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04 October 2012, 13:02

Banshee 2.6 delivers Mac OS X improvements

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Zoom The development of Banshee 2.6 has focused largely on improvements to the Mac OS X version of the application, but some bugs are still apparent

The Banshee developers have released the latest stable version of their open source music management application, bringing improved Mac OS X support. Banshee 2.6.0 delivers the improvements that were developed in the Banshee 2.5 development branch. These include more hardware support for USB mass storage devices on Mac OS X and the ability to open files directly in the Finder along with the ability to use native file chooser dialogs when importing files to Banshee. Several other enhancements such as additional keyboard shortcuts and better error logging have also been incorporated.

There are a number of cross-platform improvements in Banshee 2.6. It includes the ability to submit recently played songs to Last.fm (a process known as "scrobbling") from connected portable audio players and phones, but this currently only works on devices supported by its AppleDevice extension. Version 2.6 has separated the file management options for music and videos to allow for different import settings for each media type. The release also includes a number of bug fixes and minor improvements like the return of the AAC audio profile for imports and performance and UI tweaks.

More information on the release, with a full list of changes, can be found in the official release notes. Banshee is available to download for Windows, Mac OS X and several Linux distributions. The program is licensed under the MIT/X11 Licence.

Despite the improvements, the Mac OS X version of the application is still classed as a "beta-quality technology preview" by the developers, and in initial testing at The H, several bugs quickly surfaced. These included problems with the new file picker dialog and crashes when trying to access the Now Playing screen. There are also known issues when running on Mac OS X 10.8. The developers point out that those testing the Mac OS X release are encouraged to give feedback and report any bugs that they find.

(fab)

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