Gabriel Burt's Blog

What's Happening @Banshee

2011-05-03T03:01:00.000+00:00

@Banshee is finally on twitter, where we'll always keep you up to date and sometimes entertained if you follow us.

We also just released Banshee 2.0.1, a stable, bug-fix-only follow on to 2.0.0!

We've got 2.1.x releases scheduled leading up to 2.2 in September. We'll be porting to Gtk# 3 and dropping a bunch of legacy deps in the process, while still supporting users on older distros. I e-mailed banshee-list more about what that means and how we'll do it.

Banshee 2.0 is here!

2011-04-06T17:13:00.000+00:00

We are thrilled to announce the release of Banshee 2.0! It's the culmination of six months' work by 36 developers and dozens of translators, documenters, bug reporters, and testers. It is a stable release, the successor to Banshee 1.8.

New Features:

Artist/Album Browser Track Actions
Play After Queue Options
Sleeker UI, Less Wasted Space
Video Subtitle Support
Lots of new devices supported
Amazon Cloud Player download support
Hundreds (277, to be exact) of bugs fixed, and dozens more minor enhancements!

View the release notes for much more information, or head straight to the download page.

The Banshee community has come a long way in the last six months.

We now support Windows in addition to Linux and OS X. Our Windows installer has been downloaded by 12,729 unique IPs.
We are donating $1,200 USD per month to the GNOME Foundation — that's over $15,000 annually, or 5% of GNOME's 2009 budget.
And Ubuntu decided to make us their default music player, joining the ranks of openSUSE and Foresight Linux.

Congratulations and many thanks to everybody who made all this possible! If you want to learn more about Banshee, how you can contribute, get in touch, get help, etc, head over to our website.

Canonical's New Plan for Banshee

2011-02-24T16:58:00.002+00:00

This is an update to my previous post. Canonical asked the Banshee maintainers to join a conference call about an hour ago. They announced their new plan, calling past proposals mistakes:

Banshee's Amazon store will remain enabled, with Canonical taking a 75% cut of all affiliate revenue; 25% on Ubuntu will now go to the GNOME Foundation.
The Ubuntu One store for Banshee will remain enabled by default, but now Canonical will donate 25% of its revenue to GNOME. They will now do the same for Rhythmbox.

Banshee Supporting GNOME on Ubuntu

2011-02-15T16:23:00.000+00:00

Background
The Banshee maintainers and community have been proud to support GNOME by sending 100% of our FOSS Amazon MP3 store's affiliate revenue to the Foundation. We're already on pace to contribute at the same level as a small company on the Advisory Board, $10,000 USD per year, and revenue is increasing every month.

Canonical's Proposals
After choosing Banshee as the next default player in Ubuntu, Canonical approached us, concerned with how our Amazon store would affect their Ubuntu One store. They proposed two options:

Canonical disables the Amazon store by default (you could enable it in a few easy steps) but leaves the affiliate code alone (100% still to GNOME), or
Canonical leaves the Amazon store enabled, but changes the affiliate code and takes a 75% cut.

Our Response
We are pleased that Canonical is willing to leave the affiliate code unaltered.

As maintainers of the Banshee project, we have opted unanimously to decline Canonical's revenue sharing proposal, so that our users who choose the Amazon store will continue supporting GNOME to the fullest extent. The GNOME Foundation's Board of Directors supports this decision.

The Banshee Maintainer Team
Aaron Bockover, Alexander Kojevnikov, Bertrand Lorentz, Gabriel Burt

Amazon Affiliate Revenue

2010-12-15T22:24:00.000+00:00

Since late July Banshee has had AmazonMP3 store integration, earning a 10% affiliate fee. We're proud to send all of that revenue to the GNOME Foundation. Here is the cumulative revenue breakdown per store:

Amazon.com	$1185
Amazon.de	€315
Amazon.co.uk	£80
Amazon.co.jp	¥28
Amazon.fr	€70

That totals to about $1800 USD, all going directly to the GNOME Foundation! This accounts for about half of what GNOME has earned from Amazon in the last six months.

