable Banshee release in history.
If you have had issues previously with Banshee, you are highly encouraged to try out 1.8.0. We are mighty proud of this release, and hope that it will solve a number of long standing issues for users. So if you have a bug open against Banshee please do retest it and tell us if you are still experiencing problems.
On behalf of the The Banshee Team I wish to thank the OMG! Ubuntu! readers for faithfully helping out testing through the 1.7.x development cycle, without your talent for breaking our code 1.8.0 wouldn’t be the release it is. We hope you will join us for the exciting 1.9.x cycle which should start shortly and bring with it 6 months of continued improvements, enhancements and new features.All of which you will be sure to be amongst the first to hear about right here on OMG! Ubuntu!.
Installation
Packages should hit the Maverick repos very soon, but if you’re desperate, you can grab it from the the Banshee PPA.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:banshee-team/ppa
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
Should you have any issues with this new Banshee release, please file a bug.