Banshee, the next best thing to Linux iTunes

Phew! For a minute I thought someone was making a good Gnome music prodution suite for Linux. 'Had me scared ther for a minute.

I think it's interesting that the full article is written from the perspective of a KDE user. I wonder if he's even heard of Rhythmbox, or is familiar enough with the more recent releases to compare them with Banshee.

Banshee definitely has more bells and whistles than Rhythmbox, but when it comes to useful features, I think Rhythmbox is ahead of Banshee for now. I usually end up picking one app over another because of one killer feature, and for me, Rhythmbox's killer feature is the play queue. I find it really, really nice to interrupt random play for a few minutes to hear a few songs I want to hear, in the order I want to hear them, and then go back to random play without my intervention. Automatic playlists are also pretty clever. There are other little things -- like Rhythmbox looking for the track number, so it shows songs in the order they appeared on the album -- that Banshee just doesn't do.

The reviewer's killer feature seems to be iPod support. I thought Rhythmbox was also supposed to have iPod support, but seeing as I don't own one, I wouldn't know.

I don't mean to bash Banshee. It's pretty good, and shows even more potential for future growth -- it's just not there quite yet.

Banshee is good, but rhythmbox is improving too. Banshee 0.10.x still hasn't got podcasting features (next version seams to have, but then it will be immature for a time).

Basically I think it is good to have to such programmes to compete, and that they use all different languages, just makes it more interesting.

I've never used iTunes, but I don't think it is a good idea to create as a rule, that the perfect programme should do and look exactly the same as some other programme