Planet Banshee

Apple and LastFM can still receive open source love

2012-05-02T02:36:00+00:00

Here we are in an era in which ad-based services (like LastFM) and closed-products (like Apple ones) are on the rise.

But contradicting what you may think, open source is still friendly to them.

If you have an Apple device supported by libgpod* and you're an avid user of LastFM's scrobbling feature, you can today configure Banshee to send all the songs that were played on your device to your LastFM account the next time you connect your device while you have Banshee running.

Pretty handy, especially if you own a device that doesn't have internet connection these days (something definitely not on the rise). You should thank our new Banshee developer Phil Trimble for doing an awesome job on implementing this feature (and on resisting to not sending me to hell when I made the patch reviews...).

The next version of Banshee, in the 2.5.x series, should include this feature. Until then, hold on to your seats! (or compile it yourself from master ;) )

* Beware: not the last generation ones! you would have to donate to libgpod project if you want those recognised.

PS: If you're a developer and want to extend this feature to other kind of devices, you should just implement the interface IBatchScrobblerSource in the corresponding Source class of your device. If you want to make it scrobble to a different service than LastFM, just create a Banshee addin (simple sample here) that subscribes to the ServiceManager.SourceManager.SourceAdded event to then later subscribe to the IBatchScrobbleSource.ReadyToScrobble event from it, to later make the corresponding HttpWebRequests to the scrobbling service.

Voice Control For Banshee

2012-04-28T20:49:16+00:00

The idea is to add voice control for Banshee media player to improve the accessibility. Many portable media player devices can be controlled using the human voice and it has resulted in the users having a rich accessibility interface. The plan is to let the user do basic controls through his voice which will be helpful for the people who can't use the normal mouse controls. Abstract idea of the project I was selected. Banshee via GNOME

Hello GNOME, Hello GSoC!

2012-04-28T15:24:11+00:00

This is my first post in a series of posts about my Google Summer of Code project. I was accepted by the GNOME Project to spend this summer coding on the famous banshee media player. I’ll focus on the Mac OS X port of Banshee, which needs quite some love and polish to shine as much as it’s linux port.

But first, a brief little introduction of myself: My Name is Timo Dörr, I am currently enrolled as a student at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (fomer University of Karlsruhe) and will soon finish my studies in the field of computer science. I’ve used linux since more than a decade as my one-and-only operating system until I bought myself a Macbook and played a little with Mac OS X. Since then, I would call myself a “dual-user” hopping between both universes. I therefore am really excited about the GSoC assignment, which not only allows me to work with the banshee team and improve one of the best media players out there, but also enables me to get a closer insight into developing in C# with Mono on OS X – which I’ve already learned to love in the Linux world.

I’ll work on different parts to (hopefully) bring banshee’s OS X up on pace to its linux port, but to shortly sum up my proposal (which eventually got accepted by GNOME & Google), here is my TODO list:

Integrate the Banshee Community Extensions (BCE) into bockbuild (the OS X buildsystem currently used to build banshee on OS X) so OS X users can enjoy existing plugins, too
Select and propably adjust native code parts within the plugins to work with OS X
Work on simple hardware detection support of mobile devices, which is currently not working at all on OS X
Make lots of smaller improvements that make banshee feel more “native” on OS X, like usage of the media keys, native file dialogs and more.

I will regularly post about my work and the problems I faced, and am always open for tips and suggestions. Though I’ve made a reasonable schedule of what to complete when to successfully finish the assignmet, I think there is quite some room for further small tasks. So if you ever wanted to use banshee on OS X (or other platform) but found anything weird, quirky or missing feel free to email me: timo (at) latecrew (dot) de – I might end up working on it during or after the GSoC period

Banshee Media Player

2012-04-13T01:22:12+00:00

I have been involved in contributing to Banshee media player since January and planning to kill some bugs. By the help of contributors and previous work I have been able to figure out some key design factors in Banshee code.
Banshee is an open source media player which is integrated with the present and future releases of Ubuntu. It has a nice interface for play music, videos, and other media as well sync it with portable devices. Banshee uses GStreamer for audio and video decoding (playing) and encoding (ripping, format conversions).
High level architecture of banshee which is more like a platform rather than just a program.

