Banshee 1.0 is out.

Banshee the Gtk#/Mono based media player for Unix has finally reached its 1.0 status.

Congratulations to the Banshee team for this release!

This is one of the finest applications built with Mono, Gtk#, GStreamer, Mono.Addins, DBus#, C# and Boo. The Banshee developers have worked very hard in creating a very polished UI and have paid a lot of attention to the smallest details to provide an enjoyable user experience.

This really should be considered Banshee 2.0 as SLED shipped two years ago with Banshee 0.10, which was already a stable product.

Since that first public release, a lot of work went into improving the user experience by making Banshee faster and cope better with large libraries. This required new custom Gtk# widgets (these are reusable widgets, with a model-view-controller system, and part of the Banshee Core) as well as rethinking the way that storage was handled by pushing as much work as possible to the SQLite layer and never loading all the data in memory.

The full list of the features will give you a better idea of what this player can do.

Plugin Architecture, a Foundation For Experimentation.

This is an architectural overview of Banshee's Core:

Banshee is split up in various components, but most importantly the core does very little work. Pretty much all of the functionality for the media player is implemented as Mono.Addins. Mono.Addins provides services that allow users to install new extensions for Banshee to add new features to the core.

To make it simpler to develop plugins we will be shipping MonoDevelop and VisualStudio templates to get developers started on creating new plugins for Banshee.

For example, Alan McGovern, the creator of MonoTorrent a bittorrent library for Mono and .NET extended the Podcast functionality in Banshee to download your podcasts using Bittorrent (this extension is not part of the 1.0 release).

In this screencast you can see how a download for a Democracy Now podcast goes from 1.5k/s to 650k/s (OGG, low-quality WMV).

Windows

In the next couple of weeks we will package Banshee for Windows to expand the reach of Banshee to more users. And as part of this distribution we will also distribute templates for Visual Studio developers to create their own extensions.