OStatic

The Banshee Project is working on making it easier for developers to make extensions and get them to users. Gabriel Burt, who works on the Banshee Project, announced yesterday the Banshee Community Extensions (BCE) sub-project.

Banshee, a video and music player for Linux, allows developers to create extensions to add functionality not in the core program. Many of Banshee's features are implemented through extensions and included in the main Banshee codebase. This makes Banshee much more flexible and extendable, but getting extensions included in the main release requires a lot of coordination with the main developers. The BCE breakout will make it much easier for third-party developers to create extensions for Banshee and host them in a central repository.

Even though it's a point release, the latest Amarok comes with some major new features and all the benefits of the 2.2.0 release. Dubbed Weightless, the 2.2.1 release is full of bug fixes and polishing from 2.2.0 release as well as improvements to music management, podcasts, and the ability to update Amarok scripts.

Amarok is already speedy when processing large media collections, but this release includes a tweak to take it up a notch. In the past, Amarok would scan an entire directory -- including sub-folders -- when the main directory had changed. Now Amarok can just breeze through the main directory if the subdirectories haven't been modified, making it even faster. And it's plenty fast already: I've passed a 57GB collection through Amarok in just a few minutes.