mcinroy.org

Since switching over to Ubuntu Linux from Windows XP a few months ago I’ve never looked back, the only applications I ever saw myself missing were Adobe Photoshop (I can’t use GIMP no matter how hard I try) and iTunes. I’ve managed to do without Photoshop, although I was researching GIMPShop tonight: looks good but I can’t find the required libraries to install it, good job I don’t use Photoshop that much. iTunes however was my most used program in windows and I was pleased when a search for “Linux iTunes alternatives” popped up with Banshee. It looks a lot like iTunes, but cleaner with an obvious GNOME theme going on, but it still works in KDE. The interface isn’t quite as slick as iTunes, but with the features it offers that can be forgiven.

The design is pretty much the same as iTunes, with the playlist, lists and album art in the same place. The only thing different is that it has a song recommendation bar at the bottom which recommends other artists based on the song your playing. I found this extremely annoying, maybe others will find it interesting but it wasn’t for me. Fortunately this was easily turned off in the plugins section.

There arn’t a lot of options to configure banshee with, it just pretty much works well. The only options to configure are your music folder and the CD ripper (Which is pretty good).

Banshee doesn’t come with MP3 playback but that was easily fixed with a quick

and were done. You can also install MP3 playback by opening an MP3 file with Totem player and allowing it to install the required codec for you. The quality of the mp3 playback is perfect, banshee doesn’t support seamless playback but this is a feature I can live without.

One of the best features of Banshee is that if you hover your mouse over the Banshee taskbar icon you can see which song is playing, its album cover and continually updating progress. If you hold Control (ctr) and left click you can skip to the previous song, Control and right click skips to the next song and Control and middle click pauses/plays the current song. This is much more useful as the media keys on my laptop stopped working suddenly in Ubuntu after my upgrade to Fiesty.

Overall I’d rate Banshee above iTunes, if only on the base of the taskbar icon view and the Control clicking. In all other respects it more than equals iTunes and it can download cover art for any album from the web and automatically save it for you, instead of having to use 3rd party tools.

If your looking for an iTunes alternative for Linux, or just a change from Amarok/Rythmbox then check out Banshee @ Banshee-Project.org

Here’s some screenshots:

Main Window

Taskbar Icon Functions