With regards to music brainz being included in Banshee. If you know the track name that is almost trivial, but amarok has feature that just takes any old track and queries music brainz for the metadata, which I found very useful. So I was looking to try and write similar module for Banshee, as it seems to lack this right now.

However, in order to retrieve data for any track music brainz uses PUID which is proprietry, but can be generated from their libtunepimp library. The only thing is the library is written in C not C#. So I thought I ask what would banshee dev community think of using C libraries in C# code. I am sure there is a way of doing it, but it probably is quiet hairy and not very desirable. On the other hand there is no C# bindings yet.

Alex

I wish I knew more (read: anything) about development so that I could help out. Until I learn me some codes, I guess I’ll just keep contributing by reporting bugs. Banshee 1.4 is pretty amazing – thanks for all the hard work.

The set of GStreamer plugins you need to extract metadata from something is the same set you need to play it. One of the main reasons I’m not really interested in replacing rhythmbox’s extraction code with something taglib-like is that it ensures that if we can extract metadata from something, we can also play it, and it we can import any type of file gstreamer can play. I guess that’s not much of a selling point if you need to consider other media frameworks for playback, though.

@lariq: It seems to have worked well enough for Rhythmbox, though since I’ve not poked too deeply into Banshee perhaps there are design decisions that limit GST’s use.

… the extension could make a track column and query field available, so you could easily search for and view Creative Commons music. This was a pain to do in legacy Banshee, but it’s a few lines of code in 1.x.

Banshee has since made leaps and bounds in the plugin support and I think Creative Commons support would be only a few small steps away. The code and progress is documented here:
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CcBanshee

Feel free to contact me with questions or anything if you want to play around with it.

@Ethan: we’ll take a look.

@John: The maintainer of TagLib# appears to have stopped working on the project. We’ve tried unsuccessfully to work with him on getting a few patches rolled into a release. We told him we would be willing to maintain the project if he is unable. Alas, we have yet to hear from him, so my intentions are to fold TagLib# under the Banshee umbrella.

The source code will still be maintained under Mono SVN, but we’ll set up new project infrastructure (web site, bug tracker, etc) and releases will be done by us, hosted at download.banshee-project.org.

Finally, TagLibg# is a great code base. It’s very fast, and it covers the big container formats. GStreamer is not the right library to use as a general purpose tagging library for two reasons:

1) It’s incredibly expensive. Having to set up and tear down a full multimedia pipeline for reading and writing tags takes a long time. This has to be done on each song.
2) It’s plugin dependent, so many of the more obscure or otherwise encumbered container formats are not implemented in -base or -good modules.

We do use GStreamer for reading tags from a playing pipeline, but it’s just not the right tool for general purpose tagging. TagLib# is, and we will devote more energy to that project now.