Apple iTunes, eat your heart out, Banshee will have your liver, with a nice chianti.

People are constantly asking me what is it about a Linux distribution that I couldn’t live without:

Choice. Freedom. Infinite expansion opportunity.

Of course with Microsoft or Apple you have none of that, and you’re used to it, Windows and Mac are like living in sub-saharan Africa and getting used to having parasites and curable illnesses plaguing you, but coming to accept this as normal.

But with Linux, you don’t have to suffer through vendor lock-in, everything is a component, most stuff is interchangable, and instead of 47 media players or a hacked together set of buggy illegal codecs (K-Lite), you can simply use the media player of your choice with the backend and codecs you want, which today I would like to highlight Banshee Media Player, the offering of Novell, and a part of OpenSuse by default, though available for many other distributions.

Banshee on Fedora 9 playing a Last.FM channel, hmmm, you figure it knew I wanted a screenshot of it in an article mentioning why Microsoft and Apple are bad? My god..it’s psychic!

But high quality, ad-free radio where you can make your own stations and get recommendations (note the Love/Ban buttons) is really only the tip of the iceburg in Banshee’s features.

As you can see, it playlists all the music and video files it finds in your home folder and sorts them 99% correctly (and gives you a tag editor if you need to tweak it a bit), this opposes iTunes which just says “Screw you, you can just eat the playlisting we give you, you can edit the tags, but good luck figuring that out, you’ll be better off loading Winamp and doing it from there”, aside from making your life easier by not requiring the user to reach down and unscrew their playlist by hand, Banshee will also sync your ipod provided you have the ipod-sharp and libipoddevice packages installed, and it will sync most standard players like ones from Sandisk and Samsung, and Creative with no extra libraries required, it even syncs a cheap little ILO (Wal-Mart off brand) flash-based player I happened to have, seeing as how it seems to support some MTP devices, it possibly will sync a Microsoft Zune, though I’m not about to buy one to find out… :P

What file formats does it support?

Anything your Gstreamer backend has codecs for, most users will want these (your distro might call them something a bit different:

Gstremer-plugins-bad

Gstreamer-plugins-bad-extras

Gstreamer-plugins-ugly

Gstreamer-ffmpeg

(Note: “Bad” and “Ugly” refer to licensing, not code quality, if you were wondering, your distro is pretty much guaranteed to have Gstreamer-plugins-good already, this is a reference to a Clint Eastwood movie “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly“, Bad and Ugly can be found in Livna’s repository if you use Fedora, and are in Ubuntu’s Restricted Extras package)

Obviously I recommend using Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora, for encoding your music to, if you haven’t checked out Ogg formats, I highly encourage them, they are very much superior to things like MP3 and DivX, both technically and in licensing (public domain), but the other plugins are there in case some flatulating butthead sends you a Quicktime movie or something, though I recommend converting all those to Theora then fixing the problem at it’s source, by taking an axe to their Mac and then shooting the offender. (That last bit was a joke!)

But it won’t burn my files to CD!

Oh but it will…muahahahahaha!

Get Brasero, it integrates with Banshee and therefore gives you playlist burning support from within Banshee itself.

But it doesn’t offer to sell me DRM crippled. low quality music files like iTunes does! Call the Waaaambulance!

You have many options for getting legally licensed, high quality files into those clean clean hands of yours. ;)

Online record labels that aren’t evil:

http://www.jamendo.com/

http://magnatune.com/

Non-DRM MP3:

http://www.amazon.com/MP3-Music-Download/b?ie=UTF8&node=163856011

Note: Amazon’s license says you won’t modify those, I guess that includes converting them to ogg, I trust you’ll comply with that even though nothing stops you…..

Of course you could just buy the CD for around the same price (or used, on the cheap), and get this nifty CD as a bonus:

I honestly don’t know what the whole thing about downloading music is about, I’d rather get the CD used at the local Half Price Books, or go fishing through eBay, is a $3 CD worth getting sued for *puts his pinky to his lip” one MILLION dollars?

Bonus: You can rip it to exactly whatever format, in lossless, or at your own choice of bitrate, and then upload it to your digital music player.

Why should I care about DRM?

I’m sure if George Bush declared a War on Corporate Depravity, he would say that when you fund companies that use DRM, you sing along with Osama.

But we’re Linux users, we don’t settle for stupid dichotomies that don’t answer any real questions.

1. Interoperability. DRM might mean that music that works on Windows, won’t work on a Mac or Linux, or that music that works in iTunes will only work on iTunes, or that music from iTunes will only work on an iPod, or music from the Zune Store will only work on a Zune.

This is obviously an anti-competitive ploy more than anti-illegal copying, the DOJ should go after antitrust proceedings against Microsoft, Apple, and the RIAA. But they won’t because we have the best congress critters money can buy.

2. You may not be able to copy music you bought into the format or onto the device you choose, for your own personal use.

3. If the distributor of the files goes under so does all the content you bought, errrr, I mean, licensed. (You did know you didn’t actually BUY anything, right?)

So remember, don’t fund corporate terrorism, don’t buy DRM.

What about Podcasts?

Yeah, it supports those, but I don’t listen to any.

So to wrap this up:

Banshee rocks.

iTunes is an even bigger turd in light of this revelation.

Buy used CD’s wherever possible

When I want the Mac Guy’s lip, I’ll jiggle my zipper, I could have doubled that up with a pun if Fedora used Zypper.

Packages needed: Gstreamer-plugins-bad Gstreamer-plugins-bad-extras Gstreamer-plugins-ugly Gstreamer-ffmpeg Banshee 1.0.x (duh) Brasero