Banshee 1.0 Alpha 1

Aaron Bockover has just announced the alpha pre-release of Banshee 1.0. This is a result of the heavy refactoring that has been taking place in Banshee trunk since October.

Obviously there is still a bunch of stuff missing, notably hardware player support, and a bunch of plugins still need to be ported - but it's good to get this out there as a baseline for people to get started playing with Banshee and help out.

I'm heading to Chicago for the weekend where I'll link up with Gabriel Burt, who has implemented the last.fm plugin. I will be buying him a bunch of beer:

Gabriel has made it trivially easy to add custom stations based on any of the last.fm criteria. So I can follow my friend's individual stations, group stations (like the Banshee and Ubuntu stations), and songs based on tags. Gabriel talks about this release here. 

Thanks to Jonathan McDowell for mentioning that you can listen to songs tagged as "cover" to get a station of nothing but cover songs. Awesome.

Other improvements include dramatically reduced memory consumption and real FAST searching. Read more about the release in the release notes. The Banshee folks have been putting in tons of overtime on this new release, so kudos to them.