Aaron Bockover

Banshee… on Windows

To continue with the theme, the elusive Fredrik the Great spent a night of hacking last week on getting Banshee to run under Windows.

Banshee: coming soon to a Windows desktop near you

I think his efforts were mainly out of curiosity, but they are a great step forward in getting Banshee to be cross platform. Fredrik chose to also implement an engine backend directly against Windows Media Player, called Banshee.MediaEngine.WMP10. It’s nice to have a native platform engine for playback, but I’ll be very interested in also getting the current GStreamer engine running under Windows as well.

We will be putting more serious effort into the Windows port of Banshee in the coming months. What I anticipate to be the real difficult part of this port is properly supporting all the hardware use cases, some of which should be much easier than others:

• Audio CD detection
• Digital Audio Player detection
• CD Burning

I have zero working development knowledge on Windows, so I may just be over-speculating here. My concerns are mainly around the hardware events – on Linux we have this glorious thing called HAL. Anyone working on a Windows HAL port?

Luckily, the innards of Banshee are designed to allow easy implementations of platform specific pieces. Lots of factory/provider junk. It should make life at least a little more organized and allow for drop-in solutions for what’s missing.

Huge kudos goes to Mono, GTK+, and GNOME for already being there to make cross platform a reality. Much more on all this in due time. Congrats to Exaile.