Banshee Media Player 1.5.4 Has Been Released

(image credits: Gabriel Burt, as Banshee 1.5.4 is not yet available in the PPA)

Banshee 1.5.4 has just been released and the new version features the release of Banshee Community Extensions as well as support for Nokia N900 phones and more.


The Banshee Community Extensions include Alarm Clock, Lyrics, Mirage (which calculates the acoustical similarity between songs) and several other extension. The most interesting is the Mirage extension which doesn't use the Automatic Playlist Generator anymore, and instead it is now integrated into the playback controller either by adding shuffle-by-similar or fill-by-similar:

Other improvements in Banshee 1.5.4 include:

• Wikipedia context pane extension enabled by default
• Anonymous opt-in usage data
• Equalizer presets
  
• Add support for Nokia N900 phones
• Coverart for unicode artist/albums now supported
• Dropped glade-sharp dep; GNOME 3.0 ready
• Add columns showing track sample rate and bits per sample
• Option to sort an artist's albums by year, not title
• Fixes to GIO backend
• Many crash/startup fixes for OS X build
• Fix several memory leaks

The next version of Banshee (1.5.5) is expected on March 10, followed by the release of Banshee 1.6.0 on March 31.

Install Banshee 1.5.4 in Ubuntu

Banshee 1.5.4 is not yet available in the Banshee PPA but should be uploaded very soon (hopefully). When it will be available, you can install it in Ubuntu by running the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:banshee-team/ppa
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install banshee banshee-extension-alarm banshee-extension-lirc banshee-extension-mirage banshee-extension-lyrics

If you feel adventurous, you can add the Banshee Daily Builds PPA (also add the Banshee Stable PPA for dependencies) but the latest build is from 2 days ago.


For other Linux distributions and source code, see the Banshee download page.