Banshee helps you manage and play media files. Moreover, it allows accessing media contents on the Internet, such as podcasts and radio programs. The tool has a nice straightforward interface, which resembles those of other media players, so it is unlikely that you have any difficulty to use it.
Banshee can scan the selected folders to create a media library. Once this process has ended, the program organizes the contents by the name of the artists as well as the albums. Moreover, it comes with a powerful search engine. Thus, finding the desired files becomes quite easy. It is also great that it also lets you synchronize those contents with various types of portable devices, such as Android and Apple. In addition, the tool gives you the opportunity to purchase more music thanks to the integrated Amazon MP3 Store.
Like other players, Banshee supports creating personalized queues with your favorite music. But, not only that, you can trust the Auto DJ feature to generate playlists for you. It can also shuffle the songs randomly or based on your ratings.
It is a shame that the version of Banshee for Windows is not as advanced as those for other operating systems. In fact, it seems to have been somewhat neglected. In this respect, the site warns that this version has “known bugs and deficiencies”. I was not very lucky: I first tried it on one of my computers and it did not work. All I got was an error message, although it seemed to have installed without problems. Then, I decided to try it on another machine. I was luckier this time because the program did start. However, it constantly froze, so I had to close it several times through the Task Manager.
All in all, Banshee is conceptually OK and I just wish it worked well. Since it is open-source, I encourage programmers to join the project and come up with a stable Windows version of this product. In the meantime, I prefer to simply wait.
Comments