Banshee Media Player for OS X
December 15, 2008 by Ross McKillop
Banshee is a media player that most of the Linux community is very familiar with. Last month they released version. Recently they released version 1.4 - which is their first release for the OS X platform. Keep reading for a brief review of Banshee 1.4.1.
Banshee 1.4.1 is only 21MB once installed, but it requires the Mono 2.0.1 (or newer) framework - which is 300MB once installed. As you might expect, because this is a “new to OS X” release, Banshee isn’t 100% stable. From their web site:
This release is a beta-quality technology preview with known bugs and stability issues. We encourage you to test and report issues. Banshee 1.4 is our first release on the Mac OS X platform, so it is not yet as complete or as stable as our Linux releases.
To install Banshee on your Mac, you must have either 10.4 (Tiger) or 10.5 (Leopard) on the Intel platform (they do not plan on supporting PowerPC).
The installation is as straight forward as most OS X apps - just drag the program to your Applications folder.
Launch it from your Applications list, and the default interface will appear. To add music or videos to Banshee, select Media from the menu bar, and then Add Media… from the drop down list. Once you’ve added some music, double-click a track to play it.
You’ll notice a few of Banshee’s features right away. If you’re connected to the Internet, it will automatically download the album art for that album. You’ll also be presented with a list of Recommended Artists, and a list of Top Albums and Tracks by that artist.
If you have an account with Last.fm, select Last.fm from the left menu, sign in, and your Last.fm stats will be displayed.
Another of Banshee’s features is if you hover your cursor over the small album artwork at the top of the window, a larger version will appear in the middle of Banshee’s main screen.
To get to Banshee’s preferences, select Banshee from the top menu, and then Preferences from the drop-down list.
The first screen, General, allows you to set the default folder for your media collection, in addition to some File System Organization and Miscellaneous settings.
The second tab, Audio CD, allows you to define your importing/ripping settings. The default format is .ogg, but can also be set to .wav. MP3 is not an option “out of the box”.
The Extensions tab displays installed (default) extensions. You can download a few additional Extensions here.
All in all, I found Banshee to be relatively stable in OS X. I’ve used it in Linux for quite a while, and the Linux version is more stable, particularly with video files. If you don’t already have the Mono framework installed for use with other app, you may want to skip using Banshee until a more stable release comes out - as 321MB is fairly large for a less-than-totally-stable media player. However, if you just can’t stand iTunes - Banshee might be just the thing for you.
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