Ravi Saive: A Technology Blog For Newbies

Banshee is an open source music management and playback application written in C# using GNOME technologies for GNOME, build upon Mono it uses GStreamer multimedia platform for encoding and decoding media formats like Ogg Vorbis and MP3. Banshee can support and play many audio CDs and portable media players like Android, Apple Ipod, and other players. Banshee integrated with last.fm and podcast support. Banshee is released under the terms of the MIT License. Stable versions are available for many Linux distributions, as well as a beta preview for Mac OS X and an alpha preview for Windows.

Banshee 2.4 has been released after six months of hard work by 31 developers, 33 translators and dozens of bug reporters and testers. It is a stable release, the successor to Banshee 2.2. Banshee 2.4 brings new feature set such as DVD playback support navigable via mouse and keyboard, as well as improved additional filters (genres and years) when in browsing content. Along with the UPnP support (browse and play music or videos shared over a local network or UPnP device), the 2.4 release comes with 91 bug fixes (since 2.2 version) and various minor enhancements.

This release is dedicated to Scott Thomas Peterson, who passed away a few months ago. He was a great guy and a valued contributor to the Banshee project and to the wider Mono community. In particular, he created the Mono.Upnp library which now powers our new UPnP support.

Banshee 2.4 New Features

1. DVD playback support : Watch your DVDs with Banshee. You can navigate in the DVD's menus
   using the mouse or the keyboard. 
2. More flexible browsing of your media : You can now display the genres and years in the browser, in
   addition to the artists and the albums, and use them to filter your
   music library. The artist filter can be hidden, or it can be set to
   only display album artists, instead of all artists in your library.
3. UPnP support : Browse and play music or videos shared over your local network
   via a UPnP device.
4. Dap.MassStorage : Add support for the Archos Internet Tablet and the NEC LifeTouch Note
   
5. Dap.MassStorage : Don't sync 'unknown album' metadata
   
6. Dap : Add support for DOS folder separator in playlists
   
7. Update values for the Smiley Face equalizer preset
   
8. MusicBrainz : Enable FreeBSD support
   
9. Set the PulseAudio media.role property
   
10. StreamPositionLabel : Fix label when loading
    
11. Preferences : Change wording of Metadata settings
    
12. Add a Composer filter in the SearchEntry filter menu
    
13. Lastfm : Use one single directory for last.fm caching
    
14. Dap.MassStorage: metadata resync in manual mode.
    

For complete set of new features visit Banshee 2.4.0.

Banshee 2.4 Screenshots

This howto's guide shows you how to install Banshee 2.4 on Windows, Fedora 16/15/14/13/12, Ubuntu 12.04/11.10/11.04/10.10/10.04 and Debian. We use YUM repositories to install Banshee 2.4 on Fedora and apt-get for Ubuntu and Debian.

Install Banshee 2.4 in Windows

Windows users can easily download and install with just one click of mouse and start using it. Download link is below.

Download Banshee 2.4

Install Banshee 2.4 in Fedora

On Fedora 16/15/14/13/12 may or may not be available latest release of Banshee 2.4, try to run the following command to install, If available it will install the latest one or older one.

yum install banshee

Install Banshee 2.4 in Ubuntu

To install Banshee 2.4 in Ubuntu 12.04/11.10/11.04/10.10/10.04, then run the following commands on the terminal to add the PPA for Banshee on your Ubuntu system.

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:banshee-team/ppa
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install banshee

Install Banshee 2.4 in Debian

On Debian system issue below command to install Banshee 2.4.

apt-get install banshee

That's it, if you're having any difficulties feel free to leave your queries below using comments form.