Banshee is a

cross-platform In computing, cross-platform software (also called multi-platform software, platform-agnostic software, or platform-independent software) is computer software that is designed to work in several computing platforms. Some cross-platform software ...

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 so ...

media player, called Sonance until 2005. Built upon

Mono Mono may refer to: Common meanings * Infectious mononucleosis, "the kissing disease" * Monaural, monophonic sound reproduction, often shortened to mono * Mono-, a numerical prefix representing anything single Music Performers * Mono (Japanes ...

and Gtk#, it used the

GStreamer GStreamer is a pipeline-based multimedia framework that links together a wide variety of media processing systems to complete complex workflows. For instance, GStreamer can be used to build a system that reads files in one format, processes the ...

multimedia platform for encoding, and decoding various media formats, including Ogg Vorbis,

MP3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Origin ...

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 softwa ...

. 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 wa ...

, Android devices and Creative's

ZEN Zen ( zh, t=禪, p=Chán; ja, text= 禅, translit=zen; ko, text=선, translit=Seon; vi, text=Thiền) is a school of Mahayana Buddhism that originated in China during the Tang dynasty, known as the Chan School (''Chánzong'' 禪宗), and ...

players. Other features include

Last.fm Last.fm is a music website founded in the United Kingdom in 2002. Using a music recommender system called "Audioscrobbler", Last.fm builds a detailed profile of each user's musical taste by recording details of the tracks the user listens to, e ...

integration, album artwork fetching, smart playlists and podcast support. Banshee is released under the terms of the

MIT License The MIT License is a permissive free software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 1980s. As a permissive license, it puts only very limited restriction on reuse and has, therefore, high license comp ...

. Stable versions are available for many

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, whi ...

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 la ...

and an alpha preview for

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for se ...

. Banshee was the default music player for a year in

Ubuntu Ubuntu ( ) is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed mostly of free and open-source software. Ubuntu is officially released in three editions: '' Desktop'', ''Server'', and ''Core'' for Internet of things devices and robots. All ...

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 SQLite (, ) is a database engine written in the C programming language. It is not a standalone app; rather, it is a library that software developers embed in their apps. As such, it belongs to the family of embedded databases. It is the mo ...

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

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 mu ...

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 MusicBrainz is a MetaBrainz project that aims to create a collaborative music database that is similar to the freedb project. MusicBrainz was founded in response to the restrictions placed on the Compact Disc Database (CDDB), a database for so ...

: Automatically retrieves missing and supplementary metadata for library items, including album art. *Music Recommendations using

: 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 The first alpha release of Banshee on Windows was Banshee 1.9.4, released on February 23, 2011.

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 compute ...

and

openSUSE openSUSE () is a free and open source RPM-based Linux distribution developed by the openSUSE project. The initial release of the community project was a beta version of SUSE Linux 10.0. Additionally the project creates a variety of tools, s ...

. 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.

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

Plugins

Cross-platform support

Release history

Helix Banshee

See also

References