Banshee media player improves Mac OS X support

With the release of version 2.5.0 of its cross-platform media player, the Banshee development team has added Last.fm device scrobbling support and "lots of improvement" for Mac OS X.

The first release in the 2.5 development series includes support for scrobbling the names of recently played tracks from a connected device to the Last.fm online music service. This means that when users connect a supported media player to Banshee, recent plays can be sent to Last.fm to be added to their music profile. However, the developers note that this feature is currently limited to devices supported by the AppleDevice extension.

The enhancements on Mac OS X add hardware support for USB mass storage devices and enable files to be opened directly in the Finder file manager. When importing files, Banshee now uses a native file chooser dialog. Updated keyboard shortcuts, and fixes for volume issues and inconsistencies are among the other Mac-specific changes.

Enhancements on all supported platforms include the addition of mass storage support for the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, re-enabling the AAC audio profile, and various Last.fm scrobbling improvements. Releases of Banshee with an odd second digit in their version number are unstable development versions aimed at developers and testers. According to the developers, a stable 2.6 release is expected to arrive in October.

An overview of improvements and new features can be found in the release notes, and instructions for building Banshee 2.5.0 for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux from the project's git source code repository are provided. Those testing the release are encouraged to give feedback and report any bugs that they find. The current stable release is Banshee 2.4.1 from the end of May. Banshee is licensed under the MIT/X11 License.

See also:

• Banshee 2.4 adds DVD playback and UPnP streaming, a report from The H.

(crve)