I want to walk you through the upgrade process for Banshee 2.0 on Ubuntu. You don’t have to be using the most recent beta release of 11.04, but you really can’t go back any further than Ubuntu 10.04. With that in mind, let’s see what Banshee 2.0 will bring you and how you can get it installed.

New Features

Here is a list of the new features offered in 2.0.

Artist/Album Browser Track Actions: Finally you can right-click on an artist or album and select an action to act upon the selection. From that list you can Add to play queue, Play after, Add to play list, write to CD, edit track information, and more.

‘Play After’ Queue Options: From the Play After menu option you can insert a track or an entire album after the currently playing track. This makes listening to must on the fly very easy.

User Interface Improvements: Several changes have been made with a goal of having a clearner and user-friendly UI. These changes include:

• Removal of active source titlebar.
• Search now beside volume button.
• Smaller icons.
• Hidden counts for libraries.
• Name group-separators..
• Seek slider and search area can be resized.
• Podcast episodes now shown in grid and include descriptive lines.

Ubuntu One: The Ubuntu One Music Store is no longer an extension, but a part of the core Banshee application. No more enabling this feature. SoundMenu extension also enjoys this same change.

Subtitles: Support has been added for embedded and external subtitles.

Enhancements

There have been a ton of enhancements that are now available in Banshee 2.0. Some of these enhancements include:

• Support Amazon Cloud Player browsing and downloading
• Remember sources’ column configuration
• ‘Shuffle by’ respects user-selected artist/album
• MultimediaKeys: Support Pause, FastForward, Rewind, Repeat and Shuffle
• Album grid has tooltips for ellipsized text
• MusicBrainz cover art search supports CDBaby and Jamendo
• Allow to clear the play queue while in Populate mode
• Add a new ‘Recently Played’ default smart playlist
• Blank track editor spin buttons when 0
• Remove Home and Photo folder import sources
• Improved write-metadata-to-file performance
• Many improvements and fixes to the F1 user guide
• Add support for handling u1ms:// links
• AmazonMp3.Store: amazon.ca support
• Daap: Keep a list of recently used remote servers
• Windows build (alpha-quality) now available
• Mac build (beta-quality) has been updated

Installation

The installation of Banshee 2.0 is actually quite simple, if you follow these steps:

1. Open a terminal window.
2. Issue the command sudo apt-add-repository ppa:banshee-team/banshee-daily
3. Issue the command sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

You will notice, during the installation process, the Ubuntu One extension will be removed, this is normal and must be done, since this service is now rolled into the core.

Once the above commands are run open up Banshee and you should now see a much-improved interface as well as a far better performing player.

What’s new?

There is a lot to be said in this category. The openSUSE 11.4 release offers the following updates:

KDE Plasma Desktop 4.6: openSUSE might well be the first distribution packaging the most recent KDE desktop by default. Although KDE 4.5 probably brought to the users the single most amount of bug fixes ever, 4.6 does a great job of upping the performance ante once again. KDE 4.6 is an incredibly solid desktop that any user would be happy to have as their default.

You will also find better KDE to Firefox integration in the 4.6 release. As well KPackageKit has become the default update applet.

Web browsers: Speaking of Firefox, openSUSE 11.4 ships with Firefox 4.0 and the latest release of Konqueror (The version of Konqueror installed is the Webkit version.)  But don’t think you are limited to those two browsers. You can now easily add Chromium to your desktop through the Add/Remove Software tool! Before you try to add Chromium, you will have to enable to community repos by following these steps:

1. Open YaST2.
2. Click on Configuration.
3. Select Repositories.
4. Click the Add button.
5. Click Community Repositories and click Next.
6. Check Main Repository (Contrib) and click OK.

Now you can search for Chromium and install it.

Office tools: I was pleasantly ssurprised to find LibreOffice pre-installed on openSUSE 11.4. I believe openSUSE might be the first of the distributions to ship with LibreOffice as the default office suite! You will also find the standard KDE office tools along side LibreOffice.

Multi-media: Banshee 2.0 has been added and is used as the default media player in openSUSE. In order to have this on your desktop by default, you will need to download the full DVD install and not the Live CD. If you do install from the Live CD you will be able to install Banshee from YaST2 by simply searching for “banshee” (no quotes) and installing. I would, however, suggest installing from the full DVD, in order to get the complete openSUSE experience.

