Ubuntu’s new default media player Banshee has seen its first active development release leading towards the new media experience in Natty, 1.9.0. As we reported the Banshee team has vowed to provide an excellent experience for Ubuntu users, devoting the full 6 month cycle to delivering polish and stability, already 51 bugfixes have been delivered in the 1 month and 12 days since the 1.8.0 release (compared to 230 bugfixes being delivered in the 6 months between 1.6.0 and 1.8.0), along with a number of UI changes.

Not everything is bug fixes though, 1.9.0 also adds a few new features.

  • Play After feature for the Play Queue (covered in full by OMG! Ubuntu! here)
  • Album covers will now also be fetched from CDBaby and Jamendo
  • Support for Huwei Ideos Android phones
  • A new grid view based UI for podcasts (covered in full by OMG! Ubuntu! here)

Along with Banshee 1.9.0 comes a new release of Banshee Community Extensions (as of the writing of this article, the tarball has yet to hit the ftp servers, that is how shiny and fresh news OMG! Ubuntu! brings you) bringing with it 3 new extensions.

  • Automatic metadata correction using Last.fm fingerprinting (covered in full by OMG! Ubuntu! here)
  • Random by Last.fm shuffle mode (covered in full by OMG! Ubuntu! here)
  • Support for remote music storage using Ampache

If you don’t know what Ampache is, fear not, neither does your faithful Banshee reporter, but till I can provide an in depth article on this new Banshee feature the Ampache websites informs us that:

Ampache is a web based audio/video streaming application and file manager allowing you to access your music & videos from anywhere, using almost any internet enabled device.

More information on the Banshee 1.9.0 release can be found in the 1.9.0 release notes

Trying this on your Ubuntu machine:

Currently Banshee is likely to enter Natty as the default media player in time for Alpha 1 but your trusty Banshee packager Chow Loong Jin also provides a PPA of daily snapshots which you can use to try this out (this does not contain Banshee Community Extensions currently).

Thank you to the Banshee team for the screenshots