Our revenue has increased every month, too; in December we're on track for another record month! Find out more about Banshee...

Use Bugzilla Like a Champ

2010-08-16T18:22:00.005+00:00

Things that can eat up way too much time:

Given a bug id #, going to its URL
Searching bugzilla

To save time, frustration, and get more done (since it's no longer time-consuming and frustrating), I added a few, special bookmarks. They contain a keyword, which you can type in the URL bar to go to the bookmark, and a %s, which is replaced by whatever you type after the keyword in the URL bar. In Firefox, you can right click a bookmark and edit its Properties to add a keyword.

Here are the ones I use most, and examples of what you can type in the URL/Awesome bar:

Go to a bug: bgoid
bgoid 585112
Search BGO: bgo
bgo product:banshee os:windows
bgo product:hyena status:needinfo
Other search fields you can use
Search Banshee bugs by summary: bbug
bbug startup crash
bbug metadata

Enjoy!

GUADEC 2010

2010-07-20T15:41:00.006+00:00

Business
I'm giving a talk on Friday, July 30 at 10:15am. I intend it for people who want to start hacking on FOSS and GNOME projects but haven't found a way in yet, and those of all experience levels who want to learn more about hacking on Banshee in particular. Of course I'll talk a lot about the state of the project, and some of our cool new features too.

Pleasure
If you want to meet up in Amsterdam sometime Wednesday through Saturday, or in The Hague after that, [email protected]">send me an e-mail. I arrive in AMS early Wednesday with no plans.

Finally, a lazyweb request: if you have advice on prepaid data SIM cards in the Netherlands, I'd love to hear it.

Update
After taking the train to Amsterdam Central, I went to this Vodafone store and got a €7.50 sim card, €5 of call/txt credit (incoming is free, outgoing is 30 cents/min and 19 cents/txt) and a 50% off €10 30 days of data — so all told, €17.50. The guy spent 10 min or so fiddling with my G1 (dev phone) to get it activated, and then I goggled the APN info you need to enter manually: live.vodafone.com with username and password 'Vodafone'. Seems to be working great!

Banshee 1.7.0

2010-05-05T21:04:00.001+00:00

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!

Beautiful Evidence of Committers

2010-04-02T02:09:00.010+00:00

Background

A couple years ago I got turned on to Edward Tufte's books about visualizing data. It's inspiring work, showing the value and beauty of data-rich visualizations that work at multiple levels. Since then, I have wanted to apply the principles he espouses in my own work, leveraging software for data processing and interactivity.

This is my first attempt. I wanted to visualize who contributes to a given project and how long they've been involved. I knew I had speedy access to the commit logs via git, but the choice of tools or languages to process and generate the display was harder to make. I opted to try using Perl (a language ingrained in my memory from using it at the LJ World) and HTML/CSS (ingrained from numerous projects and jobs).

The Evidence

I'm happy with the result. You can quickly see when people started contributing, and the changing rate at which they joined. And you can see how long any given contributor stayed involved. I generated charts for a few git repos I already had checked out, including Banshee.

This is a scaled screenshot of the rendered HTML output, which I encourage you to click through to since it has tooltips and is zoomable in your browser. The script is available, and barring bugs should work on any git repo.

Banshee 1.6!

2010-03-31T21:50:00.000+00:00

As scheduled, we just released Banshee 1.6.0! This release has been a long time coming, and we're really proud of it.

A more detailed backstory

We originally intended to release 1.6 last fall, but we got caught short on time, and ended up calling 1.5.1 a stable release so distros would feel comfortable picking it up, but of course the weird versioning has caused quite some confusion.

We continued the 1.5 series with 1.5.2 though 1.5.7 betas, leading up to this release: 1.6.0. The process really started 14 months ago when we branched off 1.4, and master became the workplace for 1.5. It wasn't even until after we branched that Alexander Kojevnikov, now one our most prolific contributors and a maintainer of the project, got involved!

