A few years ago, I used to write some plugins and a little bit of code for the Banshee project. As I grew in my job at Mintel, I lost energy for working on Banshee but the project carried on and has grown from version 0.x to 2.x in a few years time. I keep using Banshee on my Linux laptop, but a year ago I made an odd choice of buying a Macbook and I’ve been hating iTunes ever since. iTunes really sucks.
I was catching up on old blogs the other day and found that Aaron has moved on from Novell and that some old & familiar names have stepped up to help with maintainership. Pretty cool stuff guys. Oh and the Mac OS X builds are much more regular than they used to be, and it’s working great!
One tip: If you’re looking for the latest version of Banshee on OS X, the website is a bit out of date. Go straight to the GNOME download server for the latest OS X build which is 2.3.4.
Furthermore, if you’re running Banshee on Ubuntu and love Amazon MP3 and the GNOME project as much as I do, please give this a read.
That is very cool. Thanks for bringing attention to this. I like Banshee for the most part on my Linux systems at home. It’s pretty close to good.
Out of curiosity, what about iTunes “really sucks”? I can understand not liking it for various reasons, but for the most part it is a pretty reliable media player.
My biggest beef with iTunes is the digging I had to do to try and find how to support codecs other than mp3. I have quite a few FLAC & Vorbis files. The majority of Mac users seem to be happy to convert their music to mp3 rather than teach their media player how to play other codecs, so it’s hard to find resources on this. I actually gave up on it, I never figured out how to make this possible.
I generally find iTunes to be slow, and quite a few times it’s frozen for minutes at a time. iTunes is the program that made me have to look up the keyboard shortcut for Force Close. I’m sure it’s not that bad, but my experience coming from Banshee to this has made me want to run away! :)
I’m thinking about buying a Mac and also thinking about all the possibilities I have on that system in order to carry my FLAC tracks with me. I’m seeing the Banshee progressing as time goes by and seems that now everything on OS X is in tune with Banshee for Linux. I’ve made some tests with Banshee while I was experimenting with Linux Ubuntu with the Orca screen reader. I’m a blind user and thought about jumping to Linux for my dayly music projects, but Orca’s impossibility of dealling with reading of certain QT4-based applications made me stick to Windows for a while. But I had my hands on Banshee during my Ubuntu adventures and I think this is a great alternative to iTunes. Hope it fits with VoiceOver, the Apple’s screen reader.
Just tried Banshee (OS X) again and like the interface and the ease of use BUT FLAC files sound all distorted.
In the age where we need better quality music it is disappointing that FLAC isn’t completely supported.