By exploring the code and getting the information from contributors the Banshee contains three separated layers as in the figure.
These are some of the few principles that have been used in Banshee which suggest it as an platform or framework,
• Separation of UI code and non-UI code.
• Separation of the platform/OS specific code.
• Distinction between the parts that could be potentially useful for others and the "Banshee only” parts.
The extension infrastructure comes mostly from Mono.Addins which has been designed to be easy to use and useful for a wide range of applications: from simple applications with small extensibility needs, to complex applications which need support for large add-in structures.
In order for Banshee to be adaptable through extensions, it has to be very modular, with as low coupling as possible between each module. It is concerned that it helps a lot with maintenance. This modularity then helps to solve the performance versus portability problem. For example, Banshee file I/O is done with pluggable backbends; each backend is a Mono.Addins extension and implements a set of interfaces in the Banshee.IO namespace. The original reason for that is the fact that the standard .Net API (System.IO), which is available on all platform, performs poorly on Linux. So on Linux Banshee was using the Mono.Unix API instead, while still being able to fallback to System.IO when necessary. Because of this architecture GIO API was implemented as an additional backend, without changing the core of Banshee.

Banshee 2.4 released!

2012-03-22T00:54:13+00:00

Banshee 2.4 has been released!
Banshee 2.4 is the culmination of six months' work by 31 developers, 33 translators and dozens of bug reporters and testers. It is a stable release, the successor to Banshee 2.2.
It has some exciting new features, like DVD playback and UPnP support, and lots of polish! Read the release notes for more info.
Get it now!

Banshee 2.3.6 released!

2012-03-08T02:08:21+00:00

Banshee 2.3.6 has been released! Banshee 2.3.6 is part of the 2.3 development series leading up to 2.4, scheduled for March 21st, 2012.. Read the release notes for more info. Get it now!

xmonad-log-applet for GNOME and Xfce

2012-02-16T05:31:03+00:00

xmonad-log-applet is a handy panel applet/plugin for GNOME (and now Xfce) users who use Xmonad as an alternative window manager. The applet will show the visible workspace(s), active window’s title or anything you send its way from your xmonad.hs.

I recently took over xmonad-log-applet maintainership from Adam Wick, and today I’m happy to announce the release of version 2.0.0.

Changes since the previous release:

Migrated the GNOME 2 applet from deprecated libbonobo API to the new D-Bus based API.
GNOME 3 panel support (in fallback mode).
Xfce 4 panel support.
Revamped the build system.
Dropped GConf dependency which was used to specify the applet width; instead fill all available space (like the window list applet) and ellipsise when necessary.
Simplified background transparency handling.
Fixed install locations.
Updated sample xmonad.hs.

To install get and unpack the tarball or clone the repo, then run:

% ./configure --with-panel=gnome2
% make
% sudo make install

Substitute `gnome2` with `gnome3` or `xfce4` if that’s what you use. If you cloned the git repo, use `./autogen.sh` instead of `./configure`. After restarting the panel you should be able to add the applet.

Use the provided sample xmonad.hs file to bind it to Xmonad. It depends on the DBus package, which currently doesn’t compile with GHC 7.x, but it’s easy to work around:

% cabal update
% cabal unpack DBus
% cd DBus-0.4
% $EDITOR DBus/Internal.hsc

Replace `import Control.Exception` with `import Control.OldException`, then:

% cabal configure
% cabal build
% cabal install

After this, your xmonad.hs should compile.

EDIT: With GHC 7.4, you also need to edit DBus/Message.hsc and prepend `Foreign.` to `unsafePerformIO`.

Happy Xmonading!

Banshee 2.3.5 released!

