Mono, Banshee Will Still Be Loved In Ubuntu 12.04

[phoronix]

Phoronix: 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...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTAwOTg

[DavidNielsen]

In Banshee we are well aware of the fact that we are not yet using GTK3, the port is mostly complete. Right now we are stuck on a bug in GTK#3 or Mono that causes scrollbars to disappear. GObject-Introspection was supposed to make creating bindings easy but it lacks annotations needed to do this for environments such as Java and .NET, an issue GIR upstream has been made aware of but so far seems to be uninterested in addressing (AFAIK).

The bug in question is this one, any help getting it resolved with greatly speed up the process of getting to GTK3.

https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=442068

A little tidbit on the specific bug and other Banshee stuff can be found here.

https://plus.google.com/u/0/111146406732565623394/posts/E9c2uSYHwSq

I am unaware of the ARM issue, I have such a device in hand but I have not extensively tested Banshee on it. However it launches fine for me. I'll do some more testing as soon as possible.

We are also moving to GStreamer# which should enable video on all platforms (Linux, Windows and OS X) but this is dependent on GTK#3 being merged. There are additional improvements to the Video handling (specifically TV Show support and making the video support an extension that can be en/disabled at will) in progress but these are down on the list in terms of importance compared to getting GTK#3 porting merged and moving off the remaining C bits in Banshee. We also, finally, merged the DVD support.

So there is little to fear, Banshee will move to GTK3 soon and improvements are happening.

Disclosure, I am involved with Banshee development.

[AJenbo]

For some reason Banshee seams to lock up on my after playing a single song I didn't have this problem in 11.04, hope things will improve.

[grotgrot]

For some reason Banshee seams to lock up on my after playing a single song

I'd be delighted if that is the worst that happened for me. I frequently have to kill it. If I pause for a while and then come back later it will often be in this zombie state where it thinks it is both playing and paused. Sometimes selecting a different track will fix it, other times I have to kill the app. Almost every startup results in a white screen for many seconds. It often completely forgets about items in my filesystem queue. It has lots of trouble maintaining the score and play count of items in the filesystem queue (mostly one or two hour music podcasts) mostly because of the difficulty it has actually getting to the end of any one item.

And right now it is still playing something in my file system queue but the interface has completely locked up.

[marcusklaas]

mesa no see point in keep banshee. my opinion: rhythmbox superior. deport banshee. it is mono, gtk2 and badder interface. rhythmbox u ask? nice interface. gtk3. why ubuntu have banshee? only cause of music deal wif amazon. i think is stupid. i install rhythmbox great joy. only critique: i make many bug report, but dev not reply. still better then banshee.

[AJenbo]

Sounds more like a detailed description of what I am experiencing

[ciplogic]

I don't know what was so wrong about Rhythmbox. When I moved over to Fedora it was waiting for me like an old friend - sure, it's not as pretty (though I tend to prefer minimalist apps anyway), but I've never had any problems playing music with it - which is kinda the point of a music player..

I was one of the first proposing Banshee and not Rhythmbox (like here) and the reasons were mostly that initially Banshee player was an inferior product but catched up in many ways:
- can play more than music, so that's why Banshee is not be just music player but media player. Maybe for you makes no difference, for some it does
- because Mono in itself have some shared high level runtime, makes Banshee to be a pretty small package in itself, so will not add too much to Live CD (even it has a bit more functionality)
- you are not a programmer, and that's fine, but RBox is an old codebase and few people contributed to it, or not as much as Banshee, and this made that Banshee was fixed from original bad bugs like taking an etertnity to add a big list of files to playlist. C# and Mono made it possible.
Let me back up with some parts:
- Rythmbox is not and never was a bad software package, it basically evolved slower than other software package. Ubuntu is impartial regarding Mono, for this reason it removes F-Spot and used Shotwell as Shotwell did catch up and could be a good replacement for most F-Spot use-cases and had here and there other features to compensate
- basic functionality sometimes is not enough to put it as a default player. Xmms is not for a long time a default player, but as of today I could still use it as it is. I don't but I think is not about loving a usage case, to let an application for forever. Repository is still handy so you can take it (both Xmms or RBox)