Beautiful numbers

53 programmers contributed to Banshee 1.6 just since 1.5.1, and over Banshee's full history, 142 programmers have contributed. I think these are astounding numbers. And these don't include Banshee Community Extensions, which started two months ago today and already includes 15 extensions and 19 maintainers.

We fixed 265 bugs since 1.5.1 as well (over 500 since 1.4), added dozens of new features and enhancements, and had over 2,000 beta users opt-in to report anonymous usage data that we will use to make Banshee better.

Banshee 1.6

Here are some of the new features in Banshee 1.6. Read the Release Notes for more detail, screenshots, and enhancements not listed here.

Play Queue Auto DJ
Sync Device From Playlist
Grid View
Type-ahead Find in Track, Artist, and Album Lists
Automatic Scoring
New Shuffle Modes
Audiobooks Library
Library-folder Watcher
eMusic Importer/Downloader
Internet Archive Extension
YouTube Extension
Improved Metadata Handling

A community effort

Thanks to everybody who has helped make Banshee such a success! Tremendous thanks go to Bertrand Lortentz and Alexander Kojevnikov, who over the last year in particular have contributed countless hours writing their own patches and reviewing others', triaging bugzilla, being active on IRC and the list, and generally being great maintainers of the project. They have invested in Banshee, and the effect on Banshee's quality and the community's growth is evident.

You can tap into the Banshee community and energy in many ways – read Planet Banshee, follow us on Twitter, lurk in the #banshee chat room, subscribe to banshee-list, monitor bug activity, and keep up with the latest code. We're a friendly, productive bunch, so stop by if you have a question or idea, if you want to contribute or you just want to learn how you can make your own project better.

Banshee 1.5.5

2010-03-11T19:14:00.003+00:00

We released Banshee 1.5.5 – aka 1.6 RC 1 – yesterday, with a lot of bug fixes, polish, and a couple new features.

Gapless Playback / Playbin2

Banshee now uses the playbin2 GStreamer element. With this comes support for gapless playback, which is the default now for users with GStreamer > 0.10.25.2.

Grid View

We are debuting a new grid mode for our custom list widget, visible in the modified Album browser. It will be used for Videos, Audiobooks, and more in future releases.

Album browser, now as a grid

YouTube Extension

This extension shows YouTube videos in the Context Pane related to what you're playing, and lets you watch them within Banshee. You can enable it in the Extensions tab of the Preferences dialog.

Contextual YouTube videos

Banshee Community Extensions Update

We also released Banshee Community Extensions 1.5.5, including five new extensions: CoverWallpaper, LiveRadio, Magnatune, Telepathy, and Ubuntu One Music Store (not ready for users yet).

The Mirage shuffle/fill by-similar mode has been greatly improved. It's smarter, now looking for tracks similar to the last several you've played, and dissimilar from ones you've skipped.

Enhancements and Fixes

Improve search responsiveness on large libraries
Add icons for Nexus One and Audiobooks
Play Queue item count, size, duration now ignores old tracks
Muinshee fixes: disable Auto-DJ, allow reordering, hide previous song
Fix a very common, SQL-related crash in 1.5.4
Fix saving equalizer settings in culture-invariant way
Jumping to a source's prefs via its context menu works again
Usage data not submitted more than every 48 hours
Fix repeatedly resyncing some files to a device b/c transcoded
Clear the redo stack on shuffle mode change
Accept feeds with empty title
Uri encode file location queries, making them work properly
Fixes to the OS X build

Plans

We are now string frozen in preparation for our 1.6 release on March 31st - so translators, full steam ahead! We might do a RC 2 in a couple weeks for additional testing and fixes. File bugs for any issues you find, and help us make Banshee 1.6 the best release ever!

Banshee Metrics

2010-03-03T18:18:00.008+00:00

Last Wednesday we released Banshee 1.5.4, which included an opt-in feature to submit anonymous usage data. Over 500 people have already opted-in!