2012-02-16T01:19:01+00:00

Banshee 2.3.5 has been released! Banshee 2.3.5 is part of the 2.3 development series leading up to 2.4, scheduled for March 2012.. Read the release notes for more info. Get it now!

Thank You EFF

2012-01-26T03:26:47+00:00

For the last 8 years I’ve donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, one of my favorite non-profit organizations. The EFF continues to fight to protect our freedoms in the digital world – and for that I’m grateful.

Banshee 2.3.4 released!

2012-01-19T16:17:22+00:00

Banshee 2.3.4 has been released! Banshee 2.3.4 is part of the 2.3 development series leading up to 2.4, scheduled for March 2012.. Read the release notes for more info. Get it now!

CodeSprint 2

2012-01-15T04:21:58+00:00

Last weekend Interviewstreet conducted a second CodeSprint. The event had a format similar to the Google’s CodeJam: they gave you a bunch of problems and you had to program your way through as many of them as you could. There were a few differences though: the number of problems and the time given to solve them was higher (15 and 48h), they also ran solutions on their servers instead of just checking the output.

I managed to solve 5 problems and to rank 145th out of 1890 contestants, spending about 12h in total during the weekend. There were a few technical quirks in the process, but all in all I really enjoyed the sprint and was pleasantly surprised by the quality and the complexity of the problems.

In this post I will explain how I solved those 5 problems; it’s mostly for myself, to straighten the thoughts out, as it was a bit chaotic and stressful during the contest.

If you are interested in solutions make sure to check out the official CodeSprint website, they should have them available in a couple of days.

Picking Cards

Links: problem, solution

Sort cards by their number, then take them one by one. On step n the number of ways is multiplied by the number of cards at the beginning of the deck with c_i ≤ n. If this number is 0, it’s impossible to pick up all the cards.

The brute-force approach is O(N²) and could be too slow. To speed it up, we keep track of the last m : c_m ≤ n and start from there. As m is never decreased the overall complexity is O(N).

Coin Tosses

Links: problem, solution

On each toss we either have a head or a tail, so the expected number of remaining tosses T(n, m) = 1 + ½ × [T(n, m+1) + T(n, 0)]. We could try a dynamic programming approach, but the formula is cyclic.

However, for m = 0 the expected number of tosses can be expressed analytically: T(n, 0) = 2ⁿ⁺¹ – 2 (proof). Add the boundary condition T(n, n) = 0 and memoisation, and you have a solution.

Fraud Prevention

Links: problem, solution

One of the company-sponsored problems. We want to normalise email and street addresses and to keep two hashes with the combination of the normalised values and the deal IDs as keys. For each key we keep a list of credit cards along with order IDs. Then we process orders one by one and check all possible cases (see the source code comments).

I found this problem a bit uninteresting for a contest — it’s tedious and, uhm, un-algorithmic. However it would probably make a decent interview questions with all its practicalities.

Subsequence Weighting

Links: problem, solution

Generalisation of the Longest increasing subsequence problem. The algorithm is very similar: take each value one by one and maintain values (and cumulative weights) of the last elements of subsequences of certain weight. After we process all values, the last element will have the maximal weight.

One complication is that we need a data structure with efficient insertion, deletion, search and traversal times. One possibility is to use a red-black tree (as implemented by std::set) and augment it so that all nodes form a doubly-linked list. Also, unlike with the LIS algorithm, each insertion can lead to many deletions (see lines 74-82).

With such a data structure, the running time is still at O(n log n).

That was my favourite question, and the one I spent the most time on, even though in retrospect it doesn’t look all that complex.

Quora Nearby

Links: problem, solution

Another company-sponsored problem. A pity N was quite small and the brute-force approach actually worked. Higher limits would require a clever data structure, such as the k-d tree and would make the problem much harder and more interesting.

First we read all topics and questions and create a vector of all topics (ID and co-ordinates) and a map of topic IDs to the lists of question IDs.

