Friday, January 11, 2008

Installing Latest Banshee

Banshee is a music management and playback application for GNOME. Over the course of the year a variety of high quality, highly polished, and all around “swell” Mono GNOME Desktop applications have been popping up. As with many of these apps, Banshee has a beautiful user interface and is well architected.

It features

  1. Import Music
  2. Organize Music
  3. Play & Share
  4. Rip CDs
  5. Sync with IPod and most popular Music devices
  6. Play Last.fm playlists
  7. Play podcasts
The latest version ( 0.13.2) got released on January 8, 2008 and I was pleased to see the packages in Arch Linux. A simple pacman -S banshee revealed the fo;;owing packages will be installed.
pacman -S banshee
resolving dependencies... done.
looking for inter-conflicts... done.

Targets: libgdiplus-1.2.6-1 mono-1.2.6-1 gtk-sharp-2-2.10.2-1
libgnomecups-0.2.2-4 libgnomeprint-2.18.2-1
libgnomeprintui-2.18.1-1 gtkhtml-3.16.2-1 gnome-sharp-2.16.0-2
sqlite3-3.5.4-1 gstreamer0.10-faac-0.10.5-1
gstreamer0.10-faad-0.10.5-1 pmount-0.9.13-4 sg3_utils-1.25-1
libipoddevice-0.5.3-1 ipod-sharp-0.6.3-1 libnjb-2.2.5-3
njb-sharp-0.3.0-1 banshee-0.13.1-2

Interesting to note is that banshee comes default with ipod-sharp, the C# library for syncing with IPod. However, Banshee does not currently support IPod Touch or the IPhone. Also the latest version of Banshee supports PodSleuth, which replaces libipoddevices. However, Arch linux still does not have packages for PodSleuth and still use libipoddevices, I am sure this will soon change.

Banshee requires HAL and Dbus to be started before starting banshee.
I have just installed it and started using it for playing music from my hard disk.
Will try bnashee soon to sync my IPod Video.





Well if doing pacman -S banshee is difficult for some people, then they can install latest banshee with a click of mouse on OpenSUSE 10.3.
Aaron Bockover, the developer of banshee, got a comment saying that

dude a release blog without a 1-click link is like coffee without caffeine

So Aaron has promptly released the 1-Click install package for OpenSUSE 10.3.
Just click the following icon and let YAST do the work for you.

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