Posted on November 14, 2008 - by jono
Banshee Kickin’ It
Just wanted to throw out a big woohoo to Bockover and co over at Banshee for kicking out Banshee 1.4. I am a big fan of what they are doing, and they are doing some really neat work. The 1.x series is really kicking. 
The only thing I would really like to see and what is missing for me is StreamTuner integration – I would love to see a huge catalogue of online radio stations available. I like that StreamTuner scans online services for the available catalogue. I used to listen to these stations a lot – there is some incredible music out there.
What would be an interesting feature would be a workflow in how we listen to, consume and share music. So imagine this:
- I listen to an artist either on an online radio station, on Last.fm neighbourhood radio or something else.
- I like what I hear, and Banshee provides one click access to learning about the artist. It can show me a single page with the band’s Last.fm and wikipedia content, a discography and if free music is available, I can click a button and it will download it to my library. This would provide a great workflow for when you hear something you like (which can often be only a few riffs) you can fill your library with all available content.
It would also be great to have a feature for sharing music legally. Imagine I have a bunch Free Culture music in my library. It would be great to have a button to make those songs easily available to others to transfer to their library, over IM or other online service, maybe using the (CC) branding and logos to help this along.
Just thoughts, but congrats guys on a fantastic release!
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November 14, 2008
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Agreed, I was really impressed after installing 1.4 last night, congratulations Banshee team!
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November 14, 2008
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Integrating Wiki support would be beautiful ^^ .
Lyrics too.
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November 14, 2008
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+1! Banshee 1.x is absolutely awesome and 1.4 is rock solid (compiled it from source after reading this post). The new track metadata editor is great and the rate that extra hardware is being supported in Banshee is amazing. Managed to convert a friend to Ubuntu today and was confident that Banshee would work 100% with his Music collection and his iPod (which it did). Keep it up!
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November 14, 2008
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Indeed, Banshee is kicking some major ass.
The Extra tab in the track information dialog has a “Copyright” field (which is just the id3 tag field); we should extend that to parse for recognizable licenses (eg: CC, Open Audio, etc) and display a clickable image or something.
Just an idea.
Keep on rocking Banshee!
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November 15, 2008
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That’s what audiosource has http://img404.imageshack.us/my.php?image=guanoapesua3.png
And it works pretty simple. Webkit to render page + plugin that fetches artist information from last.fm http://hg.backtrace.info/hgwebdir.cgi/mpx/file/44611fc1ae35/python/plugins/trackinfo-webkit/init.py.in
I’m sure that banshee will have it soon. What I would like to see is a windows port:)
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November 18, 2008
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Jono, Greg: you guys spawned a new blog post. Hopefully I address both of your questions in it: http://abock.org/2008/11/17/a-couple-of-ideas-for-contributing-to-banshee/
Cheers!
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November 26, 2008
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Indeed, Banshee is a nice piece of software.
The only thing that keeps me from using it is the tag editor. It doesn’t edit the original tags included in the music file, but stores the edited information in a separate database. That means that if you decide to switch to another music player, all the edited metadata are gone.
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February 25, 2009
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I am using 1.4.2 and it has an option to save the edits to the files. EDIT > PREFERENCES > General (Tab) > “Write metadata to files”
What I would like to see is a decent tag editor in the first place. Linux needs this in general from what I can tell after weeks of looking for one. On windows I use mp3tag which is free and excellent. Has “tag to file” and “file to tag” features, along with lookups on a wide range of online tag sources (extendible with add-ons). Would love to see better tag editing in Banshee. fingers crossed.