Introduction
Banshee 1.0 is now out, so here is the review. I tested this brand new release on a Debian Lenny system with all the updates to date.
Features
Banshee 1.0 comes with many features, like a pretty good collection management, audio and video libraries, support for podcasts and many plugins, a notable one being the Last.fm integration and song submission.
Except for song submission, the audioscrobbler plugin also allows basic integration with Last.fm, displaying recently loved artists, recently played songs and top artists.
The podcasts support is fine. I could add some podcasts and listen without any problems.
What I liked is the ability to sort the songs in your playlist by any factor, like location, bitrate, rating, play count and even skip count.
It comes with plenty default plugins, like the already mentioned Last.fm support, iPod support, audio cd importing, podcasts, bookmarks and several more. You can enable or disable the plugins on demand.
You can also write audio CDs with Banshee, given that Brasero is installed.
After setting up the collection location and starting to import music, Banshee automatically created an SQLite database and started downloading the cover art for albums. It doesn't seem to look in the album's directory though.
When you mouse-over the album cover of the currently playing song, it pops up at a decent size.
In KDE, Banshee stops responding when quitting it from the system tray. Another big disadvantage is that there is no popup hint when you mouse over an album/song whose name is too long to fit the widget it's located in. You'll have to select the song, right click on it and go to Edit Track Information in order to see it. Random crashes occured every once in a while, like for example when I clicked the Favorites tab in the video library.
Conclusion
I was a little disappointed with this release. It's still labelled as a 1.0.0 release, not as a beta like 0.99.2. Some more work needs to be done in order to correct random crashes, but overall, Banshee still is a competent player.
