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-bundleat 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!
Banshee Grid View
Spread out over a number of hours over the last few weeks I’ve been working on making our high-performance list view in Banshee also handle grid-style layouts.
That is, all the benefits of our polished list widget with a new look and feel! I’m making the widget more clever and abstracted about layout and rendering so it can be more inviting to users. In fact, you can even live-toggle between layout modes (e.g list and grid) without losing any state.
This effort provides a more visually immersing and space-conscious view for your collection of albums. This big step forward is the groundwork for presenting other media collections in a friendlier way — video thumbnails, movie box covers, audio books, photos…
The new grid layout mode for the album browser.
There are still a few quirks to work out regarding interaction (different maths for keyboard navigation), and some more polish to add on the rendering side of things, but I am very close to merging this work to master in git.
The code is being developed in the grid branch in git for those who would like to try it out. Poke me on IRC if you find problems, but I probably am already well aware — again, it’s not merged to master because it’s not RC worthy yet — but it’s ready for some broader testing!
Thoughts? Suggestions? Complaints? Hopes and dreams? I’m super excited about finally having this land, and it’s been an enjoyable hack to implement.
Mono 2.6 + MonoDevelop 2.2 on openSUSE 11.2
Fantastic news — Mono 2.6 and MonoDevelop 2.2 are out! Be sure to read the detailed Mono 2.6 release notes.
If you are running openSUSE 11.2, it’s quite simple to safely update your entire Mono stack and stay up to date with any 2.6 updates:
zypper ar -f -n Mono http://ftp.novell.com/pub/mono/download-stable/openSUSE_11.2 repo-monozypper mr -p 10 repo-monozypper refreshzypper dup -r repo-mono
Those instructions will change the Mono distribution from openSUSE to the upstream Mono repositories.
I highly recommend installing MonoDevelop 2.2 (zypper in monodevelop), though if you already had it installed, the above will update you to the 2.2 release.
Integrated Mono 2.6 soft debugger in MonoDevelop 2.2
A huge congratulations and thank you to the Mono team for another exceptional major Mono milestone!
UPDATE: apparently there is a problem on the x86_64 build in the openSUSE Build Service. This appears to be an OBS bug, but for this reason, it’s recommended that you use the repositories at http://ftp.novell.com/pub/mono/download-stable.
Exciting updates on the road to Banshee 2.0
At the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit last week I demoed my new work-in-progress Netbook-focused interface to Banshee called Cubano.
Cubano is designed with the Netbook in mind, but is certainly not limited to such a device. I prefer this clean and simple interface to the more traditional Banshee interface already, even on my desktop. Cubano is more about experiencing your music than managing it.
I am aiming to introduce visual metadata (photos, colors) and simple whitespace as UI elements to separate and emphasize content instead of the hard lines from traditional toolkit widgets.
However, even with a minimal interface you don’t lose any of the power to which you may be accustomed from the traditional Banshee interface.
I must stress that not all of the UI concepts here are solidified or indeed implemented. A few quick things to note about what will change in the very near future:
- The painful source combo box will go away, don’t worry! It was just a widget that already existed in Banshee that I was able to easily reuse to connect the dots.
- We’re working on a grid view for artists and albums.
- I don’t care for the header either — it will receive much attention in due time.
Feel free to checkout Cubano’s source code, but you’ll also need clutter, clutter-gtk, and clutter-sharp from Clutter git master, and Banshee from GNOME git master. Bleeding edge!
Lastly, let me further stress that Cubano does not replace Banshee as we know it today. It only augments it. Cubano simply provides a different user experience on top of the existing Banshee platform.
Platform you say?
Trendy, I know. Banshee is in its third generation now. It’s been designed to be completely extensible, and major components are abstracted and organized in reusable ways.
As such we’ve fostered the development of many Mono/.NET libraries, most of which are not specific to Banshee and can easily be reused in other projects.
We essentially glue everything together with Mono.Addins, and build user interfaces on top of it all. What this means is the traditional user interface we’re used to in Banshee is an astonishingly small 875 lines of C# code.
Therefore, it’s conceivable, and even quite easy to think of Banshee as not just an application, but a platform for building new applications and user experiences. Ergo, Cubano.
For those interested in some of the wider details of the design and utility behind Banshee as platform, I recently had lovely a discussion on the topic with Scott Hanselman — Senior Program Manager in the Developer Division at Microsoft — for his podcast, Hanselminutes.
F-Spot
A major take-away from this platform discussion at GCDS last week is talk of re-basing the core of F-Spot — the wonderful photo management application — on top of Banshee itself.
