Banshee

Banshee is back. Enjoy the classic Linux music player, revived for today's desktops.

Browse your music collection by artist and album, build playlists and listen to your favourite podcasts, all in a familiar GTK interface with album artwork and desktop playback controls.

- Play and organise your local music collection.
- Subscribe to podcasts, download episodes and listen offline.
- Scrobble your listening to Last.fm and discover related artists, albums and tracks.
- Search the Internet Archive and stream audio, including LibriVox audiobooks.
- Control playback through your desktop's media controls and MPRIS-compatible tools.

On first launch, Banshee suggests your desktop's music folder. You can choose another folder or skip setup until later. Music is imported only when you confirm, and your files stay where they are by default.

This is an unofficial community preservation build of Banshee 2.6.2. It includes compatibility fixes and restores selected online services. It is not an official release from the original Banshee developers, and not every historical feature or service is supported.

We’ve kept Banshee 2.6.2’s familiar interface, with fixes and a few additions:

- Modern build support: fixed compilation against newer Mono and libraries.
- Reliable desktop behaviour: fixed a GTK file-chooser crash, restored toolbar icons, and added Yaru theme integration.
- Working HTTPS: supplied current certificate trust so online services can connect securely.
- Podcast reliability: repaired downloading, resuming, retries and streaming, with clearer download errors.
- Internet Archive: updated search and metadata handling for today’s API, restoring browsing and playback.
- Last.fm: restored browser login, recommendations, now-playing and scrobbling, including safer retry handling.
- Desktop integration: updated D-Bus, MPRIS controls, tray integration and notifications, with local artwork for GNOME.
- Automatic artwork: improved fetching and recovery for missing covers.
- Better snap first run: added an explicit music-folder prompt, including localised folder detection, without copying music by default.
- Persistent media storage: put artwork caches and downloaded podcasts in shared snap storage so updates don’t duplicate them.

For music on USB or other mounted drives, enable removable-media access:

 sudo snap connect banshee:removable-media

The drive must be mounted somewhere the snap can access, with suitable file permissions.