Site regular David Nielsen, a Banshee contributor, is having issues that prevent him from posting an update on the Mono-based media player’s recent progress.
But don’t worry; he’s armed me with a stash of nifty news snippets to help tide the Banshee faithful over until he returns…
What’s cooking? Let’s find out.
Banshee’s recent work (Summer 2011)
Banshee 2.1.4 was released
Banshee 2.1.4 and Banshee Community Extensions 2.1.4 were released. Both bring a variety of bug fixes to the table and can be downloaded, as always, from the official Banshee website [update 2026: dead link removed].
GTK3 Banshee is still happening
Banshee’s GTK3 work continues, though the port is now delayed until the Banshee 2.3.x series. This is to avoid introducing any potential stability problems late in the upcoming Banshee 2.2 release.
The delay isn’t without its benefits, as upstream GTK3 has benefitted from some ‘significant improvements’ as a result of Banshee’s porting work – which will benefit other projects looking to make their own GTK3 ports. Nice!
uPNP
Banshee finally has uPNP server and client support, thanks to Google Summer of Code 2011 student Tobias Arrskog (and his mentor, Alexander Kojevnikov).
This is another feature you can expect to land in the Banshee 2.3.x series.
Interested in learning more about the work? Take a read through the GSoC writeup on Tobias Arrskog’s blog, which details the process and technical challenges faced.
Gstreamer#
David writes: “GStreamer# port now supports Video playback and is considered a target for merging. However it depends on GTK#3 which is 2.3.x material and thus will not be in 2.2. Significant improvements have been merged to the GStreamer# backend in 2.2 though.
“This work will vastly improve functionality on non-Linux platforms and allow Banshee to use GStreamer directly rather than through the existing problematic C shim (which is in use on Linux currently).”
All platforms that can run the 2.3.x release will benefit from this work, which David says should improve stability and reduce the maintenance burden for the project as a whole.
Browse by Artist & Genre
A patch to allow users to configure the music browser (showing or hiding the ‘Genre’ and ‘Year’; and showing all artists or only album artists) will “hopefully be merged during 2.3.x”, says David.
Those willing – and capable – of patching Banshee’s code from source can try the feature out earlier. See bugzilla #540873 for details.
WebOS port continues
While the future of WebOS appears to be in limbo since HP acquired it from Palm, work on porting Banshee to the mobile platform is continuing anyway.
Banshee developer Jo Shields posted the following picture on his Twitter:
Banshee for Mac OS X
Want to run Banshee on Apple Mac OS X? Well, David has together a Banshee test image for OS X Lion. Emphasis falls duly on the word “test” since there are plenty of known issues, including drag and drop actions crashing the player, video playback crashing the player…
You get the idea.
It also has no hardware backend at all, so don’t expect it to sync to any iPods, etc.
Elsewhere, Xamarin, the recently formed company supporting and developing Mono, have hired the open-source development group Lanedo to improve GTK support on OS X. That work will benefit Banshee and other cross platform apps on Apple’s OS too!
Yes, he can!
Last, but by no means least, is news that Banshee’s lead developer Gabriel Burt has taken a job with the Obama re-election campaign.
As a result, Gabriel will have significantly less time to devote to Banshee. The good news is that he says he plans to stay involved as and when time allows.
Article updated in 2026 to fix dead links and images.