Banshee Music Player for Ubuntu

Another missing piece in the list of applications that I found essential seems to have been resolved: Banshee Music Player is replaced iTunes.

The version that is included with the standard Ubuntu 6.06 LTS is version 0.10, and although pretty good, I desperately missed the podcast support. Using iPodder to get the podcasts and import them into Banshee was a short-term solution - I don’t like doing repetative tasks by hand… 🙂

On the Banshee website was mention of version 0.11.3, which came out earlier this month, with support for Podcasts..! Since I had a little bit of trouble trying to install some of the plug-ins (missing libraries and utilities), I was a little wary to install 0.11.3 from scratch, until I found this excellent How-To on getting all the prerequisites, the source code itself, and all compilation/installation instructions!

It takes a while to get through them all (depending on how many libraries you already have installed), and I had two hiccups (#1 was during Step 1, I had to use libsgutil1 and libsgutils1-dev with Ubuntu 6.06 instead of libsgutils and libsgutils-dev, #2 was during the configuration of ipod-sharp - I needed to install the mono-gac package).

I just fired it up, and seems to work OK! I just added 6 feeds to the podcast module, and I’ll update the episodes a little later. For now, great stuff, and thansk to the folks at Banshee for creating the cool application, and GameGod of Linux Revolution for the great How To!

Written on December 31, 2006