Sometimes longer than we'd like. Over two years ago at a Boston GNOME Summit Aaron Bockover laid out some of his ideas about the future of Banshee. At the time Banshee wasn't very mature, it was in need of some love and new blood. In the room along with us was Gabriel Burt, Miguel de Icaza and his band of mono people, Mike Urbanski, Brandon Hale, and a few others.
Over the course of this session we discussed things like the much-needed play queue, the need to redo a bunch of the guts, better device support, and a myriad of other ideas and thoughts. At the time it seemed so impossible that Banshee would ever get there.
This week Aaron announced Banshee 1.4, and in my view this is the Banshee that we envisioned. Much has changed. Since then Gabriel has been working on Banshee at Novell for a year now, and the Banshee community has grown by leaps and bounds.
In many ways I feel like Banshee 1.4 is what 1.0 should have been. Hindsight is very 20/20, but looking back at the amount of work accomplished by the team (on top of their other work duties) and the solid base that is current Banshee, I think the decision to rework the guts and push through to what we have today has been worth it. I think that getting out 1.0 and 1.2 when they did come out was important, even though some things weren't finished.
So now that we're here ... aaaaahhhhhhhh.
So now what? Well, I for one have been looking forward to this day for a number of reasons. One, I feel that Banshee has now reached a point where it can be boring. By "boring" I mean mature. The big churn is over and now we can concentrate on the sexy little bits.
I myself have been lucky to watch the Ubuntu part of the Banshee community grow. We have hyperair maintaining the Banshee team PPA, which provides Ubuntu users top-notch binaries for running Banshee. Prior to hyperair, there was no one really working on delivering fresh-Banshee to Ubuntu users, so my thanks go out to him. I've literally forgotten how to build Banshee from source. :)
And clearly no one can ever forget Sebastian Dröge's work on not just Banshee, but the entire Mono stack in Ubuntu over the years. He's been off doing awesome things for Collabora, but his contributions to Ubuntu, Debian, and Banshee are very significant. And lastly, my personal bug hero, Andrew Conkling, who has been that "bridge" between Ubuntu and upstream; triaging bugs and ensuring that the right bugs get reported to the Banshee developers and generally kicking serious butt.
I'd also like to thank those of you out there who have reported bugs in Banshee, helped people in IRC, and done general support and advocacy. You're all full of awesome.
Hey, awesome, Banshee 1.4 is actually able to import songs, unlike 1.2. Nice. I wonder if it's able to import new songs ripped through Sound Juicer without forcing you to either empty the library then re-import the whole thing or dig through each individual directory that changed like it did a year and a half ago? Guess I'll find out when I get around to ripping my other CDs.
Posted by: Mackenzie | November 17, 2008 at 21:34
I honestly wish ubuntu would use banshee for the default music player, it really is best of breed.
the only thing missing from it is DVB support, then it can replace totem and rhythmbox, for me atleast.
and slightly off topic, but why can't f-spot get this amount of love, is no one as passionate on that project as Aaron is with banshee or Miguel is with mono.
Posted by: andrew | November 18, 2008 at 03:47
Thank you for making Banshee, this program is really good, and it also help making amarok better...
Posted by: kde user | November 19, 2008 at 19:28
Andrew:
Big issue I see with Banshee is that it uses TagLib instead of GStreamer to import music. This means that if you have it running while Sound Juicer is ripping a CD, it will freak out and throw a bunch of errors trying to import songs that aren't done being ripped. It also totally fails to import songs on occasion. It just pretends they're not there, skips over them. Rhythmbox is very reliable about importing songs.
Posted by: Mackenzie | November 20, 2008 at 03:31
(Disclaimer: Not the Andrew who already commented.)
Jorge, you rock. Inspiring post!
Mackenzie: Banshee doesn't automatic importing, so I'm not sure how you'd get yourself into a situation where it's importing while Sound Juicer is ripping. Also, if you're having problems importing tracks, check out the support page: http://banshee-project.org/support/
Andrew #1: Though there are some exceptions (Firefox instead of Epiphany), I think that Ubuntu would be more motivated to make Banshee its default music/media player when GNOME makes it theirs. I'd be curious to know what it would take for that to happen too.
Posted by: Andrew Conkling | November 24, 2008 at 09:20
I tested banshee quite early and thought "wow, mono must suck. Here a bunch of skilled devs wrote a piece of crap". I still know nothing about mono, but I know I love banshee. It is one of the best players/music managers out there.
I was especially impressed with how it re-encoded the audio not supported by my music player when I synchronized. Really impressive. The one problem I see with that is that I have my whole music collection as flac (which my iaudio7 supports), but there is really no need for me to have the flac audio on my iaudio7. Is there a way to set it to recode the flac files to say ogg vorbis or mp3? That would really be a killer feature.
Posted by: Linus | November 24, 2008 at 10:11
Oh... I found some info here: http://wiki.banshee-project.org/Guide/DAPs/MassStorageDevices
Posted by: Linus | November 24, 2008 at 10:14