Mono, Banshee Will Still Be Loved In Ubuntu 12.04

The Banshee music player will still be used in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, but this Mono-based media application will receive some changes.

Besides talking about more documentation and a stable API, the Ubuntu developers meeting this week in Orlando also talked about Banshee as the default media application in Ubuntu.

Concerns over this Mono and GTK#-using application were raised since Banshee has had some problems on ARM (the application freezing with a white screen) and Mono issues on ARM in general. There hasn't been any attention from upstream Mono about these issues under ARM, but there's some thinking it may be a Banshee problem since the Mono-based F-Spot and Tomboy programs are working under ARM without fault. Developers are hopeful that the matters will be worked out for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, instead of switching to a Mono-free multimedia player.

It was also raised that Banshee is still using GTK2 and not yet GTK3 in Ubuntu and that the movie playing functionality from Banshee will be disabled in Ubuntu, since it's broken.

Other details about what was discussed can be found in the session notes on media players review.