Banshee 1.0 alpha 1: the awesome has arrived

by davidnielsen

Banshee 1.0 is something I’ve personally been looking forward to the past many months, since before it was a twinkle in Aaron Bockovers eyes I suspect, mainly because Banshee is one of my favorite applications. I love music and Banshee always provided a very nice way to interact with my music in more ways than just listening to it. Todays face of audio includes listening statistics and recommendation fronted by the excellent last.fm service, there is the multitude of new media available in the form of podcasts and internet radio. When outside the house, my iPod follows me everywhere as does my entire library of music. Banshee supports all this and it presents it to me in an easy to use interface. There are many media players available in the Fedora repos, but Banshee remains my favorite, it’s slick, stable and boasts a powerful featureset (all as plugins naturally).

Banshee 1.0 alpha 1 is the Banshee you know and love but faster, more featureful and sexier than ever before. Though being an alpha release, it is not perfect e.g. not all the plugins has been ported yet so you have to live without things like iPod support, these feature gaps will be filled shortly. Banshee 1.0 alpha 1 scales beautifully, even with very large libraries it never suffers from performance problems during use or startup. Additionally many of othe long standing feature requests like equalizer, album/artist browing and play queue support have been fulfilled as well as the introduction of a new powerful search system.

For more information please consult the release notes

Naturally I will put this in the Fedora Development repo as soon as possible so people can play with it.