Interesting Stats
They are primarily getting Banshee through the Ubuntu PPA, with a moderate number building from source or using other distributions — including 20 OS X users.

383	Ubuntu
33	source-tarball
27	openSUSE/SLED
22	git-checkout
20	OS X
16	Gentoo

They are using Banshee in 36 locales, across 30 languages. Keep in mind the Preference to opt-in is (so far) only translated into 9 languages.

223	en-US
51	en-GB
41	de-DE
35	unknown
21	ru-RU
18	it-IT
14	fr-FR
12	en-CA
11	en-AU
11	es-ES
9	pl-PL
8	pt-BR
6	es-CL
5	es-MX
5	nl-NL
5	sv-SE

About half have the Banshee window maximized, enable ReplayGain support, show the bottom-left cover art, and show the context pane.

I'm still working on better ways to analyze the data and extract actionable information. I plan to have distribution graphs and such soon. In the meantime, I've posted some more stats here. As we get more submissions, add more data points, and get better analysis, we will be able to identify options nobody uses and optimize Banshee for real-world users.

Banshee 1.5.4

2010-02-25T01:12:00.000+00:00

Banshee 1.5.4 is out, with cool new features and lots of fixes! This is our fifth release in preparation for our big 1.6 release at the end of March.

Banshee Community Extensions

We have made a 1.5.4 release of Banshee Community Extensions as well. This includes the Alarm Clock, Lyrics, and Mirage extensions, and several others.

Mirage Similarity Engine

The Mirage extension has been modified heavily, dropping the old “Automatic Playlist Generator” in favor in integration into the playback controller – adding shuffle-by-similar, and into the Play Queue Auto DJ – adding fill-by-similar. Mirage calculates the acoustical similarity between two songs.

Play Queue Auto DJ, fill by similar

Anonymous, Opt-in Usage Data

Under Preferences, you can choose to "Improve Banshee by sending anonymous usage data" back to the Banshee developers. This collects information on what version you're running, what OS, library size, slow SQL queries, and a whitelisted subset of your preferences. This information will help us choose better defaults and see what parts of Banshee are used most and can be improved.

The 30+ people running a development version of Banshee and already submitting data are using 11 different language locales, have a median screen resolution of 1440x1024, and a median music library size of 5k songs. I'm working on some analysis/viz software to crunch the data - stay tuned!

Other Notable Improvements

Wikipedia context pane extension enabled by default
Add support for Nokia N900 phones
Coverart for unicode artist/albums now supported
Dropped glade-sharp dep; GNOME 3.0 ready
Add columns showing track sample rate and bits per sample
Option to sort an artist's albums by year, not title
Fixes to GIO backend
Many crash/startup fixes for OS X build
Fix several memory leaks

More Information

As always, check the release notes for more detailed information, screenshots, and download links. Thanks to everybody who made this release happen!

Banshee Community Extensions

2010-02-18T05:39:00.015+00:00

Introduction

Writing a Banshee extension and getting it into users' hands has never been easier. We have started a new sub-project called Banshee Community Extensions (BCE), collecting various existing extensions under one source repo, bug tracker, and autobuild setup.

Its source is hosted on gitorious, dramatically lowering the barrier to committing and sharing your code publicly.

This centralization makes things easier on translators and packagers, too. And users get access (without manually downloading/installing) to the fruits of the extension community's labor.

Creating a Working Extension in Minutes

It's ridiculously easy to make a new extension. Install Banshee 1.5.3 (including the devel package), or build/install the latest from git master instead. Then,

git clone git://gitorious.org/banshee-community-extensions/banshee-community-extensions.git
cd banshee-community-extensions
./create-extension Foo
make run

This creates, builds, and runs Banshee with your extension. Go to Edit » Preferences » Extensions to enable it, and see it appear:

We already have seven extensions migrated, and one brand new one!

AlarmClock
Awn
ClutterFlow
LCD
Lyrics
Mirage
RadioStationFetcher
StreamRecorder

And, we have 13 maintainers already!