Over all take

I have to say I was quite pleased with how well openSUSE runs. Not only is it quite stable, it’s also lightning fast. The only problem I came across was with the effects engine. The machine I tested on is able to use all visual effects in both Ubuntu and Elive, but openSUSE seemed to not be able to run KDE with visual effects running. So effects had to be turned off. Outside of that small issue, the experience with openSUSE 11.4 has been quite good.

Who’s it for?

Would I recommend openSUSE for a new Linux user? No. But if you are comfortable in the Linux environment, openSUSE and KDE 4.6 will be a welcome change. If, however, you are a new user who really wants to cut their teeth on something with a bit more power than Ubuntu, openSUSE might be just the distro you are looking for.

Because of this switch, I thought I should give a bit of an update on where Banshee is now as a multi-media player. What are the nifty features that will easily win over the hearts of the Rhythmbox faithful? Let’s take a look.

Banshee features

Outside of the standard media-player features, you will find the following in Banshee:

• Cover art.
• BPM detection.
• Play youtube videos within Banshee.
• Subscribe to podcasts.
• Fix broken metadata.
• Context pane.

And much more. There are so many great features to this media player, you might be wondering what stopped you from using it before?

BPM

There are plenty of user-types that require Beats Per Minute (BPM) detection. DeeJays and fitness instructors are two groups that come to mind. When you play a song in Banshee the BPM is not auto-detected. You actually have to tell Banshee to detect the BPM. How is that done? Follow these steps:

1. 

   Figure 1

   Right click on a track and select  Edit Track Information.

2. Click on the Extra tab (see Figure 1).
3. Click the Detect button.
4. Click the Play button (next to the Detection button).
5. Very shortly after the song starts playing the BPM will show up and you can click Save.

If the BPM is not detected, you can also manually detect the BPM by clicking the Play button and then clicking the Tap button to the beat of the music and the BPM will be set.

Adding podcasts

Although this feature isn’t very intuitive at first, once you know how, the task is incredibly simple. Banshee has built in Miro which is a great place to find podcasts. So to add a podcast follow these steps:

1. Click on the Miro link in the left nav.
2. Navigate through Miro until you find a podcast you want to subscribe to.
3. When you find a podcast you like, click the ADD FEED TO YOUR SIDEBAR button.
4. From the left nav click on the Podcast button.
5. Navigate to the podcast you want to listen to and double click on it.

If you have a specific URL for a podcast you want to add you can do the following:

1. Click on the Podcast button in the left nav.
2. Click Add Podcast button in the upper right corner of the window.
3. Copy the URL in the resulting window and select how you want the podcast to be downloaded.

Context pane

This pane is incredibly useful in discovering new music (or information about the band/track you are currently playing). To view this pane click View > Context Pane. The Context Pane will allow you to see (based on the track/disk you are playing):

1. Last.fm recommendations.
2. Wikipedia information about the artist.
3. Related youtube videos.

Final thoughts

Like I said, at first I was skeptical about the switch to Banshee. But after using it for a few weeks I have discovered that Banshee is, in fact, a much richer experience than is Rhythmbox. Give Banshee a go and I think you will agree.

In this article I will show you some of these cool extensions, where to get them and how to add them.

Where to find the extensions

Most extensions will be found in your package manager. In fact, that is where I recommend you getting your extensions from, because it will ensure the extensions will work properly. So if you fire up your package manager and do a search for “banshee” (no quotes) you should see plenty of extensions. Now, let’s take a look at some of the better ones.

Figure 1

How to enable them

To enable an extension you only need to click on Edit > Preferences to open the Preferences window and then click on the Extensions tab (see Figure 1). To enable a specific extension just click on the check box associated with the extension and close the window.

Ubuntu One Music Store

Naturally, if you are using Ubuntu, you are going to want this extension. I was surprised to see how seamlessly this worked with Banshee as Rhythmbox has been proclaimed as the “official” player for UOMS.

DAAP Sharing

If you have anyone on your network running a DAAP-enabled music player (or DAAP server), you will want to be able to listen to their tunes. Do so with the DAAP sharing extension.

