Banshee (media player)


Banshee is a cross-platform open-source media player, called Sonance until 2005. Built upon Mono and Gtk#, it uses 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. 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.
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.
Banshee uses the SQLite database library.

Plugins

Banshee's plugin-capable architecture makes the software extensible and customizable. stable plugins include:
Compared to the Linux builds, which have stable releases, the Mac OS X builds are considered beta quality, and Windows builds are alpha quality. During Google Summer of Code 2012 Banshee has seen substantial improvements to its OS X support
The first alpha release of Banshee on Windows was Banshee 1.9.4, released on February 23, 2011.

Release history

VersionRelease dateSignificant changes
1.0June 5, 2008
  • Album Browser
  • Play Queue
  • Now Playing section
  • Video support
  • Audio CD support
  • CD Ripping / Burning
  • Podcast support
  • Integrated Next/Shuffle button
  • Device support
  • Mini mode
  • Automatic cover art
1.2July 29, 2008
  • 10-band Equalizer
  • Internet radio
  • Music recommendations
  • DAAP client
  • Playlist importing
  • Compilation album support
  • Manual reordering of playlists and play queue
  • Amarok migration
  • 1.2.1August 12, 2008
  • Bugfix release
  • 1.4.1November 10, 2008
  • Improved device support
  • Support for the HTC Android G1
  • Support for Mac OS X
  • New track editor
  • New rescan library tool
  • 1.4.2January 20, 2009
  • Bugfix release
  • 1.4.3March 4, 2009
  • Improved MTP support
  • Device playlist sync
  • 1.6.0March 31, 2010
  • Rhythmbox migrator
  • Beats Per Minute detection
  • Automatic scoring
  • Creative Commons licensing information column
  • Separate library locations for music, videos and podcasts
  • Gapless playback
  • Album grid view
  • YouTube extension
  • Equalizer presets
  • Nokia N900 support
  • Sync device from playlist
  • Type-ahead Find
  • Optional cover art in lower left corner
  • Editable cover art
  • Separate library for audiobooks
  • Library-folder watcher
  • eMusic Importer/Downloader
  • iTunes importer
  • Supports searching and streaming from the Internet Archive
  • Support for Pulse and Droid phones
  • Uses Last.fm 2.0 API
  • New Shuffle mode
  • Auto DJ
  • Support for webOS devices
  • Support for Samsung Galaxy phones
  • 1.6.1May 7, 2010
  • ?
  • 1.8.0September 29, 2010
  • Ability to connect to remote DAAP servers
  • iPod and iPhone / iPod Touch support
  • No more HAL dependency
  • User manual
  • Amazon MP3 Store and downloader
  • Miro podcast directory
  • Bulk metadata fixup extension
  • Improvements for Audiobook support, layout
  • 1.8.1January 28, 2011
  • ?
  • 2.0.0April 6, 2011
  • 2.x major-number release
  • Artist/Album Browser Track Actions
  • 'Play After' Queue Options
  • User Interface Improvements
  • Ubuntu One Music Store and SoundMenu Extensions
  • Subtitles
  • 2.0.1May 2, 2011
  • ?
  • 2.2.0September 21, 2011
  • ?
  • 2.2.1November 1, 2011
  • Support for the following Android devices: New Devices Supported: Motorola Atrix, Notion Ink Adam, Samsung Galaxy Ace, Samsung Galaxy S2, Xperia X12
  • Support for the Barnes & Noble Nook
  • Support default internet radio stations
  • Various bug fixes
  • 2.4.0March 2012
  • Support for UPnP
  • DVD video support
  • Additional search filters
  • Improvements to the interface
  • 2.4.1May 31, 2012
  • Various bug fixes
  • 2.6.0October 3, 2012
  • Significant improvements to the OS X release
  • Updated to use Last.FM scrobbling API 2.0
  • AAC transcoding profile reenabled
  • Device-scrobbling support to LastFM
  • Support for the following Android devices: Samsung Galaxy Nexus
  • Various bug fixes
  • 2.6.1April 16, 2013
  • Various bug fixes
  • Minor enhancements to filetype handling and device support
  • 2.6.2February 18, 2014
  • Various bug fixes
  • AppData file for inclusion in opensource appstores
  • 2.9.0October 8, 2013
  • Port to GTK3
  • Symbian device sync support
  • Various bug fixes
  • 2.9.1March 18, 2014
  • GStreamer 1.x support
  • New GStreamerSharp playback backend now default
  • New MediaPanel UI
  • Various bug fixes
  • 3.0.0TBA
  • Stable version of the 2.9-series
  • ColorMeaning
    RedOld release
    GreenCurrent stable release
    OrangeCurrent development release
    BlueFuture release

    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.