We have bleeding-edge openSUSE/SLED packages available, and Ubuntu packages should be ready in time for Banshee 1.5.4 next week.

If you've been putting off some extension idea you've had, delay no longer! Read the full Extension Writers Guide, and get started today!

Thanks

Thanks to Chow Loong Jin (aka hyperair, our fearless Ubuntu packager) for broaching the idea behind BCE, and to Bertrand Lorentz for teaming with me to get things to this state - in just two weeks!

Banshee 1.5.3

2010-01-27T21:52:00.006+00:00

We've just released Banshee 1.5.3, containing a lot of exciting new features and bug fixes.

New Features:

Sync device from playlist option
Type-ahead find in track, artist, and album lists
Optional cover art in lower-left corner
Cover art editable via drag-and-drop and right-click
Audiobooks library extension
Library-folder watcher extension
eMusic importer/downloader extension
GIO file backend, supports non-local files

Read the 1.5.3 Release Notes for the full scoop and some screenshots of the new features.

This release is what will become Banshee 1.6 and be picked up by distros; your help testing it and filing bugs is important and appreciated!

Try It

You can get packages for your distro, grab the source tarball, or follow the bleeding edge by trying it from git master.

Aaron worked hard to bring back the OS X build this release, too.

Digg It!

Banshee Release Schedule

2010-01-25T22:58:00.004+00:00

We are aligning Banshee's release schedule with GNOME's, at least for the next few months. Banshee 1.6 will be released the same day as GNOME 2.30, and we'll have three beta releases before then.

1.5.3 - Jan 27 - Wednesday!
1.5.4 - Feb 24
1.5.5 - Mar 10 - String Freeze
1.6.0 - Mar 31

I'm excited to try switching our schedule from feature and whim driven to time-based; I think it will be felt positively by everybody: contributors will know when their work will reach people, translators will have time to translate, and users can stop wondering what mixture of magic and bribes will cause a release to finally happen.

Subscribe to the Banshee development calendar, find out how to help test the latest Banshee, and/or contribute your creativity and sweat!

Banshee 1.5.1

2009-10-14T18:22:00.004+00:00

After another 4.5 months development, including contributions from 51 people, we have released Banshee 1.5.1! Shuffle Modes Shuffle by artist or album let you listen to everything by an artist or on an album before jumping to a new random artist or album. Shuffle by rating or score lets you shuffle through your songs, with higher rated or scored tracks being more likely to play. Thanks to Elena Grassi for her patch for the rating shuffle mode that got the ball rolling. Alexander Kojevnikov wrote more about the new shuffle modes on his blog. Auto DJ This new feature gives you the option to keep your Play Queue filled with endless music. It builds on the shuffle modes work, letting you fill the queue randomly in artist, album, song, rating, or score mode. As ever, you can manually add, remove, and reorder songs in the Play Queue — even while in Auto DJ mode. Alexander, the mastermind behind this new feature, wrote more about the Auto DJ on his blog. More Info Other notable new features include keeping the playing song visible, showing tooltips for ellipsized text in the main grid view, and support for WebOS and Samsung Galaxy devices. There were over 130 bugs fixed and 20 other enhancements added since 1.5.0. Read about them on the release notes. Visit our download page to try it out!

Banshee 1.5.0 released!

2009-06-01T23:17:00.001+00:00

Intro After six months of work by more than 30 contributors, we have released Banshee 1.5.0 (aka 1.6 beta 1)! We have an astounding 95 people listed in our developer credits now! As I recently tweeted, we are also lighting up bugzilla. So far in 2009, # bugs: 950 commented on, 501 closed, 428 filed, 171 with new patches attached! Release Information This is a beta release, debuting a lot of big underlying changes. It also has tons of fixes, polish, and performance improvements. Some feature highlights:

