Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Banshee 1.7.0

We just released the first of the unstable/beta releases leading up to Banshee 1.8. We are aligning with the GNOME release schedule for 1.8, like we did for 1.6. The Banshee calendar has the full release schedule. Our download page describes how to get beta releases. See the 1.7.0 release notes for more information.

One small new feature is the ability to switch sources quickly via the keyboard. You can type 'g' to activate the switcher, then type a source's name, acroynm, or substring of the name to switch to it — eg g then np to switch to Now Playing.

Busy Busy
There is a lot going on in the Banshee community! For example:
  • Alex Launi was accepted to Google Summer of Code to work on Banshee's Now Playing source, making it slicker and more useful. Banshee co-maintainer Alexander Kojevnikov will be mentoring him.
  • Mike Urbanski is working hard to get his podcast-ng branch merged into master, get it tested, and possibly replace the current Podcast extension for 1.8.
  • Paul Cutler is preparing to ramp up his docs branch work, adding in-app end-user documentation to Banshee.
  • I'll be speaking about Banshee at GUADEC. More on this later.
  • We'll be making very frequent 1.7.x releases, quickly getting contributors' fixes and features into users hands.

There will be dozens of other features in 1.8, but they depend on what piques contributors' interest and motivation. You can wait and see what makes it — or get involved and make things happen!

7 comments:

  1. The release notes mentions "Improved Maemo device support", what does that mean, was there any Maemo device support in the first place? There's no Banshee in the Application Manager on my Nokia N900.

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  2. @Tomasz: it means that on your Linux desktop, Banshee should recognize when you plug your Maemo device in, and should be able to sync your media to it.

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  3. Argggh, that PPA upload delay is killing me! :-)

    I hope the icon transparency problem in Ubuntu is finally gone, I never though that such detail would be so important for my experience :-)

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  4. Hello, I have one question, is there any way to make banshee play RealMedia files (.rm, .ra, .ram...)?

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  5. Is Cubano still alive??

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  6. I am also wondering on the status of Cubano, any news?

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  7. Cubano has been superseded by the MeeGo integration work that is in Banshee git master.

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