The goal is simply to allow F-Spot to benefit from Banshee’s mature and maintained core, which provides many of the underpinning necessities in F-Spot, and allow the F-Spot developers to focus on the more interesting task of organizing and manipulating Photos.
While nothing is set in stone, I have a simple proposal:
- Re-base F-Spot’s non-UI core on Banshee’s non-UI core.
- Implement basic photo importing, tagging, and viewing as a Banshee extension (an optional feature). This would mean showing photos in Banshee like we do for videos.
- With Banshee/Cubano supporting basic photo management, grow the F-Spot user interface and experience to be more like that of professional tools such as Adobe Lightroom — an experience missing today on the Linux desktop.
GCDS Slides
The talk I gave at GCDS covered the above and a bit more. The slides are available here, but may be a bit terse if you weren’t in the audience. I’m not sure if my talk was recorded or not.
Nevertheless, for your perusal:
Mono 2.0 wins developer product of the year award!
Congratulations to the Mono project for winning the Developer.com Product of the Year Award in the .NET Tool/Add-in category!
"It is no surprise to see Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) take the prize for technology of the year; however, seeing the open source project Mono 2.0 grab the honors for .NET tool is a surprise," stated Bradley Jones, Senior Executive Editor of Internet.com's Developer Channel.
Very exciting!
Cross Platform thoughts through the lense of Banshee
Banshee 1.3.2 on Mac OS X 10.5
A huge amount of thanks goes to Eoin Hennessy for all of his efforts to bring Banshee to the Mac. Eoin singlehandedly fixed cross platform bugs in our core, worked out some kinks in the build, and implemented a Mac OS X platform backend to provide tight integration with the OS (i.e. the menu bar).
So how do I get it?
On Friday we will release Banshee 1.3.3, the last preview/developer release before we officially bless 1.4 as the new stable series in a couple of weeks.
As Miguel mentioned, we will be releasing for the Mac from here on. That means that along side our source code tarballs, RPMs for openSUSE, and packages published through other distributions, we will have a .dmg available to download.
If you are courageous, you can try to build Banshee on OS X today. However, our trunk does not yet run. Eoin has done all of his work in github, and while this branch runs, it's slightly outdated, and does not use the new build environment I wrote this weekend.
Eoin is in the process of extracting patches that we will merge this week into trunk. These patches include the fixes to core, and the OS X integration.
More bling, before I ramble on about technical things and get teary-eyed and nostalgic
How does this cross platform stuff work?
Banshee is designed in a very modular way. We have a fairly small core, which is completely platform agnostic. It uses only ECMA/OSP .NET APIs and APIs of libraries which are themselves cross platform and open source (Mono.Addins, NDesk.DBus, Cairo, GTK, etc).
Additionally, all real features are designed as extensions: the Play Queue, video playback, the notification area, Last.FM, and so on. This means that we can easily pick and choose features by adding or removing assemblies from a package.
Finally, anything requiring a platform specific implementation is abstracted into an agnostic factory/interface, and implementations are loaded as extensions.
Cross platform frameworks give you the 90%, but it's really the 10% that matters
It's virtually impossible to write a cross platform application that does not suck if you just stick to what a single framework provides. By this I mean if we used only features in .NET or if a Java application used only features in the Java framework, the user experience would feel isolated and sandboxed.
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In GNOME this means using GConf to store settings and working with DBus services like GNOME Settings Daemon. We interact with the screensaver, we support multimedia keys, integrate with Brasero for CD burning, and so on.
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In the general UNIX world (Linux and BSD/OS X), we have a POSIX IO backend that performs much better than the System.IO .NET backend.
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In Linux we have the HAL hardware backend (which I like to think of as HALAL, but don't read too far into that).
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On OS X we integrate with the dock and the system menu bar.
Okay, but what about Windows?
Ah, right. Windows. There's one tiny little drawback to making a media player written in C# cross platform. Namely, we require GStreamer on all three platforms, and in turn we have a small library, libbanshee, written in C. Of course this pain is more than eased by the incredible power and functionality that GStreamer offers.
The truth is, I know next to nothing about Windows, and I find it incredibly frustrating to work in that environment. I am getting close however to getting a build of libbanshee on Windows. With this piece in place, we'll be able to release on WIndows.
Currently the goal is that we'll always distribute libbanshee as a binary on Windows, but the rest of Banshee can be built using "F5" in Visual Studio. This will be very interesting as it opens up Banshee to a whole new world of contributors.
Google Chrome has seen an incredible amount of contribution from external contributors simply because the source can be downloaded, opened with Visual Studio, and compiled. Users can tweak some code, and immediately see the results. This is where we want to be - Linux, Mac, and Windows.
