Banshee running on Windows XP
I wanted to make a small status update. I am not ready to discuss technical things because it’s quite late and I don’t think my storytelling skills are up to par.
It was a slow and painstaking process, but I finally got the hang of Banshee’s build system and I have a running version of Banshee on my computer. I’ve even gone so far as to use it as my primary player, and I should say that it shows promise. It is quite unstable under certain scenarios, but I see that as excusable for a program that has never been tested on Windows. Just a few examples:
- Trying to play any iTunes encoded AAC song will cause Banshee to crash without a very helpful error message. Playing songs on shuffle is a risky business.
- Next up (this is funny) – Help -> About will cause Banshee to crash.
- Playing a song which has anything but ASCII characters in its full path will cause the song to not play. This is frustrating because the song is detected and all the tags are read and displayed correctly because all of that is programmed in C#, but the playback is up to GStreamer which, having been written in C, is having issues. C has never had a very standard way of dealing with Unicode.
- The track progress bar had to be disabled because it was causing Banshee to crash. Right now it just sits still as if the player is idle when I play a song.
I have hopes that all of these will be fixed eventually, and I am actually putting in a decent amount of time toward producing a stable Windows version of Banshee. I am strongly motivated by my own desire to use the player. I hope to go into some technical discussions in the next few days.
8 Comments
Thank you for your work that you put into this. There are a lot of people waiting for the windows version to come out. And Im pretty sure it will attract a bunch of new developers once its done…
Hi,
just discovered your blog via the Banshee planet. Since 1.5.0 I’ve been a massive fan of Banshee, culminating in me even abandoning Rhythmbox.
I’d LOVE to use Banshee on Windows and wish you the best of luck for your efforts!
Good to see someone’s working on this!
I too can’t wait to see Banshee on Windows some day.
I’m certain that cross-language, cross-platform issues are the cream of the crop of bugs!
Whoohoo! Glad to hear it’s coming along. I can’t wait to use Banshee in Windows.
Glad to see this is in the works! I can’t wait to use it… will make the transition to using Linux easier (once I get my speakers to work on it).
Hope it goes well!
Hey,
finally good news about banshee on windows! I’m glad someone with the proper knowlege is doing what i always wanted to do.
Please keep on going!
Greetings, Jake
Would you mind uploading your compiled copy and providing basic instructions to get it working (e.g., install necessary dependencies like GTK) so other people (like me) can give it a try?
@Kobie
I really should. I hope I can sit down and do this soon. Right now I’m stressing over grad school applications and find that doing anything but that makes me feel like I’m wasting my time.