BPM Support With Banshee 1.5.0, you can autodetect the BPM of songs in your library, or you can manually set it by tapping the beat. Then, you can sort, search, or make smart playlists based on BPM.
Automatic Scoring As you play songs in Banshee 1.5.0, it will automatically assign them scores (0 - 100) based on if/when you press skip.
BPM and Score columns
Rhythmbox Migrator Banshee 1.5.0 can import your Rhythmbox collection, including ratings, play counts, and playlists.
Separate Library Locations You can now specify separate library locations for your music, video, and podcast libraries.
Creative Commons Integration A new column displays Creative Commons licensing info where applicable (and properly tagged). The license can be edited in the track editor (see below). There is also a new default Last.fm station for songs tagged 'Creative Commons'.
Track editor, showing BPM and License URI

See the 1.5.0 release notes to read about and see screenshots of the dozens of enhancements and fixes! Get It! Since this is a beta release, we are not distributing this through the same channels as our stable releases. Visit our download page or talk to your distro to see if they have a beta channel for Banshee.

openSUSE and SLED
Ubuntu (may not be built yet, be patient)
Mac OS X
Source tarball
Directly from GNOME git

Digg It!

Putting Banshee to Work

2009-04-15T03:21:00.002+00:00

Recently I have spent some time creating a smart job scheduler for Banshee. Some jobs we have include

Importing
Saving metadata to file
BPM analysis

BPM analysis and saving metadata to file jobs should be paused while doing speed sensitive jobs like importing. To achieve this, each job has priority hints and a list of resources it heavily uses. The priority hints are

SpeedSensitive, for jobs the user is actively waiting on, such as importing
LongRunning, for things like BPM or Mirage analysis of the entire library

And the resources are customizable, but currently I'm using

CPU
Disk
Database

If two jobs use the same resource

SpeedSensitive jobs run immediately (more than one ok)
Normal jobs (not SpeedSensitive or LongRunning) then follow, one at a time
LongRunning jobs then follow, one at a time

It is a bit of pretty low-level polish and a pretty simple idea, but it will give better performance and a better experience. The code is in a git branch for the moment, hopefully to be merged into trunk before 1.6.

Hack Banshee all Summer for Fun and Profit

2009-03-25T20:37:00.001+00:00

As I mentioned the other day, now is a great time to get involved with Banshee, and the deal is even sweeter if you want to work on it full-time this summer and get paid $4,500 through Google's Summer of Code. We have four developers (Bertrand, Eoin, Scott, and myself) willing to mentor, and we have some rocking project ideas we'd love you to tackle:

Banshee Web Content Make it easy to browse, search, view, and subscribe to content from one or more of archive.org, miroguide.com, spokenword.org, npr.org
Telepathic Banshee Let users share files and information (recommendations/ratings, current playing info, BPM analysis) with other users on their IM buddy list(s) via the Telepathy communications library and, likely, its Tubes data-transport mechanism. There is already a submitted proposal for this project.
Recommendations-based Play Queue Modify the Play Queue to have an option to automatically add songs recommended by Last.fm, Mirage, etc.
Banshee UPnP Add a UPnP extension to Banshee. More info.
Banshee in Context Show contextually relevant concert info, flickr photos, wikipedia info, etc.

Your application is focused around a particular project proposal, but you can apply multiple times. And you are not limited to the above ideas if you have your own. Feel free to e-mail me personally, e-mail the banshee-list, or chat us up on IRC if you have any questions or want feedback on your application. Make sure you apply with GNOME as the mentoring organization and read the GSoC FAQs. You have a week and two days (until Friday, April 3rd) to apply, so get on it!