The End Result
What is important with all of this cross platform work is simple: infiltrate the proprietary platforms, attract users and developers to free software, and grow the open source ecosystem. Ultimately, we'd like to think this will help Linux adoption. Applications are the key, not the platforms.
Banshee on Mac OS X is symbolic to me. It marks a period in our project where we step out of the realm of our comfortable and lovable GNOME community and into different communities, creating and bridging through the shared goal of open and free software. Users unite!
Finally, I'd again like to thank Eoin for his great efforts with our code, Imendio for their great work on GTK for OS X, the Mono team for the solid 2.0 release, and the GStreamer community for the best multimedia framework an application developer could ask for.
A few updates from the farm
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While Scott is working on all sorts of awesome, Gabriel and I are hard at work in mostly bug-fix mode to prepare for Banshee 1.4, to be released on November 10th.
Tomorrow we will release Banshee 1.3.2, the third release in the development series leading up to 1.4.
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Currently I am finishing up the new collection indexer API that allows other applications to index or monitor the Banshee library over DBus. Alex Launi is patiently acting as a guinea pig - implementing support in GNOME Do!
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Check out the new Banshee Calendar that we'll try to keep up to date and relevant, with new release information being added hopefully well in advance of actually making releases.
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Mono 2.0 has finally been released - and the web site got a huge, long over due face lift!
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And of course this weekend is the Boston GNOME summit! See you there!
Banshee 1.0 Released!
It is my immense pleasure to formally announce the release of Banshee 1.0. After nearly eight months of vigorous, non-stop work (since the last major Banshee release), it's here - and we couldn't be happier!
I'm not going to highlight much of the release in this post since we have written up some rather dashing release notes, full of pretty pictures and exciting detail.
Do yourself a service today, and try the release for yourself!
Install Banshee 1.0 - Binaries Ready Today
Release Highlights
I would however feel a little disappointed if I didn't at least mention some of the awesomeness that Banshee 1.0 has in store, but really, you should read our release notes. We spent a lot of time on them!
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Artist/Album browser
Visually filter your collection with album art -
Video playback and management
Create video playlists, smart playlists, browse, search, and sort your video library -- just like your music library -
Powerful Podcasting
Supporting video podcasts and stream content before or while you download -- no waiting! -
Rich Last.fm integration
Create your own radio stations and discover new music -
Play Queue Source
You be the DJ -
Lots of supported hardware
MTP/PlaysForSure players, USB mass storage players, iPods, audio CD playback and ripping, CD burning -
Performance improvements
Better scalability, impressive speed, lower memory footprint -
Compelling framework
It's easy to bring new features to life in Banshee through its powerful extension framework and rich APIs. In fact, most of the features in Banshee are extensions themselves. Drop into IRC and start hacking on your favorite feature today!
New Web Site -- Finally
Gabriel and I have spent the last four days cranking out the new Banshee web site. We've still got tons of content to organize and migrate from the old wiki, but we think this new web site will become a strong asset to the Banshee Project in due time.
Why are you still reading this?
Mono.Zeroconf 0.7.4 and cross platform glory
I released Mono.Zeroconf 0.7.4 last night which is a minor bug fix release. Packages are available for openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise, and Fedora. Sources and binaries are available for Linux, Windows and OS X.
What I have found interesting about Mono.Zeroconf is a growing adoption by the Windows crowd. I have been getting almost weekly emails from a new Windows developer using Mono.Zeroconf. A few bugs have been fixed in the process, though mostly in the Bonjour provider, which doesn't affect modern Linux distros (because they use the Avahi provider, of course).
Since there's been good feedback from the Windows world, I spent a little time making Mono.Zeroconf actually build on Windows in Visual Studio (yikes!). I am producing .zip files of the regular sources as well to make releases more accessible on Windows. Additionally, I generate a -binary.zip file which contains just pre-compiled assemblies.
The fun thing with all of this is validating how truly remarkable Mono is. I had never written any of Mono.Zeroconf specifically for Windows, never tested it on Windows, yet released the precompiled assemblies (built in Linux by Mono) for the hell of it. And without any changes, everything "just works" on Windows/.NET (and Mac OS X as well).
Andy made the leap to Linux.
So what's so important about this? These new Mono.Zeroconf users on Windows inherit the fact that Mono.Zeroconf is truly cross platform, which means their applications are immediately more portable to Linux and other platforms that Mono supports. By luring Windows developers with delicious, easy to use libraries that are already cross platform, we make it easier and more enticing for those developers to bring their awesome applications to Linux.
