Banshee was a

cross-platform Within computing, cross-platform software (also called multi-platform software, platform-agnostic software, or platform-independent software) is computer software that is designed to work in several Computing platform, computing platforms. Some ...

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

media player Media player may refer to: *Digital media player, home appliances that play digital media *Media player software, software that plays digital media *Portable media player, portable hardware that plays digital media *Windows Media Player Windo ...

, called Sonance until 2005. Built upon

Mono Mono may refer to: Biology * Infectious mononucleosis, "the kissing disease" * Monocyte, a type of leukocyte (white blood cell) * Monodactylidae, members of which are referred to as monos Technology and computing * Mono (audio), single-c ...

and Gtk#, it used the

GStreamer GStreamer is a Pipeline (computing), pipeline-based multimedia framework that links together a wide variety of media processing systems to complete complex workflows. For instance, GStreamer can be used to build a system that reads files in one f ...

multimedia platform for encoding, and decoding various media formats, including

Ogg Vorbis Vorbis is a free and open-source software project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The project produces an audio coding format and software reference encoder/decoder (codec) for lossy audio compression, libvorbis. Vorbis is most common ...

MP3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany under the lead of Karlheinz Brandenburg. It was designed to greatly reduce the amount ...

and

FLAC FLAC (; Free Lossless Audio Codec) is an audio coding format for lossless compression of digital audio, developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation, and is also the name of the free software project producing the FLAC tools, the reference software ...

. Banshee can play and import audio CDs and supports many portable media players, including Apple's

iPod The iPod is a series of portable media players and multi-purpose mobile devices that were designed and marketed by Apple Inc. from 2001 to 2022. The iPod Classic#1st generation, first version was released on November 10, 2001, about mon ...

Android Android most commonly refers to: *Android (robot), a humanoid robot or synthetic organism designed to imitate a human * Android (operating system), a mobile operating system primarily developed by Google * Android TV, a operating system developed ...

devices A device is usually a constructed tool. Device may also refer to: Technology Computing, electronics, mechanisms and telecommunication * Appliance, a device for a particular task * Computer, a computing device * Device file, an interface of a pe ...

and Creative's

ZEN Zen (; from Chinese: ''Chán''; in Korean: ''Sŏn'', and Vietnamese: ''Thiền'') is a Mahayana Buddhist tradition that developed in China during the Tang dynasty by blending Indian Mahayana Buddhism, particularly Yogacara and Madhyamaka phil ...

players. Other features include

Last.fm Last.fm is a music website founded in the United Kingdom in 2002. Utilizing a music recommender system known as "Audioscrobbler", Last.fm creates a detailed profile of each user's musical preferences by recording the details of the tracks they ...

integration, album artwork fetching, smart playlists and podcast support. Banshee is released under the terms of the

MIT License The MIT License is a permissive software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 1980s. As a permissive license, it puts very few restrictions on reuse and therefore has high license compatibility. Unl ...

. Stable versions are available for many

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

distributions Distribution may refer to: Mathematics *Distribution (mathematics), generalized functions used to formulate solutions of partial differential equations *Probability distribution, the probability of a particular value or value range of a varia ...

, as well as a beta preview for

OS X macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

and an alpha preview for

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

. Banshee was the default music player for a year in

Ubuntu Ubuntu ( ) is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed primarily of free and open-source software. Developed by the British company Canonical (company), Canonical and a community of contributors under a Meritocracy, meritocratic gover ...

and for some time in

Linux Mint Linux Mint is a community-developed Linux distribution. It is based on Ubuntu and designed for x86-64 based computers; another variant is based on Debian which is named Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) and has both 64-bit and IA-32 support. T ...

, but was later replaced by

Rhythmbox Rhythmbox is a free and open-source audio player software, tag editor and music organizer for digital audio files on Linux and Unix-like systems. Rhythmbox is designed to work well under GNOME, but can function on other desktop environments. ...

in both distributions. Banshee uses the

SQLite SQLite ( "S-Q-L-ite", "sequel-ite") is a free and open-source relational database engine written in the C programming language. It is not a standalone app; rather, it is a library that software developers embed in their apps. As such, it ...

database library.

Plugins

Banshee's plugin-capable architecture makes the software extensible and customizable. stable plugins include: *Audioscrobbler: Adds the capability of reporting played songs to a user's

playlist, and play last.fm radio stations (user's library, tags, similar to, etc.). * DAAP music sharing: Allows sharing of music libraries with

iTunes iTunes is a media player, media library, and mobile device management (MDM) utility developed by Apple. It is used to purchase, play, download and organize digital multimedia on personal computers running the macOS and Windows operating s ...

and other DAAP-compatible music software. The current version of Banshee is only partially compatible with iTunes 7, allowing iTunes to open a Banshee library, but not vice versa. *iPod manager: Allows the transferring of songs, videos, and album art to and from the device. *Metadata searcher using

MusicBrainz MusicBrainz is a MetaBrainz project that aims to create a collaborative music database that is similar to the freedb project. MusicBrainz was founded in response to the restrictions placed on the CDDB, Compact Disc Database (CDDB), a database for ...

: Automatically retrieves missing and supplementary metadata for library items, including album art. *Music Recommendations using

: Recommends music based on the currently playing song. *Mini-Mode plugin: Provides a small window with minimal playback controls and song information. *Multimedia keys support in

GNOME A gnome () is a mythological creature and diminutive spirit in Renaissance magic and alchemy, introduced by Paracelsus in the 16th century and widely adopted by authors, including those of modern fantasy literature. They are typically depict ...

: Banshee can be controlled via multimedia keys as configured through GNOME. *Notification Area Icon: Adds an icon to the notification area in GNOME. *Podcasting: Enables Banshee to subscribe to podcast feeds, which are updated on a regular basis. *Radio: Provides support for streaming Internet radio stations.

Cross-platform support

Compared to the Linux builds, which have stable releases, the Mac OS X builds are considered beta quality, and Windows builds are alpha quality (and, as of April 2013, two versions behind the other platforms). During Google Summer of Code 2012 Banshee has seen substantial improvements to its OS X support The first alpha release of Banshee on Windows was Banshee 1.9.4, released on February 23, 2011.

Helix Banshee

Helix Banshee was a version of Banshee, included in older versions of

SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) is a Linux-based operating system developed by SUSE S.A., SUSE. It is available in two editions, suffixed with Server (SLES) for server (computing), servers and mainframe computer, mainframes, and Desktop (SLED) for wo ...

and

openSUSE openSUSE () is a free and open-source software, free and open-source Linux distribution developed by the openSUSE project. It is offered in two main variations: ''Tumbleweed'', an upstream rolling release distribution, and ''Leap'', a stable r ...

. It was based upon the Banshee core, but with a plug-in to add support for the Helix framework for playback and transcoding, in addition to GStreamer.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Banshee (Media Player) 2005 software Applications using D-Bus Audio player software that uses GTK Free audio software Free media players Free software programmed in C Sharp IPod software Jukebox-style media players Linux media players MacOS multimedia software Software that uses GStreamer Software that uses Mono (software) Software using the MIT license Windows multimedia software

Plugins

Cross-platform support

Helix Banshee

See also

References