2010-10-05

Banshee 1.8.0, a few highlights

Last week we released Banshee version 1.8.0. A lot of new features and enhancements were added since the 1.6 release six months ago. So I'm not going to list them all, I'll just point out some of my favorites.

Amazon MP3 store

Browse, search, preview, purchase, and download music without leaving your media player. I can now enjoy music I never had a chance to get my hands on before !

Detailed screencast by Aaron

The part I like the most about it is that it uses the Amazon affiliate program, and all the money goes to the GNOME Foundation. Since this was put in place in August, every month brings a new record in revenue !

OpenVP visualizations

With every major Banshee release also comes a new version of the Banshee Community Extensions.
I'm really happy that it now includes the new OpenVP extension by Chris Howie. OpenVP is a platform for developing music visualizations, and the extension adds various music visualizations in the "Now Playing" source. You can now be mesmerized by your Banshee !

OSX is back

We haven't provided updated OSX packages for quite a while, so Tarmo Milva, an Apple-fanatic and a friend, could not stand this anymore. Or maybe he just got frustrated and tired of me rambling on about the awesomeness of Banshee...
Using the bockbuild build system (created by, you guessed it, Mr. Aaron Bockover), and with a bit of patience, he managed to build Banshee on his Mac, and created a shiny bundle for easy installation. He was kind enough to share it, so you can get it from our download page, and send your thanks this way.
This is still a beta-quality preview, several features are missing and it's not as stable as our Linux releases. Any OSX-related help is welcome, especially since Tarmo is often busy running marathons...

And more !

OK, I lied, I'm going to list more new stuff anyway :
  • Major update of the hardware integration, and improved Apple device support
  • Miro podcast directory
  • Topic-based user help
  • Metadata  fix-up extension
  • MPRIS v2 support
  • ...

Pretty moving pictures

Like I did a while back to celebrate the previous major release, I made another video using the excellent version control visualization tool called Gource. This one shows the activity between 1.6.0 and 1.8.0. You will notice it starts before the release of 1.6.0 with low activity, that's the stuff that was happening on separate feature branches and that got merged in later on.


If you want to be a part of the next movie, it's easy : translatewrite documentation, write code !

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

Windows binary anyone?

Would it be possible to release a MS Windows build of banshee as well?

Bertrand said...

@Anonymous
There's been some significant progress on the Windows side lately. You get get Banshee up and running on Windows, but it involves git, building from source, etc.

I think the big missing part is an installer package. It'd be great if someone with the right expertise could help us with that...

Unknown said...

I would love to see a windows binary as well. I'd really like to make banshee my go to media app, but right now I'm running between OSX and Windows, so that's not happening.

Looking forward to some windows love :)

Anonymous said...

Are the windows installation requirements available?

Bertrand said...

@Anonymous
The steps to build Banshee on Windows are describe in the following page :
http://banshee.fm/download/development/#windows

Anonymous said...

Hi,
Yep, I found those, but I was wondering if anyone had written down the requirements for end users? An installer wouldn't be too difficult.
I guess I'll try to figure it out on my own if I can get a working build.
I know GTK# must be one requirement for end users.

Bertrand said...

I don't think anyone is working on a Windows installer yet, so any help with that would be great !

Dennis said...

I'm having quite a bit of trouble with missing references. Some are probably external packages, so I will take another look tomorrow.
It's a good exercise in figuring out end-user requirements.
I'm looking forward to see this build successfully. Once I can get that, getting a working command-line build won't be difficult. That's always the first step before starting an installer.

(I was the anonymous poster)

Anonymous said...

That gource video was seriously awesome. I'll have to look into that.

Dennis said...

Bertrand, I was able to fix up many missing or broken references, however, GStreamer-sharp is killing me.
Any ideas on where to get windows binaries for this?

It looks like I only have a few more assemblies to get built (I suppose looks can be deceiving). I've been keeping a log of my changes.

If I can get a clean build out of this, I will make sure the right people get my notes.

thanks

Dennis said...

Bertrand, is there someone on the project that may be able to help with these issues?
I'm more than happy to contribute the windows installer.

Bertrand said...

@Dennis,
Various people have done Windows-related work for Banshee, so they might be able to help.
I think you should post a message on the mailing-list describing your issues or questions :
http://banshee.fm/about/contact/