Topic queries are straight-forward: we sort topics by distance (and IDs, in case the distance is the same) and print the first m IDs.

For queries it’s a bit more involving: again, we sort topics by distance, then check all associated questions using our map. The complication is that we need to check all questions for topics with the same distance, and include those with higher IDs.

Please never mind the code for this problem, my solution was accepted literally 5 minutes before the contest ended, as you can imagine I was a bit in a hurry.

Big thanks to the Interviewstreet team for a great weekend!

muspy API

2012-01-15T04:21:28+00:00

muspy is a website that notifies you when your favourite artists release new albums. muspy is free software released under GNU AGPL.

Today I’m happy to announce the availability of the muspy API. The API allows you to create and modify user accounts, to manage the list of artists you want to follow and to receive their releases.

Someone is already working on an iPhone app that will use the API, expect more news on this front soon!

Banshee 2.3.3 released!

2011-12-22T02:34:18+00:00

Banshee 2.3.3 has been released! Banshee 2.3.3 is part of the 2.3 development series leading up to 2.4, scheduled for March 2012.. Read the release notes for more info. Get it now!

Erendriel the return of the psycho…

2011-12-02T20:25:44+00:00

“They burn his crops, shattered his farm and killed his wife… Ketheriel is back for revenge!” – taken from the Chronicles of Henchmen (Tome IV – Ketheriel, the return of the psycho), the sacred Codex that exalted the deeds of the bravest cut-throat adventurers of Henchmen (the best TBC guild on Grim Batol).

Erendriel - Protection Paladin of "Lethal Industry"

Ketheriel disappeared after 3 long months of wipes in the Sunwell Plateau (M’uru) at 1/3%… He was later revived on Cataclysm as Erendriel of Grim Batol and rejoined the ranks of Lethal Industry which holds many of the veterans from Henchmen.

Erendriel – The return of the psycho – Part II

Carnage on Banshee

2011-12-01T17:52:15+00:00

I just did maintenance on Banshee repositories and cleaned them up. This involved brutal carnage on the project configuration files! If something is broken from your branches, then update them, and for God’s sake if it’s important for you, please let me know. I’m on openSUSE Connect, so my contacts are available for everyone.

Banshee

openSUSE 11.4
openSUSE 12.1
openSUSE Factory
openSUSE Tumbleweed

Banshee:Unstable

openSUSE 12.1
openSUSE Factory
openSUSE Tumbleweed

Banshee:EL6 (Enterprise Linux 6)

CentOS 6
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6
Scientific Linux 6
Currently waiting for Mono:EL6 to have some more submissions…

Banshee 2.3.2 released!

2011-12-01T02:13:39+00:00

Banshee 2.3.2 has been released! Banshee 2.3.2 is part of the 2.3 development series leading up to 2.4, scheduled for March 2012.. Read the release notes for more info. Get it now!

Alan Moore & the Guy Fawkes Mask

2011-11-27T15:25:43+00:00

Alan Moore talk to The Guardian about V for Vendetta and the use of the Guy Fawkes mask he created for V for Vendetta and its use by Occupy.

It is an irony noted with relish by critics of the protests – one also glumly acknowledged by many of the protesters – that the purchase of so many Vendetta masks has become a lucrative little side-earner for Time Warner, the media company that owns the rights to Moore’s creation. Efforts have been made to avoid feeding the conglomerate more cash, the Anonymous group reportedly starting to import masks direct from factories in China to circumvent corporate pockets; last year, demonstrators at a “Free Julian Assange” event in Madrid wore cardboard replicas, apparently self-made. But more than 100,000 of the £4-£7 masks sell every year, according to the manufacturers, with a cut always going to Time Warner. Does that irk Moore?

