Banshee is a
cross-platform open-source
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...
media player, called Sonance until 2005. Built upon
Mono and
Gtk#, it used the
GStreamer multimedia platform for encoding, and decoding various media formats, including
Ogg Vorbis,
MP3 and
FLAC
FLAC (; Free Lossless Audio Codec) is an audio coding format for lossless compression of digital audio, developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation, and is also the name of the free software project producing the FLAC tools, the reference software p ...
. Banshee can play and import audio
CDs and supports many portable media players, including
Apple's iPod
The iPod is a discontinued series of portable media players and multi-purpose mobile devices designed and marketed by Apple Inc. The first version was released on October 23, 2001, about months after the Macintosh version of iTunes ...
,
Android
Android may refer to:
Science and technology
* Android (robot), a humanoid robot or synthetic organism designed to imitate a human
* Android (operating system), Google's mobile operating system
** Bugdroid, a Google mascot sometimes referred to ...
devices and
Creative's ZEN players. Other features include
Last.fm integration, album artwork fetching, smart playlists and podcast support. Banshee is released under the terms of the
MIT License. Stable versions are available for many
Linux distributions, as well as a beta preview for
OS X
macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...
and an alpha preview for
Windows.
Banshee was the default music player for a year in
Ubuntu and for some time in
Linux Mint, but was later replaced by
Rhythmbox in both distributions.
New features in Linux Mint 18.1 Cinnamon
/ref>
Banshee uses the SQLite database library.
Plugins
Banshee's plugin-capable architecture makes the software extensible and customizable. stable plugins include:
*Audioscrobbler: Adds the capability of reporting played songs to a user's Last.fm playlist, and play last.fm radio stations (user's library, tags, similar to, etc.).
* DAAP music sharing: Allows sharing of music libraries with iTunes
iTunes () is a software program that acts as a media player, media library, mobile device management utility, and the client app for the iTunes Store. Developed by Apple Inc., it is used to purchase, play, download, and organize digital mul ...
and other DAAP-compatible music software. The current version of Banshee is only partially compatible with iTunes 7, allowing iTunes to open a Banshee library, but not vice versa.
*iPod manager: Allows the transferring of songs, videos, and album art to and from the device.
*Metadata searcher using MusicBrainz: Automatically retrieves missing and supplementary metadata for library items, including album art.
*Music Recommendations using Last.fm: Recommends music based on the currently playing song.
*Mini-Mode plugin: Provides a small window with minimal playback controls and song information.
*Multimedia keys support in GNOME
A gnome is a mythological creature and diminutive spirit in Renaissance magic and alchemy, first introduced by Paracelsus in the 16th century and later adopted by more recent authors including those of modern fantasy literature. Its characte ...
: Banshee can be controlled via multimedia keys as configured through GNOME.
*Notification Area Icon: Adds an icon to the notification area in GNOME.
*Podcasting: Enables Banshee to subscribe to podcast feeds, which are updated on a regular basis.
*Radio: Provides support for streaming Internet radio stations.
Cross-platform support
Compared to the Linux builds, which have stable releases, the Mac OS X builds are considered beta quality, and Windows builds are alpha quality (and, as of April 2013, two versions behind the other platforms). During Google Summer of Code 2012 Banshee has seen substantial improvements to its OS X support
Release history
Helix Banshee
Helix Banshee was a version of Banshee, included in older versions of SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop
SUSE Linux Enterprise (often abbreviated to SLE) is a Linux-based operating system developed by SUSE. It is available in two editions, suffixed with Server (SLES) for servers and mainframes, and Desktop (SLED) for workstations and desktop compu ...
and openSUSE. It was based upon the Banshee core, but with a plug-in to add support for the Helix framework for playback and transcoding, in addition to GStreamer.
See also
* Software audio players (free and open-source)
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Banshee (Media Player)
2005 software
Applications using D-Bus
Audio player software that uses GTK
Free audio software
Free media players
Free software programmed in C Sharp
IPod software
Jukebox-style media players
Linux media players
MacOS multimedia software
Software that uses GStreamer
Software that uses Mono (software)
Software using the MIT license
Windows multimedia software