Alarm Extension

If you want to use your PC and your music as an alarm, this is exactly what you need. With this extension you can set numerous preferences for an alarm time as well as a sleep timer.

Liveradio

If you are a fan of internet radio, you will want to add this extension which allows you to listen to live365, shoutcast.com, and xiph.org.

Streamrecorder

If you are a fan of, say, podcasts and you want to record them off live streams you can do so with this handy little extension. This is truly a “what you hear is what you get” system. Streamrecorder allows you to record using different encoders to fit your needs/likes.

Coverwallpaper

This is a fun “toy” that will change the desktop wallpaper to the cover art of the song you are currently listening to in Banshee. The only downfall to this is that the artwork will be rather pixelated when stretched to fit your desktop.

Final thoughts

People will fall on one side of the fence or the other on these extensions. To many Banshee is nothing more than a music player. But to some, Banshee is much more. Have you found an extension for Banshee that you can not live without? If so, share it with your fellow Ghacks readers.

Banshee is strongly tied to the GNOME desktop manager. These two together make managing your Android phone music as simple as it gets. Now, Banshee is not a complete replacement for iTunes. There is no way to purchase music through Banshee (which is fine because most Android phones can purchase music straight from the Amazon MP3 market). But Banshee does a bang up job of managing your music – and a simple job interacting with the Android phone. Now, let’s take a look at how this is done.

Installing Banshee

If you don’t already have Banshee installed you will need to do so. And you will need to make sure you have a version >= 1.4. To install go to your Add/Remove Software tool and follow these steps:

1. Search for “banshee” (no quotes).
2. Select Banshee for installation.
3. Click Apply to install.

That’s it.

Now that Banshee is installed, you are ready to have Banshee and your Android working together.

Connecting your Android

Figure 1

When you connect your Android phone to your Linux machine you will be asked (on the phone) if you want to mount your SD card. Go ahead and do that so your Linux machine can see the SD card on the phone. This SD card will show up in the Nautilus file manager (shown in Figure 1) as a 2.0 GB Media. You can actually drag and drop files to this directory – but we’re managing music, so we’re going to use Banshee and not a file manager.

Now open up Banshee and your Android phone will automatically show up (see Figure 2).

As you can see, the interface gives you a clear view of the space

Figure 2

available on your phone’s card. You can also see that there are two options:

Manually sync

Automatically sync

Most likely you will want to manually sync your phone. If your Banshee library is like mine there is WAY more music than will fit on a 2 Gig card. of course you can replace that 2 Gig card with a much larger card and then have Banshee automatically sync.

For manually syncing all you need to do is navigate through your music collection and then drag and drop the files you want to put on your phone.

Upon completion of the music management you can then click the Eject Android G1 Phone button in the upper right corner of Banshee. Now, before you actually unplug your phone from your computer you need to turn off USB storage on your phone. Once USB storage is off you can then unplug your phone and check to make sure your new music is present and accounted for.

Final thoughts

I certainly hope the Linux community and the Android community can work together further so that the Linux operating system can enjoy a complete sync. Once this happens wireless companies can be sure that Linux users/fans will flock to their Android offerings.

Fortunately that is not difficult. And even more fotunate, here are the instructions.

The first thing you need to is close out all applications that might want to make use of an mp3 file. This could include Ryhthmbox, Amarok, Banshee, or xmms. Now open a terminal window because you are going to be issuing some commands in a moment. Once the terminal window is open you will first need to su to root. With root privileges it is time to get down to business.

The first set of commands to run will install the necessary repositories for yum to use. First issue:

rpm -ivh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm

Once that command completes issue:

rpm -ivh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rmpfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm

Now it’s time to install the actual plugins for support. Issue the command:

yum -y install gstreamer-plugins-bad gstreamer-plugins-ugly xine-lib-extras-nonfree

Now your system will allow mp3 playback in the major players. But there is still no xmms. To install xmms with mp3 support issue the following command:

yum install xmms xmms-mp3

Once this is finished your machine is all ready for full-blown mp3 playback in just about every type of application.

Final Thoughts

Yes it’s true it would be nice if the major Linux distributions could ship with mp3 support built in. But that is not the case due to licensing. Fortunately getting this working is as simple as a few commands.