“I find it comical, watching Time Warner try to walk this precarious tightrope.” Through contacts in the comics industry, he explains, he has heard that boosted sales of the masks have become a troubling issue for the company. “It’s a bit embarrassing to be a corporation that seems to be profiting from an anti-corporate protest. It’s not really anything that they want to be associated with. And yet they really don’t like turning down money – it goes against all of their instincts.” Moore chuckles. “I find it more funny than irksome.”

Oh, poor Time Warner and your moral dilemmas. If only that was the least of your troubles.

Banshee 2.2.1 on Banshee stable repository…

2011-11-13T18:24:19+00:00

I’ve submitted on release date the update to Banshee 2.2.1 to GNOME:Apps which was declined because of a few issues on the ChangeLog. Issues corrected (typo and added a comment for .xz BuildRequires), resubmitted and accepted.

Once the update was accepted on GNOME:Apps, I’ve submitted and accepted the very same update to Banshee stable repository which now provides Banshee 2.2.1 that delivers 29 bug fixes (since Banshee 2.2.0). It should auto-update once the packages rebuild.

During the last days I’ve also done some extensive bug triage in bugzilla.novell.com regarding Banshee, and we’re now with 14 bugs open. I’ve cleared a few with the help and knowledge of upstream, some were deprecated and related to no longer supported products (ex: openSUSE 11.2).

Changes introduced in Banshee Repositories

At Gabriel Burt’s request, I’ve branched all Mono packages from Banshee to Banshee:Unstable and removed the Banshee repository as a source to grab dependencies. So Banshee:Unstable now provides all the stuff (auto-updates from changes in Banshee main repository).
I’ve created a Banshee:EL6 repository to provide Banshee for Enterprise Linux 6, which should source the Mono packages required from Mono:EL6 repository (work being done), thus we will provide soon enough Banshee for Enterprise Linux 6 (RHEL, CentOS and Scientific Linux 6).

TODO List

Prepare a maintenance submission for openSUSE 12.1 to update for Banshee 2.2.1 which delivers 29 bug fixes, some critical (bnc#727999)
Update Banshee:Unstable to Banshee 2.3.1, the latest development release;
Populate Mono:EL6 witht he Mono packages required to build Banshee for Enterprise Linux 6;
Continue the bug triage massacre on bugzilla.novell.org;

Banshee 2.2.0 for RHEL6 and clones… (soon!)

2011-11-12T16:37:25+00:00

My $dayjob requirements are around Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which took me to make a subscription of RHEL6 to use also for personal purposes on one of my laptops. Since RHEL is somehow limited in providing the stuff I want to use, I need to build some of my applications which are provided by RHEL (ex: transmission, banshee, etc).

Red Hat’s stance towards Mono leaves no doubts, sad thing… But where Red Hat fails to meet my needs, SUSE delievers, and OBS (openSUSE Build Service) takes no prisoners, even if it’s to help delivering Banshee to a competitors platform. So here’s the nice thing… I’ve created a new sub-project under Banshee in OBS on Banshee:RHEL on which I will provide builds of Banshee (the same provided by Banshee:Unstable for openSUSE), and to be a gent to many users out there, I’ve expanded the functionality of this repository to CentOS 6 and Scientific Linux 6, thus delivering custom builds of Banshee latest release to this platforms.

Since we don’t have some of this components available on OBS to build Banshee, mainly Mono packaged for RHEL and clones, I’ve decided accomplish this repository doing the following:

The mono stack used is provided by Fedora 17 (currently rawhide) source rpms (I will have to follow Fedora packaging, but that’s cool, Fedora packaging is remarkable and nicely accomplished, easy task);
The dependencies no present on OBS and that are provided by Red Hat el6 RPMs are rebuilt based on Red Hat source rpms (ex: giflib);
The dependencies not provided by OBS and Red Hat el6 SRPMS are taken from Fedora latest release (ex: libunwind);

For the start this is how things will be done. With more time in the future I’m planning to make a Mono repository for RHEL and clones on OBS providing all the Mono stack based on Fedora packaging and once it’s complete, I’ll just source this repository for Banshee:RHEL and will remove the current packages from Mono (will happen in a few months).