An Update on Banshee

2009-03-24T00:29:00.000+00:00

A Stable Release Banshee 1.4.3 was released on March 4th. It's a stable release fixing several freezes and MTP device support bugs. Leaping Forward Things are moving ahead at an awesome pace in trunk! Our community members are consistently in the lists of top GNOME bug filers, closers, patch contributors, and patch reviewers. You can keep informed about all their fixes and features landing in trunk in the ChangeLog. I hope we'll have a release from trunk – called 1.5.0, aka 1.6 beta 1 – very soon. We have over two months of awesome fixes and new features to unleash. If you want to hack on Banshee, there has never been a better time. There are more than four of us actively reviewing Banshee patches from long-time regulars and out-of-the-blue newcomers, and we're waiting to hear from you! Bug Reduction Effort A few weeks ago we had over 200 bugs with no response. Today, due to the efforts of our bug triaging team, we have 110. Anybody can help us out by reviewing the list of Banshee bugs, correcting the metadata fields, asking for more information, providing insights, confirming they can reproduce the bug, letting the reporter know somebody is out there and cares! etc. To get started, do a bit of reading, find a bug that looks lonely, and update or comment on it with your thoughts on how to move it forward. Join us in #banshee to get pointers and assurance.

Parasite Packages

2009-02-12T18:19:00.001+00:00

Last night I built packages for Parasite in my OBS home repository, available for openSUSE 11.0, 11.1, and Factory. To use Parasite with Banshee, for example, just run:

$ GTK_MODULES=gtkparasite banshee-1

Then you can inspect widgets, and even edit their properties in real-time — a great way to get a widget tweaked just right without having to restart the app. Using Parasite with Banshee - "Hello Planets!" Thanks to Christian Hammond and David Trowbridge for such a cool tool!

Banshee 1.4.2

2009-01-21T16:03:00.004+00:00

Yesterday we released Banshee 1.4.2, a stable release full of two months of bug fixes and polish. Fixed and improved are RSS feed parsing, library rescanning, occasional startup freezes, launching on device insertion, several crashers, improved playback on OS X (still a technology preview/alpha release), and much much more - 62 bugs fixed in total. Check out the full release notes for details of other bugs fixed and how to upgrade! Digg It!

Catching Up

2009-01-14T18:06:00.003+00:00

Patch Reviews In the last 24 hours or so I reviewed all 62 unreviewed patches for Banshee. The oldest was over 800 days old – very sad. But now that we are caught up, patches will not slip through like that again. It's thrilling to be reviewing patches and within hours get comments and updated versions from the contributors - pumping fresh blood into the project! TagLib# Banshee uses TagLib# for metadata (artist name, track title, disc number, etc) reading and writing, and we recently took over maintaining the project. You can file bugs and patches against it in BGO. The source is still in Mono SVN. Releases and a new website will probably soon be hosted on banshee-project.org. Banshee Status We are very close to releasing Banshee 1.4.2 with a lot of good bug fixes and polish since 1.4.1. After that will come developer releases, and then Banshee 1.6 with awesome new features. I love working on new features; I've already been playing with some in my temporary (yay GNOME going to git!) git branch: Creative Commons licensing column BPM automatic detection and manual tapability Fix metadata dialog (not finished) We have a handful of really polished patches from various contributors that have been reviewed, iterated on, and are ready to commit after 1.4.2 is released, including:

Rhythmbox migrator
Option to read/write ratings and playcounts to files
Torrent support for podcasts (like Miro has)
Scoring of tracks based on number of plays/skips (similar to Amarok)
Smooth scrolling

In addition to these nearly-finished features, I'm sure there will be many other cool things that make it into 1.6. If you want to help out by translating, testing, triaging bugs, or writing code, please do! Join us on our mailing list/forum or in IRC for advice on getting started.

A Talkative Banshee

2008-10-08T19:42:00.007+00:00

I gave a talk about Banshee to the Chicago LUG a couple weeks ago. It went great – a good crowd, lots of questions and interest – and was a pleasure to communicate what Banshee is and how we're rocking. I started my presentation by running through the major features (the vertical list on the left), verbally going into detail about niceties, fun things, and usability features as I went. I then talked about project organization, history, measurements of our progress and growth, and how to learn more and get involved. And finally I spent some time alternating taking questions and demoing – an interactive process that generated more questions and demo opportunities. The time I spent putting together my slide deck was a good chance for introspection about the project and thinking about how to effectively convey my excitement to a diverse group of people. I'm quite happy with the resulting content and design, but look forward to tweaking it for new talks to different audiences, like a talk to a class at IIT I'll give next week.