Great program with weird issues

[paulmoore]

Just switched back to Linux after a few years hiatus with winblows, and I'm glad to see that Banshee is a fairly robust music program that rivals some of the big boys. However, there are some weird usability issues that make using banshee difficult and frustrating at times.

Since podcasts are represented as a separate grouping in the source pane (the pane on the left) then it would make sense to treat them as separate from the music library. Currently in order to sync podcast with a portable, they first have to be played, which will add them to the music library, then sync'ed from that location. Since most people treat their podcasts differently from their music, wouldn't it make sense to be able to drag podcast episodes from the podcast section to the portable?

The real problem with the current way of doing things is that I had no idea that that is how it worked until I read it in the forums

While we're on the topic of syncing to portables, Banshee sux for syncing to portables. But, don't feel bad. Every music player app that I've seen absolutely sux for syncing to portables.

But here's where Banshee falls down on this issue:

1) Banshee (as well as other programs) assume that all players navigate music files by an ID3 tag database. First of all navigating music by tag info, while it theory it seems bulletproof, is often a pain in the ass. Many players, including my cowon a2, only navigate by file structure.

The example in this situation is when I synced the "Trainspotting" soundtrack. Instead of the files being copied into the "Trainspotting OST" folder on the portable (like it is on my hard drive) all of the files were placed into folders named after the artist, thereby scattering all of the files across the directory structure and making the soundtrack unfindable.

2) For some reason Banshee recopied music to my portable that it already contained, but with seperate folder names.

Where I had:

/media/COWON/MUSIC/Death From Above 1979/(2004) You're a Woman, I'm a Machine

Now I also have:

/media/COWON/MUSIC/Death From Above 1979/You're a Woman, I'm a Machine

This duplication has happened for all artists on my portable, and is quite annoying.

3) Banshee transcodes music to the format that you need, and that is bad-ass! However more and more portables are playing video as well, and more and more podcasts are also podcasting in a video format. If Banshee could also maybe send some calls to mencoder to transcode video, then that would be great!

Really the way to fix these issues are to have syncing profiles and rules. What if as a user I could tell EASILY tell Banshee what I want to copy, how I wanted it copied, and where I want it copied to? Then if it worked the way I wanted it to, I could save those rules so my syncing process could be predictable every time.

[gabaug]

Thanks for the feedback Paul. I know that Mike, who wrote the podcast plugin, has a major rewrite that he's about to release, so hopefully the synching issues will be better with it (and if not, soon).

Not sure about the duplication - looks like the album name on the second one is different (the "(2004)").

Transcoding profiles for DAPs are now supported, and video support is definitely planned for (it's one reason Novell recently hired me to work on Banshee full-time).