I’m looking for testers for CentOS 6 and Scientific Linux 6, for RHEL I’ll test them myself. If you think you can help or if you find bugs, please file them on bugzilla.novell.com against Banshee and I’ll triage them.

Improved Last.fm import in muspy

2011-11-10T08:20:46+00:00

muspy is a free / open-source album release notification service.

To make it easier to populate the list of artists you want to follow, muspy allows to import top artists from your Last.fm account. Today this function became more flexible: in addition to getting overall top artists, it can now import most frequently listened artists in the last 12, 6 and 3 months and 1 week.

I also lifted the limit on the number of artists that can be imported from 200 to 500, and increased the number selected by default from 50 to 100.

Do you have a feature that you want to see in muspy? Let me know! Alternatively, feel free to fork muspy on GitHub and to send your pull requests.

If you are a music lover and never tried muspy before, give it a go! With muspy you will not miss an album release ever again.

muspy is now free software

2011-11-10T08:04:58+00:00

muspy is an album release notification service, you give it a list of your favourite artists and it sends you a notice (by email or RSS) as soon as they have new releases.

I wrote muspy 3 years ago to scratch a personal itch — I was spending too much time online checking if bands I’m into have something new; but was still missing many releases.

muspy was initially developed for Google App Engine, which was the hot new thing back then. In retrospect, while working with App Engine was extremely educational and a lot of fun, it wasn’t a very good fit. The recent announcement on the price increase was the last straw — I decided to re-write it in vanilla Django and to host it myself.

I’m also releasing the source code under GNU AGPL in the hope that it will be beneficial for the service and for its users.

Major changes since the previous version:

Track release groups instead of releases

This was the most frequently requested feature, there were too many duplicate releases for some artists, release groups make everything much cleaner. This change was also the reason why the new version is almost a complete rewrite.
Stars are off by default for new releases

muspy allows to star individual releases, starred releases show up on top of the sorted list of releases. This feature wasn’t used by many which resulted in all releases being starred for most users. Now stars are off for new releases, if you want to star, you have to do it manually on the website. I migrated stars only for users with S < min(R, 40) / 2, where S is the number of starred releases and R is the total number of releases for all artists you follow.
Speed

It used to take more than a week to check all artists for new releases, now the checking cycle is much shorter. Things like importing from Last.fm or adding a comma-separated list of artists should also be significantly faster.
Blog

I will be blogging about muspy here instead of on the website itself. Feel free to subscribe to the full feed or just to the muspy category.

Other than that, muspy remains pretty much the same. I migrated all the data but I encourage you to go the old site at muspy.appspot.com and to check if everything was migrated correctly. Please note that the old site’s background processes are not running and it will be taken down in a month or two.

Now that muspy is free and open-source, don’t hesitate to look at the code, tweak it and suggest improvements. Git and GitHub make it too damn easy!

And if you never used muspy before, give it a try!

Banshee 2.3.1 released!

2011-11-03T00:16:16+00:00

Banshee 2.3.1 has been released! Banshee 2.3.1 is the first release in the 2.3 development series leading up to 2.4, scheduled for March 2012. Read the release notes for more info. Get it now!

Banshee 2.2.1 released!

2011-11-02T01:20:58+00:00

Banshee 2.2.1 has been released! Banshee 2.2.1 is a stable, bug-fix-only release building on Banshee 2.2.1. Read the release notes for more info. Get it now!

rpgKids

2011-10-24T13:19:01+00:00

A co-worker introduced me to rpgKids last week. After taking a look around the website, I plunked down the $5 and bought the game and the adventure pack and it was well worth the money.

rpgKids is a basic roleplaying game meant to introduce kids ages 4-7 to the wonderful world of using their imagination to roleplay. The 24 page PDF includes the ruleset, an overview of the characters, hand drawn tokens for both heroes and monsters, a character sheet and a printable 1″ grid for mapping your adventures. It also comes with with one adventure for you to run through with the kids, and the Adventure Pack (if you buy the $5 version) includes 4 more adventures. The age recommendation was perfect, as Zoe is 7 and Jack is 5.

