Changing Roles
About 6 years ago I started working for Novell to develop Banshee into much of what it has become today. I'm quite fond its evolution, but perhaps more proud of its community. As is likely obvious, I have not been too technically involved with Banshee over the past year. The last major thing I developed to production was the Amazon MP3 store integration and downloader, which was over the summer of 2010 (and is currently bringing in a respectable amount of revenue to the GNOME foundation!); yet Banshee has kept on growing - at a fantastic and exciting rate. This is all thanks to the numerous people actively and passionately involved in the project.
Announcing Banshee 1.7.3
We're very proud to announce the release of Banshee 1.7.3, which brings some much anticipated WebKit goodness: the Amazon MP3 Store and the Miro Podcast Directory integration. Amazon MP3 downloading is fully supported, separate from the integrated store itself. There are also a handful of other smaller new features and enhancements, and a good deal of bug fixing as well.
Tarballs - Why?
More and more I begin to wonder why we generate tarballs at all these days. Is it just because it's easy - a function of "make distcheck"? There's certainly value in the actual distcheck process to ensure you have a sane build, but why actually distribute the tarball? What's the meaningful difference between a tarball and a git tag?
Amazon MP3 Store in Banshee
I've landed a new extension in Banshee -- an integrated Amazon MP3 Store source. This source allows you to browse, search, preview, purchase, and download music from the Amazon MP3 web site.
Banshee on Linode
I recently migrated all of the Banshee web server stuffs to a Linode 768. We were previously running on an incredibly slow, unreliable, and expensive dedicated co-lo machine that once hosted a number of Novell community projects. As part of the migration, go-oo (Novell's edition of OpenOffice) has migrated to openSUSE infrastructure, and I've taken F-Spot with me to Linode.
Amazon MP3 downloader support in Banshee
I'm very excited to announce I have just landed support for downloading and importing your Amazon MP3 purchases into Banshee.
Banshee for MeeGo
After lots of intense work and collaboration, the Netbook profile for MeeGo 1.0 has been released today. As such, I am particularly pleased to announce in conjunction that Banshee is the default and integrated media player for MeeGo.