As discussed in the first article in this series, which gave an overview of Amarok, there are numerous, high-quality music managers available for Linux. Each has a variety of different functions and features, which will appeal to different users.
I will be providing information for six music managers in all. First in the series was Amarok, while in upcoming reviews I will give an overview of Exaile, Quodlibet, Rhythmbox and Songbird. In this article, however, I will be showing off the features, pluses and minuses of… Banshee:
Banshee is a nice manager, has great search features and is even implementing iPod sync abilities, but in my view it still doesn’t quite have “it” in order to bump the Amarok-style players off their perch.
In its default setup, Banshee wants to show the user a single list of every song available. The list is searchable, which is necessary, and sortable by any column. The search box acts as a filter, so as the user is typing a search term, the list of songs matching that term shrinks immediately, so if a particular song is being searched for, it’s a very quick thing to find it. Unfortunately, in my opinion, this search bar is necessary.
I’ve never been a fan of the completely flat list way of organizing music as provided by Banshee, as it normally makes scrolling through a very long column of songs, artists and albums in order to find what I’m looking for. This can be especially bothersome when navigating a large music collection, such as I have on my computer. I currently have roughly 10,000 songs, and to have to scroll through it line by line is a pain. In my opinion, a flat list isn’t really organizing my music at all, except it does give me organizing options.
Compare Banshee’s flat list to how Amarok organizes music. Amarok automatically groups songs into albums, and then the albums by performer. Suddenly the list of available songs is much more compressed, and easy to navigate. Still not as easy as iTunes’ three-panel way of doing things – top left panel is artists, top right panel is albums (depending on which artist is selected), and the bottom panel is an album’s song list – but not bad.
Although, in my opinion, Banshee is lacking in music organization features, it is still quite a nice music player with a great deal of features. Right out of the box, so to speak, Banshee is able to play a variety of music formats, including mp3, aac, mp4, wma, flac and more. This is all contingent, of course, on the correct GStreamer plugins being installed, but the most common ones are typically installed by default.
In addition to being capable of playing many music formats, Banshee can play Internet Radio, download and play Podcasts, and play, rip and burn CDs. Note: I had trouble with ripping and burning during my most recent Banshee experience (I installed it just for this review), but that is likely because Banshee is a Gnome program and I am using it in KDE. Banshee relies on the standard Gnome burning library, and not an external program, which likely accounts for the loss of functionality. In the past I’ve used Banshee in Gnome, and burning and ripping worked as they should. But it is something to think about.
Through available plug-ins, Banshee can fetch album art from the Internet (it attempts to use Amazon.com by default and will also display a jpg file in the same folder as your music), share your music via DAAP, make recommendations about music you might like (through audioscrobbler), and automatically download Podcasts. Like Amarok, Banshee comes with a handy menubar controller, and Banshee also synchronizes with an iPod. Personally, I’ve never had any luck getting this feature to work, but I’ve seen that others have been successful, so it’s possible it’s just me!
All in all, Banshee is a very nice program. It still feels “young” however, and many of the features not fully-implemented or perfected. From my own experience I’ve found it is a better “fit” if the user is in Gnome and not KDE, but there’s nothing stopping someone from using it in either environment. So… Banshee gets my recommendation, but not as strong a recommendation as I give other players.
