Saturday, August 16, 2008

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.
  • FĂ©lix 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!

17 comments:

  1. I would rather like to see that space being used to display useful info, instead of an Apple-ish wet floor effect ;)

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  3. @henrique: Yeah, as we've said for months, we plan to put lots of useful stuff there in addition to big, beautiful cover art. It's coming. :)

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  4. My goodness, if all this gets done + Jamendo and Magnatune support, then Rhythmbox will have absolutely nothing to show for. Except maybe slightly better performance.

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  5. Any hope that Mirage could become an official plugin shipped with Banshee. It truly is a unique feature and if it was polished up a bit it would make a great new shuffle mode (play similar music), maybe aided by ratings and last.fm similarity if available.

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  6. Now, if only Banshee could become responsive with over 4k files?

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  7. @refugee: I have over 5K files in my music library and performance is excellent. You should probably email the list to find out if something's up, or file some bugs.

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  8. Ruben Vermeersch has a patch nearly ready for optionally keeping filenames and folders synchronized with metadata.

    Can we have more info on this one? Does this mean that -finally- tag changes in Banshee will apply to files as well?

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  9. @david: yes, I've had the exact same thoughts.

    @dedalus: we've had a preference to write metadata to files forever. this options brings back the old functionality of moving the files/folders around if you edit the track num/title/artist/album etc.

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  10. What about the shuffle options? (currently disabled)

    Great release ahead! thanks

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  11. Any news on the windows port? I would love to replace WMP with this beauty! :)

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  12. Looks nice, but I think it would look better to put some more space between the text and the cover, and maybe to give it a bit of perspective.

    Here's an example of what I mean.

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  13. Any hope that when this gets stable (https://github.com/JonathanBeck/libiphone/tree/master) we can get iPod/iPhone support? I plan on taking a stab at it, but I'm not much of a C# developer.

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  15. I would hate to see those amarok-like tabs in Banshee, besides, they aren't even useful at all.
    They should do something about the Now Playing menu instead, cause even though it looks good, some people wouldn't care at all, i just think it would be better to have it as a plugin to enable/disable whenever you want.

    Edit/ps. https://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/10756/

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  16. Feature request: "Skip'n'delete"

    I actually have romantic dreams regarding this feature! Guess everyone has a ton of these annoying mp3 files in their collection they just don't know how got there. Wouldn't it be lovely to right click the banshee icon and select "Skip and delete song"? :-)

    Another annoying thing is that the list in banshee doesn't scroll when the music changes to show the current song playing.

    Great work guys! :-)

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  17. Great feature - but the space is wasted a bit too much imo. Perhaps the space should be themable, allowing for different configurations? It'd also be interesting for it to display more and relevant information, like similar artists, wikipedia info, etc. but it shouldn't become cluttered.

    I hope Banshee adds the A-B repeat function, I'd switch over from Audacious in a heartbeat.

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