Novell proudly announced on Tuesday, October 13th, the second beta release of the Banshee 1.6 media player. This new development version, also known as Banshee 1.5.1, brings some awesome features, such as an Auto DJ mode, three new shuffle modes, support for WebOS devices (like Palm) and support for the Samsung Galaxy Android phones. The Auto DJ feature appears to be the star of this release, and you should know that it will keep the Play Queue "busy." Among the new shuffle modes introduced, we can mention "Shuffle by artist," "Shuffle by album" and "Shuffle by rating." Another feature is the ability to keep the currently playing song selected and visible in the playlist.

Highlights of Banshee 1.6 Beta 2:

· The ellipsized ListView text received tooltips;
· The "Library" suffix was removed from the Video and Music sources;
· The ListView selection received a thin highlight for a 3D effect;
· The search box can be cleared with the ESC key;
· Added the --gconf-base-key command-line option;
· Added support for playlists on Android G1 mobile devices;
· Improved support for Rockbox-powered devices;
· Ability to sync the video folder on WebOS and Android mobile devices;
· The error message label is now selectable;
· Gtk.AccelMap can be saved and loaded;
· The "preset" option of the LAME encoder is now configurable;
· The song properties are now selectable;
· The track editor received tooltips;
· Copyright, conductor, composer and grouping fields received auto-completion function;
· Added oga/taglib mime-type to the OGG Vorbis audio profile;
· Multiple folders can now be selected when importing music;
· The "comment" filter was added to the Banshee's search function.

There are also other small improvements and numerous bug fixes in this release and, if you're interested, you should take a look at the official release notes. Those who want to test it should know that Ubuntu 9.10 Beta already has this version in its usual repositories! Otherwise... download Banshee 1.6 Beta 2 (1.5.1) sources and various binary packages right now from Softpedia.