Banshee is going to be the default music player for Ubuntu which makes me worry. Banshee is based on the controversial Mono technologies developed by Novell employees. Richard M Stallman has warned against Mono and C# which applies to Banshee as well.

Banshee is a simple but powerful multimedia player with Audio/Video playback support, subscribe and playback podcasts and last.fm radio from Banshee. With Banshee1.2 Import, organize, play, share your music and videos using Banshee’s simple but powerful interface. Rip CDs, play and sync your iPod, create playlists, and burn audio and MP3 CDs

Banshee is a free media player for GNU / Linux, written in Mono and Gtk . It uses GStreamer multimedia library for encoding and decoding of different file types, such as Ogg Vorbis, MP3 and FLAC.

After many years of being an Amarok fan, I was introduced to Banshee. Banshee fast became my media player of choice, due to its ability to handle video and audio files, as well as stream internet radio and podcasts.

Banshee is a popular music management tool for Linux. The default version of Banshee in Ubuntu Karmic is Banshee 1.5.1. Banshee has already reached version Banshee 1.5.2. This is what you need to do to get the latest version of banshee in Ubuntu.

Now Ubuntu Users can finally access the UbuntuOne Music Store in Banshee .You do need to be running Ubuntu 10.04 Beta 2 (or any prior Lucid version that is fully up-to-date).

Perhaps one of the most popular media players for Linux currently is Amarok, a KDE-based music player. While Amarok is certainly good, for GNOME users who prefer something that looks more native, Banshee is a great alternative.

Music is important to me. I spend all day every day listening to it and much of my free time making it. As such, the choice of media player is pretty important to me.

Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier takes Banshee’s 1.0 alpha for a spin to see if it can handle the competition. Verdict? Banshee stacks up with the best of them for media playback.