Banshee 1.2 Released

A month and a half after 1.0, we are happy to announce the release of Banshee 1.2, packed with new features and tons of bug fixes and improvements. Several of these features were things we had in Banshee 0.13.2 or before, but are new to the Banshee 1.x series. Big new features and fixes:

• 10-band Equalizer
• Internet Radio
• Music Recommendations
• DAAP Client
• Playlist Importing (.pls, .m3u)
• Multi-Artist (Compilation) Album Support
• Manual Reordering of Playlists and Play Queue
• Amarok migration (including ratings, playcounts, and podcasts)

Recommendations based on what's playing on internet radio station And a host of smaller features and fixes, including:

• More robust parsing of podcast (RSS) files
• Find and use cover art from the album folder (cover.jpg, etc)
• Add Last.fm as a cover art provider
• The last playback source is used when the Play Queue is empty
• Better performance (start up time, memory usage, searching, etc)
• Disable the screensaver when in fullscreen mode
• Much improved performance and UI for automatic cover art fetching
• Fix issues with importing and playing files in folders named Music*
• Over 80 bugs were fixed since 1.0

We had been hoping to get library folder watching in for 1.2, but wasn't finished in time. Read the release notes for the full scoop! Digg It!

New York's Finest?

A NYPD officer intentionally, violently battered a random, non-aggresive bicylist to the ground in front of a crowd of onlookers last Friday. This makes me incredibly angry. Is this the kind of bicycle-friendly city Mayor Bloomberg is trying to create? One where innocent cyclists are threatened not only by dangerous roads and traffic, piston-produced pollution, but by the police? Watch the entire video on YouTube to see it for yourself. Even if you aren't a fan of bicycling, critical mass, young people, etc - nobody deserves to be treated like this. Digg It!

Freedom and Autonomy for Network Services

Nearly a year ago I posted some thoughts on freedom for network services. In March the FSF invited a group to Boston to explore this topic. The meeting was at once a brain storming session and a cognitive map-reduce on the ideas generated. Today we have launched a site called autonomo.us, and a draft statement, the Franklin Street Statement on Freedom and Network Services. It reads in part:

Developers of network service software are encouraged to:

• Use the GNU Affero GPL, a license designed specifically for network service software, to ensure that users of services have the ability to examine the source or implement their own service.
• Develop freely-licensed alternatives to existing popular but non-Free network services.
• Develop software that can replace centralized services and data storage with distributed software and data deployment, giving control back to users.

The notes from the original meeting (collaboratively taken with Gobby) are quite interesting, and go into much more detail on many things. It has been a pleasure to be a part of this effort, and I hope we can help move the discussion and mainstream thought on network services to be freedom and principle focused, learning from and leveraging the free software and free culture movements. Thanks to the FSF and Mako for starting this process!

More Humor

On Politics Discussing the madness here in Turkey - youtube is completely blocked - with Aaron and Miguel tonight, finally put to words, in the dialect of our times, what I'd been thinking all week: On Tabs The tab meme on pgo is pretty hilarious. Very surprised how many people are horrified, and I feel it's my duty to share a sampling of the 21 comments from my post:

I want to die

this is great stuff. you can really feel how the gnome 3 announcement creates an incentive for innovation. rock on guys.

This is literally a NIGHTWARE, thhe usability of Gnome applications (Totem, Nautilus, etc) being plain slaughtered within a few days :-( I seriously wish they removed the whole tab widget from GTK+ to prevent this sort of bullshit from happening.

I wish GNOME wasn't becoming so KDE-ish.

A couple people even commented in horror after I'd commented about the reality of it all.

Tabtastic Banshee

By outrageous amounts of popular demand (and feature pressure from Totem), we are pleased to announce tab support in Banshee! You can open your Music Library in one tab, your yummy Apple device in another, and be watching a video in another, all at the same time! I'm really excited about this new direction that GNOME is taking. I can't wait for tab support in Gnometris.

Banshee BoF

Upon arriving at the conference today, we were told we'd missed our Birds of a Feather session. Turns out they changed the schedule, and the printed ones they gave everybody are out of date. BUT, we talked them into giving us back our spot, so: The Banshee BoF is on for 2:30pm in the x-large room!