2010-10-05

Banshee 1.8.0, a few highlights

Last week we released Banshee version 1.8.0. A lot of new features and enhancements were added since the 1.6 release six months ago. So I'm not going to list them all, I'll just point out some of my favorites.

Amazon MP3 store

Browse, search, preview, purchase, and download music without leaving your media player. I can now enjoy music I never had a chance to get my hands on before !

Detailed screencast by Aaron

The part I like the most about it is that it uses the Amazon affiliate program, and all the money goes to the GNOME Foundation. Since this was put in place in August, every month brings a new record in revenue !

OpenVP visualizations

With every major Banshee release also comes a new version of the Banshee Community Extensions.
I'm really happy that it now includes the new OpenVP extension by Chris Howie. OpenVP is a platform for developing music visualizations, and the extension adds various music visualizations in the "Now Playing" source. You can now be mesmerized by your Banshee !

OSX is back

We haven't provided updated OSX packages for quite a while, so Tarmo Milva, an Apple-fanatic and a friend, could not stand this anymore. Or maybe he just got frustrated and tired of me rambling on about the awesomeness of Banshee...
Using the bockbuild build system (created by, you guessed it, Mr. Aaron Bockover), and with a bit of patience, he managed to build Banshee on his Mac, and created a shiny bundle for easy installation. He was kind enough to share it, so you can get it from our download page, and send your thanks this way.
This is still a beta-quality preview, several features are missing and it's not as stable as our Linux releases. Any OSX-related help is welcome, especially since Tarmo is often busy running marathons...

And more !

OK, I lied, I'm going to list more new stuff anyway :
  • Major update of the hardware integration, and improved Apple device support
  • Miro podcast directory
  • Topic-based user help
  • Metadata  fix-up extension
  • MPRIS v2 support
  • ...

Pretty moving pictures

Like I did a while back to celebrate the previous major release, I made another video using the excellent version control visualization tool called Gource. This one shows the activity between 1.6.0 and 1.8.0. You will notice it starts before the release of 1.6.0 with low activity, that's the stuff that was happening on separate feature branches and that got merged in later on.


If you want to be a part of the next movie, it's easy : translatewrite documentation, write code !