14 DAY TRIAL // Banshee 2.9.1, an open source multimedia solution for playing music, videos, podcasts, and Internet radio, has been released and is now available for download.
The Banshee media player has been around for quite some time, and the developers had more than enough time to make this one of the best apps of its kind. The software provides support for device sync, podcasts, track queue, smart shuffle, automatic cover art, and smart playlists.
One of the main features of the application is the ability to purchase music straight from the player, and the interface will remind its users of iTunes, although it's a little different.
Banshee releases are few and far between, and the development process is not as fast as the users would have wanted it. Nonetheless, when a new version arrives, it's usually packed with new features and major changes.
“Banshee 2.9.1 is the culmination of five months' work by 17 developers, 21 translators and dozens of bug reporters and testers. It is a development release, the second of the 2.9.x releases leading up to our future stable release Banshee 3.0. This is the first official upstream release compatible with versions of GStreamer 1.0 or newer,” reads the official announcement.
The lateness of the GStreamer 1.x implementation should give you an idea of the development pace for this project, but it's good that the application was finally rebased.
According to the developers, the backend of the player has been migrated to work with the revamped GStreamerSharp bindings and it's the one being used by default on all the platforms (the Banshee player is also available for Windows and Mac OS X).
Also, the MeeGo-specific UI has been renamed to MediaPanel and it can be used by accessing it from the Media Panel option, under the View menu.
A number of other smaller changes have been implemented. For example, the application will use notify-sharp-3.0 in the system when it's available, a hang that occurred when disconnecting Nexus 5 has been fixed, aborting MTP access when the device is busy is no longer a problem, potential crashes that happened when ejecting a DAP source have been fixed, and the player no longer highlights the wrong track after an invalid track has been played.
A complete changelog can be found in the announcement. Download Banshee 2.9.1 right now from Softpedia. Also, make sure to check our review for Banshee 2.6.0.
Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.