I got a nice surprise this morning when I woke up — a note in my inbox that Banshee 1.0 alpha is available. Our own Aaron Bockover has a lot to say about the new release over on his blog:

This is the first release that shows off the hard work we’ve done on rewriting the core of Banshee. There were a number of critical flaws in previous releases due primarily to the fact that writing custom data models for the GtkTreeView was not possible until very recently in Gtk#.

We took some much needed time to redesign the database layer of Banshee to be able to deliver powerful model/query/cache level features and provide a framework to build on for years to come.

I decided to ditch the GtkTreeView and it has paid off. On top of this model sits a slick new list view rendered using Cairo. We control 100% of the drawing, so we can take this thing anywhere we want in the future – things you can only dream of with the GtkTreeView. You’ll already notice some nice GUI “bling” when using the view – try reordering columns.

With all of these core architecture changes, what we have now is a truly flexible framework for developing our prized Banshee.

Even though I’ve been a diehard fan of Amarok for some time, I’ve been playing with Banshee on my laptop for some time — and was happy, except that it had a serious glitch in organizing my music. For some reason, the version of Banshee shipped with 10.3 wouldn’t sort tracks in the right order.

I took advantage of the one-click install this morning first thing, and I’m glad to see that little problem has been sorted out nicely. So far, the 1.0 release looks like it’s shaping up nicely. As Aaron points out, 1.0 alpha is not yet at feature parity with previous releases — but they’re working on it.

Speaking of one-click install — all you happy 10.3 users can grab it right away too:

Also note, if you install it with one-click, it will be installed in conjunction with the previous Banshee. It will show up with a different icon under the Multimedia menu in GNOME, or run from the command line as banshee-1.

Big thanks to Aaron and all the rest of the Banshee team!

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