Muinshee

I'm enjoying being in Provo, Utah this week at the beautiful Novell campus, with coworkers from all over, hacking away on projects of our choosing. I'm grateful to Novell for having the foresight to give us Hack Week, a time to explore and experiment - above and beyond our weekly ITO and official responsibilities. The amazing Brad Taylor, who just joined Novell last week, joined me in creating a Muine-like interface for Banshee. People love Muine's simple interface for queueing and playing songs. Our goal is to replicate that experience leveraging Banshee. In a day's work, we got things working well. The code will land in trunk soon, and therefore will be in Banshee 1.4. We've already started on our next Hack Week project, adding support for AirTunes to Banshee. We will be at the Utah Open Source Conference on Thursday and Friday doing it live. On Friday Aaron and Sandy are giving talks on Banshee and a11y.

A Thing of Beauty

Aaron improved the cover art display in Now Playing, adding a reflection, basic song info, and cross fading between cover art. It's gorgeous. We're heads-down working on all the features for Banshee 1.4, planned for mid-September. We have a lot on our plates, but features are starting to land, and we have quite a crew working around the clock and around the world to make 1.4 happen.

• Alan McGovern's patches to support RSS feeds that contain .torrent enclosures were committed.
• Chris Howie's patch adding awesome visualization support to Banshee via his OpenVP project is nearly ready.
• I committed some important building blocks for fast, slick device synchronization.
• Aaron committed Replay Gain playback support (analysis still to come).
• Scott Peterson and Aaron are working on directory watching.
• Bertrand Lorentz has Mirage, the really nifty accoustical analysis playlist generator, working for Banshee 1.2. He's also been doing a great job as Patch Master, making sure patches get the attention they need. He's also been fixing tons of bugs.
• Ruben Vermeersch has a patch nearly ready for optionally keeping filenames and folders synchronized with metadata.
• Andrew Conkling, our Bug Master, has been doing a super-human job of helping others with their bug reports and patches.
• Sandy Armstrong has been hacking on adding interactivity to the playing track info, so you'll be able to click the artist name, album, etc and do cool stuff.
• Alex Hixon, who previously did a ton of work with Audioscrobbler and DAAP, has been fixing some bugs.
• Bob Copeland's Rio Karma device support patch was committed.
• Félix Velasco, Peter de Kraker, and Christopher Halse Rogers have contributed a lot to the recent releases.

Banshee would not be what it is today without 64+ code contributors, 60+ translators, and countless others who have filed bugs, given support on IRC and the mailing list, and helped in other ways. If you want to get involved, please do!

Banshee 1.2.1 Planned for Tuesday

We're planning a Banshee 1.2.1 release for next Tuesday, primarily to ship updated translations. We have quite a few languages with good coverage, but it could be a lot better. Translators, please make sure Banshee is available in your language!