Wednesday, July 30, 2008

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!

17 comments:

  1. I think I speak for everyone when I say: WOOT! Great job!

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  2. Awesome, its amazing how fast development is going! The one key feature Banshee is missing is folder watching support, hope that comes very, very soon!

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  3. Seems that the feature I wanted the most, watch the library for changes, did not make it again... :/

    Nevertheless, congrats!

    Og

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  4. Banshee is so nice these days, great job! Has there been any progress on the Windows version?

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  5. Please make search faster (haven't tried 1.2 yet so maybe you already have done that).

    But right now, with a few thousands songs, it's taking a long time to use the quick search. All while Amarok operates very fast and responsive. One thing that's holding me back from Banshee right now.

    Sorry. :/

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  6. Great work. I've just updated it to have the radio support on openSUSE 11.0 and it works like a charm!

    Thanks,
    Alberto

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  7. Fantastic work Gabriel and the rest of the Banshee team! 1.2 is a killer release :)

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  8. Really have been waiting for the Windows version for months.

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  9. "Multi-Artist (Compilation) Album Support"

    Ah, excellent. I have a few albums like that and the album-browser got annoying quickly.

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  10. compilation support and cover.jpg support! You people are the best!

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  11. Am I missing something? When it says:

    "Much improved performance and UI for automatic cover art fetching"

    Where is the UI? When I click 'Tools->Cover Art->Download Cover Art' nothing happens.

    Multi-artist album support is nice though :-)

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  12. @Sim: Yeah, that's basically the point w/ the cover art UI - it not longer pops up all the time - was very annoying. :) When you do that, it is checking if it needs to get any album art, but it must be too fast so it doesn't pop up the progress bar.

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  13. I second the wait for the windows version. I hate to be stuck without a decent media player on the M$ side.
    On *IX Banshee is my player of choice :)
    Keep up the good work!

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  14. Is there a way to get multi-artist albums to show up one heading in the artist broswer? like how 'Various Artists' is used for amarok.

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  15. feature-wise banshee >= 1.0 is getting nice, but I am missing bug-fix releases.

    if I look at the bugtracker, there are a lot serious bugs.

    why not work on them instead of creating new (not fully working) features?

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  16. @last anon: Did you miss the "Over 80 bugs fixed" statement about 1.2? We spent a ton of time fixing bugs. And 1.2.1, which is coming in four days, will have updated translations and probably a dozen or so more bug fixes.

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  17. Aw crap, cover.jpg support, but no png? All my covers are pngs

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