Will Farrington was kind enough to write a recipe for an early look at the next generation of Banshee, which is an early alpha. I’ve been able to get the recipe to cook locally, but not on rMake, so it’s not available in the repos yet, but we’re working on it.

With the exception of two visual quirks that come and go, it’s running great. Last.fm / audioscrobbling works 10 times better than Banshee 0.13.2, and the new UI gives you the ability to view the browser on top or on the left. (The screenshot below is with the browser on the left).

Best of all, searching overall is much faster. It still has support for Smart Playlists and DAPs, and I’m going to test the DAP functionality overnight. (update – I didn’t read the Alpha notice that pops up every time you start it well enough – no DAP support or plugins yet!) I don’t see plugin support yet, but all I need right now is Last.fm.

Well done Banshee developers!

Banshee alpha running on Foresight 2.0 Beta 1: