Migrating My Music Collection To Linux Part 4

[Moozik: My Bloody Valentine - To Here Knows When]

So I've been using Banshee as my primary music player for the past few weeks and I think I have chosen wisely. As I mentioned earlier, I was a bit partial to iTunes and wondered whether I'd end up missing it. I must give the Banshee developers a tip of my hat because the honest answer is no, I don't miss iTunes.

So what did I like about Banshee? Importing my iTunes playcounts and playlists was easy thanks to the banshee-itunes-import-plugin [0]. Both playlists and smart playlists are supported. Has impressive album artwork support, last.fm upload support, and likes my iPod. One feature that I really like is the recommended artists plugin. When you begin playing a song, Banshee displays other Recommended Artists, Top Tracks by this artist and Top Albums by this artist at the bottom of the window (see screenshot). Clicking on one of these 'Recommended Artists' or 'Top Albums' takes you to the corresponding last.fm page. NICE.

And what did I not like about Banshee? Feels a little sluggish. On the same hardware, iTunes was lightning fast. Banshee has some subtle lagging when selecting playlists, searching for songs, and synching my iPod. If you're trying Banshee after coming from another music player, you probably won't even notice it. But compared to iTunes, I notice it. Then there are the little subtle bugs that I come across from time to time. To be honest though, I'm not that bothered by them. This is an open source project maintained by volunteers who are not getting paid for their work so I just report the bugs as I find them and let those fine Banshee hackers do their magic. I would love to hack on Banshee myself but at the moment I don't have time to learn C# and mono. Maybe at some point in the future.

To conclude then, I really like Banshee and will certainly stick with it for the foreseeable future. Really, go try it out.

[0] Had I realized that Banshee just uses a sqlite backend to maintain its library, I would have written my own importer and not placed as much emphasis on finding a plugin to do it