[Banshee-List] Banshee 0.9.9

[Aaron Bockover <abockover novell com>]

I am happy to announce that Banshee 0.9.9 has been released. It has been
over a month since the last release, and I am glad to report much has
been happening in the Banshee world. While much is still to be done, I
think noticeable progress has been made since the last release. 

Please do not hesitate to file bugs against Banshee in GNOME Bugzilla
(http://bugzilla.gnome.org, component: banshee), or discuss Banshee on
this list or in #banshee on irc.gnome.org. The Banshee Wiki, open to
everyone for viewing and editing is located at
http://banshee-project.org.


NEW FEATURES
------------

- MusicBrainz CD Metadata Fetching
- CDDB Support Removed (Old CD Metadata fetching used the Gnome CDDB
Slave2 Client)
- Cover Art fetching for Audio CDs through Amazon.com
- Full resolution cover art viewing
- Enhanced CD Ripping; select tracks to rip
- New progress notification 
- Short cut keys 
     - J or F3: Focus search entry
     - CTRL+Forward: Fast forward current song 10 seconds
     - CTRL+Back: Rewind current song by 10 seconds
     - Shift+Back: Restart current song
- iTunes 5 and 6 support for iPods
- Support for music features in new iPod Nano/Video, and others
- Delete music from drive (in addition to just remove from library)
- Improved user interface elements in response to UI testing
- Great new icons from Ryan Collier and Jakub Steiner
- VLC media engine backend 
- Translations (Bulgarian, Canadian English, Spanish, Japanese,
Lithuanian, Simplified Chinese, Dutch)
- Control playback and query over D-Bus
- Control and query command line options (see --help)
- Full screen mode


FIXES AND OPTIMIZATIONS
-----------------------

- Optimized SQL queries and SQLite pragmas
- Better thread handling, more responsive UI
- Library database path fixed to ~/.gnome2/banshee/banshee.db, old
databases will be moved on first run
- Much faster startup time


THE IMPORTANT LINKS
-------------------

Banshee 0.9.9:
http://banshee-project.org/files/banshee/banshee-0.9.9.tar.gz

ipod-sharp 0.5.9:
http://banshee-project.org/files/ipod-sharp/ipod-sharp-0.5.9.tar.gz

libipoddevice:
http://banshee-project.org/files/libipoddevice/libipoddevice-0.3.4.tar.gz

Banshee Wiki: 
http://banshee-project.org/


DEPENDENCIES
------------

- Mono 1.1.9.2 and full stack
- ipod-sharp 0.5.9; in turn requires libipoddevice 0.3.4
- gtk-sharp-2.0 (2.3.91)
- sqlite3
- GStreamer 0.8.11
- libmusicbrainz 2.1.1 or better
- libnautilus-burn 2.12
- GTK+ 2.6 or better
- HAL 0.5.2 or better


NOTES
-----

- New versions of Banshee will be released every Thursday. Releases with
an odd micro version number (like this one, 0.9.9), are to be considered
essentially CVS snapshots. Even micro version numbers will be considered
more stable, and are subject to more testing. Banshee 0.9.10 will be
released on Thursday, November 3rd.

- To distributors: due to a bug in the Mono 1.1.8.x mcs compiler,
Banshee code will not compile. Attempting to do so will result in the
compiler crashing. Mono 1.1.9.2 must be used to build Banshee. However,
the resulting assembly will execute just fine on the 1.1.8.x
corlib/runtime. This means that Banshee can be built with 1.1.9.2 and
run on 1.1.8.x. For distributions that cannot upgrade the compiler, the
bare 1.1.9.2 compiler assembly has been bundled with banshee for now. To
build using the bundled compiler, simply pass --with-internal-mcs to
configure.

- Bindings to the VLC libraries have been implemented and are available
as a Banshee Media Engine. To use the VLC engine, pass --enable-vlc to
configure. Additionally, libvlc.so must be copied to
banshee/mediaengines/vlc before running "make install". To build
libvlc.so, download and build Jon Lech Johansen's snd123:

http://nanocrew.net/2005/09/20/snd123/

Copy the resulting libvlc.so to the aforementioned build directory, and
proceed with building Banshee as normal. Keep in mind, VLC support is
optional. Banshee also supports GStreamer and Helix engines. GStreamer
is required, and Helix is optional, but will be automatically detected
and configured if your system is set up properly with either RealPlayer
or Helix Player. See http://helixcommunity.org/