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This will be one of I hope a few in-depth looks at some of the great applications included in Novell Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop.

First up, we have banshee, an open source answer to Apple’s iTunes media player.

Banshee is a helix powered¹ media player that already boasts many features.

With Banshee you can easily import, manage, and play selections from your music collection. Banshee allows you to import CDs, sync your music collection to an iPod, play music directly from an iPod, create playlists with songs from your library, and create audio and MP3 CDs from subsets of your library #.

Right now many of the planned features are already in the stable release, including support for various media players, including hardware such as the iPod, Creative’s Zen, the list goes on.

The interface is smooth, if not a little basic. Out of the blox SLED 10’s banshee install handles a few media formats, including the lossless encoder FLAC and MP3. AAC support doesn’t come standard² however a quick search via google and I had an AAC decoder installed in no time.

As I have an iPod it was logical that I should just be able to plug it in and rock out. Now, anyone who has used linux in the past will tell you endless sagas of driver hell and a general unwillingness for virtually an Linux distribution to “just work” with a portable media player. Well, not today - I plugged my gen 4 iPod in, it was detected and Banshee was ready to roll.

After some solid use I can say it still needs a lot of work, however the developers aren’t keen to just reap the glowing adulation of their faithful users, oh no.. the next release is well under way, which sports a new plugin interface that has iTunes music store support³, Podcasting, Internet radio, music sharing via DAAP⁴ to seemlessly interact with other Banshee users.. the list goes on - don’t take my word for it - here are the screenshots to show the progress.

Having recently compiled and installed the upcoming version via CVS I can see some wonderful promise in banshee. It’s still a little rough around the edges, doesn’t handle multiple directory import yet and is a still a little basic in feature set.. but as that basic media player it excels.

Ripping, importing, synching, it’s all there and ready to rock. I’ve spent two very enjoyable afternoons commiting some of my CD collection to compressed form and syncing choice cuts to my iPod. Banshee will query various services for albulm art and an upcoming wikipedia plugin for sourcing related notes and information about tracks and albulms is a singularily inspired idea.

Apple’s iTunes is obviously the benchmark banshee aims to match and quite frankly, it’s already showing great promise.

I’ll be watching the CVS version closely, as being able to not only play, but also procure music via iTunes music store is a core need for me. Right now I can sync, rip, store, share and burn CD’s⁵ and generally do virtually everything iTunes will let me do. Not bad for openers, not bad by half.

1. helix is an open source media engine and server developed in conjuction with Real Networks (↩)
2. the upcoming iTunes plugin should solve the DRM’d AAC issue (↩)
3. buy, synch and go, all in Linux, just the way it should be (↩)
4. the open source movements answer to Bonjour, the iTunes music sharing technology (↩)
5. I didn’t test CD burning, however it’s always useful to have (↩)