I packed up the kids Saturday morning and we headed out to our local game store. While you don’t need to, we picked up a bunch of used miniatures for $2 bucks each for the game. The tokens included in the PDF would have worked fine, but I wanted to give the kids that little extra experience. We also picked up some dice – you’ll need a couple D12 and D6 dice for the game – I made sure to get each of the kids their own.

The included adventure gives you the overview of the story, a script to follow (if you choose) and 4 encounters, including maps, where you’ll run into the “monsters” as you try to save the town of Springwell.

The kids choose their class (fighter, healer, wizard or archer) and you as the parent play the role of Dungeon Master, keeping the kids on path in the story and role playing the monsters in each encounter. The kids had a blast as I roleplayed the monsters, especially the funny voices, and added to the script to make sure they were having a good time.

Zoe got it right away – she quickly named her character as they filled out their character sheets and chose a class, while Jack didn’t really get it until we were in the middle of the story and having our first encounter with the monsters. Alex, who is 15, came and watched – as my wife later pointed out, you could tell that he thought he was too cool to play with the little kids, but deep down, he really wanted to.

Combat is simple – roll a die for initiative, then the monsters roll against the heroes to see if there is a “hit” – 2 hits and the character or monster is knocked out. Depending on the class, you can attack from so many tiles away, adding a level of tactics and strategy to start the kids learning. My Dungeon Master skills are a bit rusty, but thankfully the script kept the story going and I embellished and added to the story where appropriate.

They definitely enjoyed it and were asking to play again – this will definitely be a great way to get through the long Minnesota winter. If you have a kids, I highly recommend rpgKids and it definitely lays the groundwork to introduce D&D when they get older. Who needs video games anyway?!

Banshee repository gets mono-addins

2011-10-09T19:04:00+00:00

After some reports of problems with running “banshee –debug” for openSUSE 11.4 and supported by upstream that updating to mono-addins 0.6.2 wouldn’t bring any harm, I’ve decided to add mono-addins to the Banshee repository. Currently Banshee 2.2.0 for openSUSE 11.4 and openSUSE 11.3 is being built against the latest version of mono-addins.

I’m interested in openSUSE 11.4 user feedback regarding this upgrade (mono-addins), specially with applications which use it and are not provided by the Banshee repository (ex: F-Spot). Please feel free to email me or open a bug report on bugzilla.novell.com.

Fork the FSF

2011-10-09T02:19:19+00:00

Larry Cafiero writes that it is time the FSF should be forked.

I couldn’t agree more.

Thanks Steve

2011-10-06T13:02:35+00:00

The internet is buzzing with thank you’s, tributes and more about the passing of Steve Jobs yesterday.

I was 11 or 12 when we got our second computer – the brand new Apple //c. A portable version of the Apple IIe, for the first time in the Apple II line it included a built in 5.25 disk drive and ports for a mouse / joystick, external disc drive, modem and more.

It was on this computer that my formative years were spent – learning BASIC, LOGO, messing with Apple Paint, and playing Choplifter, Bards Tale and Lode Runner (among others) for hours (and days) at time. Lode Runner was the first game I played where I could create my own levels and I would spend days devising clever ways to trap that little guy.

Most importantly, this was the computer that got me online. We had a 300 baud modem, and later purchased a 1200 and then 2400 baud modem which seemed liked the fastest thing ever. I remember begging my dad to let me spend more time on CompuServe, back when it cost $6 / hour to be on the service, just so I could play text adventure games.

Later I would discover the wonderful world of BBSes, and play games online, download software and interact with online communities, all while tying up the one phone line we had in the house.

Almost 10 years ago I bought an Apple //c on Ebay, which has sat in my closet since. Ironically, two weeks ago I decided to pull it out and hook it up, only to realize I didn’t buy any software.

