A revived Banshee music player is now available on the Snap store, making it possible to use it on modern Linux desktops decades after its last stable release.

The new snap, packaged by Alan Pope, means users can now run Banshee 2.6.2, the final release made in 2014, on modern Linux desktops. It includes ‘compatibility fixes and restores selected online services’, but the listing warns not all ‘historical’ services may work.

This isn’t a new official build. This is purely an act of software preservation.

Containerised packaging formats like Snap are ideal for “time capsule” type efforts, since ancient dependencies can be bundled inside, thereby not affecting the host system.

But don’t be fooled by the nostalgia; it is a real, working music player: point it at a folder of tracks and it loads them in to browse, manage and play. To get it to read from an external drive you do need to give the snap permission1.

Banshee enjoyed a spell as Ubuntu’s default music app between 2011 and 2012. Its inclusion was a big deal at the time – not just because it replaced the ever-popular Rhythmbox – but because of what it what it was coded in: Mono.

Banshee music player in Ubuntu 2010
Banshee running on an Ubuntu 10.04 LTS desktop

Mono is (it still exists) an open-source reimplementation of parts of Microsoft’s .NET stack, the C# language and related libraries. It was created by GNOME co-founder, Miguel de Icaza.

Many in the Linux community deeply dislike Mono, fearing that its use was a trojan horse effort to capture Linux, and that distros and developers who used it could be threatened with legal action by Microsoft.

That never happened.

Microsoft did become stewards of Mono, but it handed it to the Wine project in 2024.

Ubuntu did end up dropping Mono-using apps – Banshee, gBrainy and Tomboy – from its default install in 2012, but it was because of disk space concerns than phantom patent concerns.

But Ubuntu users last heard the Banshee’s wail in 2018, as the package was dropped from the Debian archives as it relied on deprecated liberties in the process of being retired.

Ubuntu suers can open App Center and search for Banshee to install it, or fetch it via a terminal:

sudo snap install banshee

Heck, I’m tempted to pull the curtains and pretend it’s 2012 and we’re back existing in the good timeline. For full-on reenactment vibes, I may even grab a pitchfork to snipe about the use of Mono.

  1. Run sudo snap connect banshee:removable-media ↩︎