Mono jukebox for the Gnome desktop

Burning Banshees

By Rüdiger Arp

www.sxc.hu

If you have hundreds of digitized tracks on your PC, you'll eventually need to impose some form of structure. The trend launched by Apple's iTunes has led to a crop of powerful, but easy-to-use, audio players on Linux. In this article, we will be looking at the Banshee audio program, which was written in Mono, and which has gathered a steadily growing community of fans. This article focuses on the current Banshee version 0.10.8.

Figure 1: Banshee handles audio CDs and tracks released by Rhythmbox.

Installation

Banshee is based on the Mono framework, so you do need to resolve a number of dependencies before you can get started. Fortunately, pre-compiled binaries exist for more recent versions of the Suse, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo, Mandriva, and Foresight distributions. A Howto on the Banshee homepage [1] tells you how to add the installation resources to your system.

The installation depends on the features you need. As Banshee is based on the Gstreamer framework, you need GStreamer plugins for Ogg or MP3, for example, to play audio formats. If you have Ubuntu Dapper or Debian Sid, you can install the gstreamer0.10-plugins-base, gstreamer0.10-plugins-good, and gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly to add these capabilities.

If Banshee is not present on your distribution, or if you want the latest Banshee version, you will have to roll up your sleeves and build the source packages manually. This is not impossible, but it is extremely time-consuming on account of the dependencies you need to resolve; the Howto [2] on the Banshee homepage will help those who are brave enough to try. If you have an external player, such as an Apple iPod or a Nomad Jukebox, there are a number of additional libraries to install if you want your player to talk to Banshee.

Feed Me!

After completing the installation, you might like to open the program settings under Edit | Properties before you start importing your collection of tracks. The program uses these settings later for tasks such as burning audio CDs.

Figure 2: Use the iPod Properties dialog box to manage iPod settings.

The settings are neatly divided by function: Library, Encoding, Burning, and Advanced. Library is where you set the path to your Banshee music folder and say whether you want Banshee to copy audio files from the library you are importing to this folder. This is a useful function for laptop owners who store tracks on their PCs or servers but don't want to do without music on the move.

The Encoding tab has details on file formats and the bit rate at which audio CDs should be ripped to disk. This is also where you will find the settings for the Apple iPod MP3 player, if you happen to have one. Burning has settings for burning CDs. The Advanced tab shows you which audio engine Banshee uses.

To import a collection of tracks, select Music | Import Music. When I tried to import about 740 Ogg and MP3 files from a local disk, I had to relaunch the operation multiple times before it finally completed, as Banshee tended to hang.

After completing the original import, future import sessions completed without any trouble, and I had no problems getting Banshee to talk to my Apple iPod MP3 player. As soon as I plugged the player into the USB port, Banshee showed me the track library stored on the iPod. And it was easy to transfer tracks between Banshee and the iPod.

Playlists

The two-panel Banshee user interface is tidy to the point of being spartan. The left panel just has a Music Library entry when you start; and its content is shown on the right. Banshee does not currently support the kind of intelligent playlists you may be familiar with from Rhythmbox [3] or Amarok [4], which show you the last songs played.

The search box in the top right makes it easier to create lists or browse your music library. When you enter a search key, the list in the panel below the search box displays a list of matches. You can use the column headers to sort the list by artist or genre. The column order is freely configurable; just click on a column header, hold down the left mouse button, and drag the header to the required position.

To add the whole list of matches to a playlist, press [Ctrl]+[A] to select the list, and right click to drop down the context menu. You will not have a play-list at first, so your only option is to select Add to Playlist | New Playlist. Right click the new playlist, and select Rename Playlist to change the name. You can then build a customized list step by step.

Tags vs Metadata

The Edit Song Metadata item supports easy editing of track information. My first attempt to edit the track information stored in the ID3 tags of a music library on a mounted Samba share led to surprising results. Although Banshee applied the changes straight away, other audio players that accessed the same data just ignored the changes.

Some research revealed that Banshee will read existing ID3 tags but not store changes in the tags. Banshee stores track information in an Sqlite database below ~/.gnome2/banshee/banshee.db. Of course, the information is not accessible to other jukebox programs.

Figure 3: The Tray plugin provides stylish presentation of track information.

Rip and Burn

Banshee makes it easy to add audio CDs to your collection. When you insert a disk, Banshee automatically queries the CD information and displays the album title. Clicking the album title displays the tracks in the right panel, and the Write CD button toggles to Import CD.

Burning Ogg and MP3 files is very easy: use a playlist or search list to create a CD, and then press Write CD to create an audio CD for the player in your car. Banshee passed our tests of various output formats with flying colors.

Conclusions

Some functions, such as ripping and burning audio CDs, or easily hot-plugging iPod MP3 players, are really convincing. And Banshee has a classy look. On the downside, creating a playlist was less than intuitive.

The workaround Banshee uses when storing track information is questionable. However, the program is at an early stage of development, so there is hope. No matter whether Banshee becomes your favorite player, you will definitely be hearing more of the Banshee's wail in the future.