I’ve been a big fan of the Banshee music player since the project’s infancy. Even then, I felt it as superior to Rhythmbox which sometimes seems like abandonware to me (sorry Rhythmbox developers). Since then, Banshee has come a long long way and now I think it’s better than Amarok!
Right about the Banshee 1.0 days, I had a serious quibble with Linux which forced me to go back to Windows. I have been happily using it ever since with the exception of missing my favorite music player. I have been waiting to hear news about Banshee’s Windows port, but there are very few places where you can find anything about the port’s progress. For the past year, I’ve been meaning to join the Banshee team specifically in order to bring it to Windows, but I never had enough time to spare. I’m very happy to say that I have finally taken the plunge and started setting up my dev environment to try and build this rather large piece of code on Windows.
Now I’m not new to coding. I have a lot of experience with C/C++, Python, Java, but not so much with C#. Still, I’m hoping that most of the problems are going to be in setting up the build environment. There are a lot of dependencies that need to be put together – libraries that are used mostly on Linux like Gstreamer. Fortunately, I have experience porting Linux projects to Windows, so I hope that would be of help.
I hope to document Banshee’s journey from Linux to Windows here for all that are interested. I have at least one friend who can’t wait for that to happen. We are both very disappointed of the Windows music player scene.
