The last time I tried the Banshee music player it was around Fedora 8/9 and it was very buggy with a lot of crashes. So until now I was using the default Rhythmbox application provided with Fedora 11/Gnome to listen to music and manage my podcasts. To be honest, Rhythmbox was a bit flawed for my use case as it didn’t allow to synchronize my podcasts to my music player (a Nokia 5310 phone); I was using an rsync script for that. Recently, things went downhill…DAAP music sharing worked when it wanted to work and with the latest update, Rhythmbox has bricked all my podcast feeds. Great.
So it was the perfect opportunity to look for another application…it turns out that Banshee is now a really great and mature product (if you don’t mind installing the Mono stack). It supports smart playlists, automatic cover art download, dynamic music library update, videos using the gstreamer back-end, online radios, podcasts AND an automatic synchronization to my Nokia phone! Wooohooo…the only drawback in comparison to Rhythmbox is that it doesn’t act as a DAAP music server.
I am very pleased to hear you enjoy Banshee for syncronization. You will, hopefully, be happy to hear that the upcoming 1.6 release (set for Aug. 31) will vastly improve the automated syncronization experience for cases where your database is bigger than the capacity of your device by letting you define smart playlists for syncing.
It should also painlessly migrate existing Rhythmbox/Amarok/iTunes databases as well as add superb support for Rockbox devices.
I will inquire with my Banshee lead developer overlords what the plan is for DAAP server capabilities so to fill our regretable functionality gap in this area.
Well, that’s a cool comment
It looks like the DAAP server capability was in Banshee at some point but got removed for some reason…Also note that in the current version I can’t eject my mp3 player from Banshee, I have to do it from the Gnome desktop. It’s probably due to DeviceKit which replaces HAL as the error is “Could not eject Media Player: org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.Volume.UnknownFeature: Cannot open /media/.hal-mtab”