Banshee 1.5.5 Released With Grid View, YouTube Plugin And Gapless Playback

Banshee 1.5.5 was released just a few hours ago. Like we told you a few days ago, Banshee 1.5.5 (aka 1.6 RC1) got a very nice new YouTube extension but the new version also brings some other new features like Grid View and Gapeless Playback:

Banshee 1.5.5 was just released, including gapless playback, a grid album browser, and a YouTube extension! It contains lots of good bug fixes as well - those of you burned by the 1.5.4 SQL crash will be pleased with the additional QA given to this release.

(the official announcement)

The Banshee Community Extensions 1.5.5 package got five new extensions: CoverWallpaper, LiveRadio, Magnatune, Telepathy, and Ubuntu One Music Store (not ready for users yet).

Other changes in Banshee 1.5.5:

• The Mirage shuffle/fill by-similar mode has been greatly improved. It's smarter, now looking for tracks similar to the last several you've played, and dissimilar from ones you've skipped.
• Improve search responsiveness on large libraries
• Add icons for Nexus One and Audiobooks
• Play Queue item count, size, duration now ignores old tracks
• Muinshee fixes: disable Auto-DJ, allow reordering, hide previous song
• Fix a very common, SQL-related crash in 1.5.4
• Fix saving equalizer settings in culture-invariant way
• Jumping to a source's prefs via its context menu works again
• Usage data not submitted more than every 48 hours
• Fix repeatedly resyncing some files to a device b/c transcoded
• Clear the redo stack on shuffle mode change
• Accept feeds with empty title
• Uri encode file location queries, making them work properly
• Fixes to the OS X build

The new Grid View:

(You can also see the new YouTube Related videos at the bottom)

The Grid View will will be used for Videos, Audiobooks, and more in future releases.


Watching a YouTube Video:

Ubuntu installation: Banshee 1.5.5 is not yet available in the Banshee stable PPA but if you want to try out the new features already, you can get it from the daily Banshee PPA, using the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:banshee-team/banshee-daily
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install banshee

If you're not using Ubuntu, see the Banshee download page.


The next release, Banshee 1.6.0 (stable) should be out on March 31.