Awesome. Mono rocks.
Banshee 0.13.2 … at last!
Only a few months overdue, we've finally released a new stable Banshee. This release includes a slew of important bug fixes and a handful of new features.
iPod
On the iPod side of things, there have been some pretty heavy changes since the last release. We now require PodSleuth and the latest ipod-sharp. This is the first release that drops libipoddevice, the hardware layer that was obsoleted by PodSleuth.
What users should care about is that this release supports the new Nano and Classic iPods. We currently are not supporting the iPod Touch nor the iPhone. Of course, my personal stance towards any iPod, especially the iPod Touch and the iPhone is to simply avoid the hardware and the lock-in that goes with it.
Last.fm
The biggest new feature users will notice is the Last.fm streaming plugin that Gabriel Burt wrote a few months ago. This plugin allows you to listen to Last.fm radio stations with all the love/ban glory expected from Last.fm clients.
We have opted to disable this plugin at runtime by default for now, but it is built by default and can easily be enabled through the plugins dialog. Gabriel has blogged in detail about this awesome new plugin.
Album Track Editing... now even easier... again
A couple of months ago I found myself in the position, yet again, of wanting to import a CD that didn't have metadata in MusicBrainz. I have blogged about the excellent track editor in Banshee before, but I continue to want to improve it. Editing an entire album's metadata can be a tedious task, but I think I have greatly simplified it yet again.
Now you can select a table or list (from a web site, for example) of track names for the album you are editing and paste the entire selection into the first "Title" field in the track editor. The selection will be parsed and applied to all of the tracks in the editor.
For example, I went to Amazon.com, found the album, selected all of the tracks, and pasted it into the first title entry in the Banshee track editor. I didn't have to type any of the titles on the CD. I created a screencast of the entire process of filling in all of the album metadata manually. Slick, though it's still of course always better if the metadata can be found in the first place via MusicBrainz.
Screencast demoing the new batch title editing for albums without automatically resolved metadata. Ogg/Theora, 46 seconds, 3.2 MB.
With metadata on the mind, I should note that Banshee's metadata services stack is very versatile and allows for any number of metadata providers. We have a few, including MusicBrainz, Rhapsody, and Amazon. However, the Amazon provider does not fetch metadata, it just downloads cover art (and same applies for the Rhapsody one). It would be really nice if someone provided a full Amazon provider (or Rhapsody) that used their web services API.
The problem with this however, for Amazon, is that it requires a developer key (at least it did in years past), and this is why we have never invested time into implementing one. Instead we just rely on MusicBrainz, and perform cover art downloads from Amazon if the MusicBrainz metadata has an associated ASIN.
Ugh, this song sucks!
Another minor little feature users may notice is a new "Play next song" button that shows up in the notification area bubbles. It's quite nice when you're listening to music in the background and a song you hate starts playing. Easy to skip without switching interfaces. Of course, if you have multimedia keys set up, I suppose that's even easier.
Notification bubble allows skipping songs!
MTP
Alan McGovern has nearly completely rewritten our MTP support and we are close to enabling it by default. The next release should have solid MTP support, and we hope to roll 0.13.3 within the next two weeks. The new MTP support uses libmtp instead of libgphoto2. This decision was made for a number of reasons, though I am really not informed enough to convey them properly. Alan has blogged a bit about his changes and his reasons for switching libraries.
We encourage users to try the new MTP support in this release, but we do not want to see distributions packaging it at this time. To enable MTP support from source, pass --enable-mtp to configure. There are a handful of known issues with many MTP devices, and these will be addressed in 0.13.3. Nevertheless, we wanted to get something out the door.
Mono.Zeroconf
I blogged about my new Mono.Zeroconf library a few weeks ago, and this release of Banshee is the first to require it. It greatly simplifies zeroconf logic inside Banshee itself by allowing us to target only one API instead of two (Bonjour and Avahi). Only the DAAP plugin uses it, so if you do not wish to install Mono.Zeroconf, pass --disable-daap to configure.
Great, but what about the really cool stuff?
While 0.13.2 is a solid release with some exciting new features, the real goodies are in our unstable trunk. We have done a ton of work on trunk, rewriting Banshee nearly from the ground up. Performance improvements are massive, and we expect to have some sort of preview release out within the next two months. Now that we are winding down with this stable series, 0.13.2 is out the door, and winter holidays are over, we will be heads down on trunk, making great strides.
Expect lots of blogging in the coming months about details of trunk. In the mean time we have a high level roadmap that can be tracked. Stay tuned, because a lot of really exciting stuff is happening in the Banshee universe!