Banshee

» see banshee-project.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

If you installed a certain Ubuntu in 2011, the music player that greeted you was Banshee, and for one release it was the desktop's official answer to iTunes. It started in early 2005 as a project by Aaron Bockover, grew up with backing from Novell, and became one of the more ambitious pieces of software the GNOME world produced. It managed your library and synced to players, and it did all of it with a polish that Linux audio software rarely bothered with at the time.

Its high point was becoming the default music player in Ubuntu 11.04, displacing Rhythmbox for a version. That was validation and exposure at once, the moment a community project gets handed to millions of people who did not choose it. It handled the attention well enough. The trouble was underneath, in a decision made years earlier that had nothing to do with how good the app felt to use.

Banshee was written in C-sharp and ran on Mono, the open-source implementation of Microsoft's runtime. That made development pleasant and made the running program heavier than a native app, which mattered on slower machines and mattered a lot on the ARM hardware that was becoming interesting. Ubuntu swapped back to Rhythmbox for its next release, and once the biggest distribution stopped carrying you, the maintainers thinned out. The final release, 2.6.2, shipped on 18 February 2014, and Banshee simply stopped from there.

~ the record ~

~ the long tail ~

Death in open source is quieter than a shutdown notice. Nothing was switched off, because there was no server to switch off. The code kept compiling for a while, then stopped keeping up with the libraries around it. The distributions quietly dropped it. Fedora stopped shipping it around 2015, Arch removed it from its main repositories in 2016, and by then Banshee was a program you could still technically build and no longer had a reason to. The community had moved toward native players written in C and Vala, chasing the exact runtime lightness Banshee had traded away.

~ the distance ~

This is one i met from the engineer's side of the desk. I have spent a lot of my life on Linux machines, and Banshee was part of the stretch when the desktop was still arguing with itself about how a music player should work. It was the good version of that argument, the one that tried to be complete instead of minimal. That it lost to its own runtime is the kind of lesson that sticks with anyone who ships software: the language that makes building fast is not always the one that makes the finished thing survive.

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