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.
February 21st, 2007 - 15:12
What Gtk# Package are you using?
Notification Icon works?
February 21st, 2007 - 16:27
That’s awesome!
February 21st, 2007 - 19:48
As for the hardware detection/event stuff on windows, you might want to take a look at WMI which is exposed to .net in the System.Management assembly.
February 22nd, 2007 - 03:47
i want help on the Win port, how?
February 22nd, 2007 - 04:34
Good news, Aaron!
Hope to finally enjoy Banshee it on Windows soon!
N.B. Will the same ever happen to F-Spot?
February 22nd, 2007 - 07:00
Although I’m not a windows user, I’m glad you’re working at this port since everybody likes portability!
Keep up the good work.
February 22nd, 2007 - 09:19
I believe that Windows has had a concept of HAL since the days of Windows NT but I don’t know how it differs from that on Linux.
The only articles I can find on msdn relate to troubleshooting rather than development. NDA protected info?
February 22nd, 2007 - 22:30
does it work for windows 98?
March 13th, 2007 - 22:12
I am new to windows and i think it’s about time we linux users so these ms loving freaks what great os software is out there def a step in the right direction keep up the great work
March 23rd, 2007 - 12:14
I started work on porting to win32 with winforms using preprocessors leaving mono/gtk# code intact. Also built a mediaengine using bass.net which makes cdaudio easy
June 22nd, 2007 - 10:37
Not sure if this is the same project but: http://sourceforge.net/projects/banshee32/
.. Now running on Windows!
June 26th, 2007 - 04:28
Yeah thats the one. I am in the process of code cleanup and some bugfixes on it
August 23rd, 2007 - 12:25
You can use the windowprocedure to spy on hardware messages windows sends. I had this working in gtk a while back, if I can find the example I’ll send it your way.
November 7th, 2007 - 07:57
well since the above copy and paste didn’t work, see it here: http://www.gtkforums.com/viewtopic.php?p=1962#1962
November 28th, 2007 - 12:31
This is cool. But part of me deep down wants to say stop bringing linux to windows users and start bringing windows users to linux. But maybe exposing them to the greatness that is Banshee will.
February 13th, 2008 - 19:21
Look, there will always be Windows users, Mac OSX users, and Linux/Unix users. I don’t see any problem with porting Linux apps to Windows in fear of making Windows more popular. :P
April 10th, 2008 - 14:00
It will propably make it even easier to move from Windows to Linux if you can use the same applications.
October 20th, 2008 - 17:01
Ok, now that it is already October is there any progress on an official port to windows?
October 20th, 2008 - 18:00
@JustACoder: http://abock.org/2008/10/20/cross-platform-thoughts-through-the-lense-of-banshee/