Banshee 2.4.0 Review for Linux

Banshee for Linux - Play your music and videos. Keep up with your podcasts and Internet radio. Discover new music and podcasts. Keep your portable device loaded with good stuff.

Banshee built upon Mono and Gtk#, it uses the GStreamer multimedia platform for encoding and decoding various media formats, including Ogg Vorbis, MP3 and FLAC. Banshee can play and import audio CDs and supports many portable media players, including Apple's iPod, Android devices and Creative's ZEN players.

Other features include Last.fm integration, album artwork fetching, smart playlists and podcast support. Banshee is released under the terms of the MIT License. Stable versions are available for many Linux distributions, as well as a beta preview for Mac OS X and an alpha preview for Windows.

Plugins

• Audioscrobbler: Adds the capability of reporting played songs to a user's Last.fm playlist, and play last.fm radio stations (user's library, tags, similar to, etc.).
• DAAP music sharing: Allows sharing of music libraries with iTunes and other DAAP-compatible music software. The current version of Banshee is only partially compatible with iTunes 7, allowing iTunes to open a Banshee library, but not vice-versa.
• iPod manager: Allows the transferring of songs, videos, and album art to and from the device.
• Metadata searcher using Musicbrainz: Automatically retrieves missing and supplementary metadata for library items, including album art.
• Music Recommendations using Last.fm: Recommends music based on the currently playing song.
• Mini-Mode plugin: Provides a small window with minimal playback controls and song information.
• Multimedia keys support in GNOME: Banshee can be controlled via multimedia keys as configured through GNOME.
• Notification Area Icon: Adds an icon to the notification area in GNOME.
• Podcasting: Enables Banshee to subscribe to podcast feeds, which are updated on a regular basis. There is also a "Find new podcasts" feature which utilises Podcast Alley.
• Radio: Provides support for streaming Internet radio stations, etc.