It wouldn’t be until years later that I would buy an Apple product again. This past January, frustrated with my PC for not playing MP3s out of the blue, I grabbed my wife in the middle of a snowstorm and we drove to the Apple store. User her education discount, I bought an iMac and was blown away by the experience – both the shopping experience at an Apple store and OS X. It just worked. I can’t say I’m a fan of iTunes, but thankfully Banshee is available on OS X. Using iMovie, I was able to quickly jump in and edit my home movie footage from Christmas. I imported my photos into iPhoto and quickly and intuitively created a photo book for my wife for our 15th wedding anniversary. Apple’s focus on making products easy to use is phenomenal.

In April, I bought an iPad, and over the summer bought the new MacBook Air. Apple’s combination of software and amazing hardware is a combination that no one can match. Having worked with Apple when the original iMac was first launched, their business practices can leave something to be desired – but they do everything for one reason – their focus on the customer experience trumps everything, and it shows in the products they bring to market.

And the focus started with Steve Jobs, and for that I’m thankful.

WTF!

2011-09-27T17:05:49+00:00

PS: I found it on youtube… a big LOL… no death threats please!

Banshee 2.2, something for everyone

2011-09-23T00:14:03+00:00

Yesterday we released Banshee 2.2. It's the result of six months of hard work by 35 developers, 38 translators and countless bug reporters, tester, packagers, and just nice people.

Of course it comes with new features and enhancements :

eMusic store
support for the Nook
ability to preload default radio stations
several new Android device supported
a new "Smiley Face Curve" default equalizer
Lots more ! And bug fixes !

Check out the release notes for more details.

I'm particularly happy about the ability to preload default radio stations. In the 0.x series, Banshee used to ship with a set of default radio stations, but those were a pain to maintain, so that was dropped during the refactoring that lead to 1.0. This was of course not ideal either, so a bug about that was lingering for quite some time.

Then Martin Pitt came up with an idea, along with a patch : when Banshee first starts, just read any XSPF files from DATADIR/stations/ (usually /usr/share/banshee/stations) and import their content as radio stations.

As Martin mentions, this allows distros or admins to provide the default stations they want just by installing one or more files, and those stations can be locale or region specific. I think this is a nice solution, but maybe it's just because we don't have to do anything... ;)

This release is available in lots of shapes and sizes, all accessible through our download page :

The usual source code tarball
Packages for various distributions: openSUSE, Debian, Ubuntu, etc. (just check out our regular update channels)
A Linux bundle for 32 bit and 64 bit systems. More details about that in my previous posts
A Windows installer
A disk image for Mac OS X

This release also marks the first anniversary of our most beloved feature, the Amazon store integration. During that year, over $9000 USD have been contributed directly to the GNOME Foundation. And we have learned that apparently most people don't buy music in August.

With a new Banshee release comes a new version of our Community Extensions. It brings two new extensions (AlbumArtWriter and DuplicateSongDetector), along with several enhancements and bugfixes to existing extensions (more details here). The project on gitorious now brings together 23 extensions, and 28 people are listed as committers.

In fact, this extension business is working so well that there are people who are (kind of) extending extensions : we now have new visualizations for the OpenVP visualizer, combining existing visualizations

The new "Spectrum Rain" visualization

Before you ask, although it looks different than what you might be used to, this is really Banshee. Just go to "Now Playing" and click "Simplify".

I'd like to thank everybody who made all of this possible, and who make Banshee such a fun project to be involved with. If you want to join us, to help out or to get some help, just head over to our website.

Banshee 2.2 released!

2011-09-21T22:52:56+00:00

Banshee 2.2 has been released! Banshee 2.2 is the culmination of six months' work by 35 developers, 38 translators and dozens of bug reporters and testers. It is a stable release, the successor to Banshee 2.0. It has some exciting new features and lots of polish! Read the release notes for more info. Get it now!