Banshee 1.0 Released

Banshee, the Linux media player backed by Novell that's built upon Mono and uses the GStreamer framework, has today reached the version 1.0 milestone. While there are plenty of people not fond of Mono or even Novell, Banshee has turned into a fairly feature-rich media player with support for synchronizing against the Apple iPod, Creative Zen, and other devices. Through Banshee's plug-in architecture, it also supports Podcasting, DAAP music sharing, and Internet radio support, just to name a few of these extensions.

The Banshee 1.0 release was our first time trying it out, and our initial thoughts were it's very easy to use and the Gtk# interface does resemble that of Rhythmbox but with a slightly fresher look -- and with video playback support.

In addition to the Podcast, DAAP music sharing, and Internet radio support, Banshee also has a Last.fm plug-in for reporting the music being played back to this popular Web 2.0 website.

It wouldn't be a media player in 2008 if it didn't support Podcasting...

The preferences are for file organization and library management, audio CD import settings, and extensions/plug-ins.

Banshee 1.0 has support for smart play-lists, with the "smart" portion being adjustable to end-user settings.

Compared to earlier versions of Banshee, version 1.0 offers enhanced performance through improved memory usage and faster start-up. For more information on all of the features that can be found within Banshee 1.0, check out its feature summary (download links can also be found on that page).

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