Aaron Bockover

Banshee 1.5.3 and the return of OS X support

The Banshee community is proud to announce the availability of Banshee 1.5.3! With a slew of new features and bug fixes, and a fully refreshed Mac OS X build, this is another solid release on the road to 1.6 (due out on March 31st).

Gabriel highlights a number of new features and improvements on his release announcement blog:

• A new sync device from playlist option
• Audiobooks library extension
• Library-folder watcher extension
• eMusic importer/downloader extension
• GIO file backend supporting non-local files

Additionally, 75 bugs were fixed since the last release. Read the 1.5.3 release notes to learn about additional new features and improvements.

Mac OS X Release

What’s particularly exciting to me is the return of the OS X releases. I have completely overhauled our OS X build, and we no longer take a framework dependency on Mono or GTK – these dependencies are bundled as part of the binary distribution of Banshee on OS X.

If you have OS X 10.5 or newer (Intel only), you can simply download and run Banshee – nothing else needs to be installed.

This gives us greater flexibility to refine and polish Banshee for OS X. For instance, I started working on a new GTK theme that uses the flexible Murrine engine. Currently the Mono framework installation uses Clearlooks.

There’s still a lot to do on the OS X build, so if you’re interested in hacking on the platform backend, it’s now easier than ever to do so:

• Install XCode
• Clone Banshee from GNOME git
• Run ./bootstrap-bundle at the top of the checkout

This process will magically build everything that Banshee requires, and from there hacking on Banshee is just like it is on Linux. I recommend using MonoDevelop of course to get real work done though.

Enjoy!

Update: There was a lame bug preventing startup of Banshee 1.5.3 on OS X. This has been fixed and the DMG image has been respun. If you had problems running the release, download the updated image. My bad ya’ll!