Banshee (media player)

Last updated
Banshee
Developer(s) Novell Inc.
Initial releaseFebruary 17, 2005;19 years ago (2005-02-17)
Stable release
2.6.2 [1]   OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg / 18 February 2014
Preview release
2.9.1 [2]   OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg / 18 March 2014
Repository
Written in C# (Gtk#)
Operating system Linux, Mac OS X (beta), Windows (alpha)
Type Media player
License MIT
Website www.banshee-project.org   OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg

Banshee was a cross-platform open-source media player, called Sonance until 2005. [3] Built upon Mono and Gtk#, it used the GStreamer multimedia platform for encoding, and decoding various media formats, including Ogg Vorbis, MP3 and FLAC. Banshee can play and import audio CDs and supports many portable media players, including Apple's iPod, Android devices and Creative's ZEN players. [4] Other features include Last.fm integration, album artwork fetching, smart playlists and podcast support. Banshee is released under the terms of the MIT License. Stable versions are available for many Linux distributions, as well as a beta preview for OS X and an alpha preview for Windows.

Contents

Banshee was the default music player for a year in Ubuntu and for some time in Linux Mint, but was later replaced by Rhythmbox in both distributions. [5] [6] [7]

Banshee uses the SQLite database library.

Plugins

Banshee's plugin-capable architecture makes the software extensible and customizable. As of 2012 stable plugins include:

Cross-platform support

Compared to the Linux builds, which have stable releases, the Mac OS X builds are considered beta quality, and Windows builds are alpha quality (and, as of April 2013, two versions behind the other platforms). During Google Summer of Code 2012 Banshee has seen substantial improvements to its OS X support [8]

The first alpha release of Banshee on Windows was Banshee 1.9.4, released on February 23, 2011. [9] [10] [11]

Helix Banshee

Helix Banshee was a version of Banshee, included in older versions of SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop and openSUSE. It was based upon the Banshee core, but with a plug-in to add support for the Helix framework for playback and transcoding, in addition to GStreamer.

See also

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References

  1. "Banshee 2.6.2". 18 February 2014. Archived from the original on 2 March 2014.
  2. "Banshee 2.9.1". 18 March 2014. Archived from the original on 23 March 2014.
  3. "Banshee rename git commit". Git.gnome.org. Retrieved 2012-10-10.
  4. "Sync". Library.gnome.org. Archived from the original on 2012-03-13. Retrieved 2012-10-10.
  5. Banshee, Tomboy And Mono Dropped from Ubuntu 12.04 CD
  6. Mint 18.1 review: Forget about Wayland and get comfy with the command line
  7. "New features in Linux Mint 18.1 Cinnamon". Archived from the original on 2020-07-26. Retrieved 2017-05-21.
  8. "GSoC 2012: Improve Banshee's Mac OS X port". Timo Dörr.
  9. "bgo#641690 Comment #4". Gnome Bugzilla.
  10. "Gabriel Burt, Twitter". Twitter.
  11. "OMG!Ubuntu! Article". OMG!Ubuntu!. 21 February 2011.