Banshee is one of the popular audio players for GNOME, and maybe the first alternative to Rhythmbox, the default player coming with this desktop environment. Banshee has made some amazing things in the last year, especially since 1.0 came out. Each new release brings something new, it gets more stable and new features are added.
Banshee allows to organise media files in a collection, it supports plugins, podcasts, radio stations, Last.fm integration, cover art fetching, playlist sorting, tag editor, ratings, notifications and even more.
Although this is not tagged as a stable release, I decided to take a look at it and see what is new since the 1.4 series. This beta comes with various new features, many bug fixes and improvements. To mention just a few:
One of the new features in 1.6 is the ability to match several characters to their ASCII equivalent when searching in the playlist. For example, o will also match รถ and vice versa. I think this is a great new feature, because it makes it easier to search and play tracks which have non-English characters in their names.
Banshee can now import the library from Rhythmbox, so if you want to made the transition from this player to Banshee, you don't have to worry for losing your library. The score column is now automatically updated after playing a song too.
Banshee has the same clean interface, typical to so many GTK audio players. Everything looks in place, everything is easy to find and intuitive to use. To the left there is the side panel, while the music library and the playlist takes most of the center area. The Last.fm panel is located at the bottom of the main window. Here's how a usual instance of Banshee looks like:
As I already mentioned, Banshee comes with Last.fm integration (that means retrieval of recommended artists, top albums by playing artist, song submission, and the profile information - recently loved tracks, recently played tracks and top artists).
To conclude, I was positively impressed by this Banshee release. And it's only a beta currently, so the final release should be even more impressing! Great work, and a great, powerful audio player which really deserves not to be missing from a top audio players on Linux list.
Banshee homepage
Source URL: http://ashesgarrett.blogspot.com/2009/06/banshee-16-beta-1-review.html
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Banshee allows to organise media files in a collection, it supports plugins, podcasts, radio stations, Last.fm integration, cover art fetching, playlist sorting, tag editor, ratings, notifications and even more.
Although this is not tagged as a stable release, I decided to take a look at it and see what is new since the 1.4 series. This beta comes with various new features, many bug fixes and improvements. To mention just a few:
One of the new features in 1.6 is the ability to match several characters to their ASCII equivalent when searching in the playlist. For example, o will also match รถ and vice versa. I think this is a great new feature, because it makes it easier to search and play tracks which have non-English characters in their names.
Banshee can now import the library from Rhythmbox, so if you want to made the transition from this player to Banshee, you don't have to worry for losing your library. The score column is now automatically updated after playing a song too.
Banshee has the same clean interface, typical to so many GTK audio players. Everything looks in place, everything is easy to find and intuitive to use. To the left there is the side panel, while the music library and the playlist takes most of the center area. The Last.fm panel is located at the bottom of the main window. Here's how a usual instance of Banshee looks like:
Banshee 1.6 Beta 1 running in Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope
As I already mentioned, Banshee comes with Last.fm integration (that means retrieval of recommended artists, top albums by playing artist, song submission, and the profile information - recently loved tracks, recently played tracks and top artists).
Last.fm integration
To conclude, I was positively impressed by this Banshee release. And it's only a beta currently, so the final release should be even more impressing! Great work, and a great, powerful audio player which really deserves not to be missing from a top audio players on Linux list.
Banshee homepage
Source URL: http://ashesgarrett.blogspot.com/2009/06/banshee-16-beta-1-review.html
Visit ashes garrett for Daily Updated Hairstyles Collection
