The case

Banshee’s Amazon MP3 store plugin was developed by Banshee star-developer Aaron Bockover, who announced on his blog last August that all revenue of the plugin would go to the GNOME Foundation. The plugin consists of two separate extensions, one for integrating music importing from Amazon’s MP3 store into Banshee, the other for embedding the store’s website. Both are open source, and available from Banshee’s GIT branch.

After discussions between Canonical and the Banshee developers, Jono Bacon announced on his blog that the final settlement was that Canonical would receive 75% of the revenue of both music stores, and direct 25% to the GNOME Foundation. Some people were outraged by Canonical taking such a large share of the revenue, arguing that the company was simply profiting from the work of others.

When are you allowed to sell?

I want to investigate this issue by going from the bottom up. Let us first establish why we pay money. We can’t do everything ourselves, because we don’t have infinite time and skills. Therefore we use the services of others, and pay them in exchange for what they produce. That money allows them to buy the products of others, so they can focus fully on their job. Money is thus awarded for a service.

In open source, most of the time you will not have to pay for the software. However, the GPL license does not prohibit selling your software. The Free Software Foundation defines free software not as ‘gratis’ software, but says software is free when a user is free to run the program, change the program, and redistribute the program with or without changes. (Read its piece on selling (free) software if you want to know more.)

When are you entitled to sell?

You pay money in exchange for a service. In the case of the Banshee Amazon MP3 plugin, Amazon gives a share of the revenue to Banshee, as a reward for bringing users to its store. Banshee subsequently chooses to give the revenue to the GNOME Foundation. Note that it is not the end-user who is the customer here, but Amazon!

Under the current plans, the Banshee Amazon MP3 plugin on Ubuntu will give Canonical 75% of the money paid by Amazon and the revenue of the Ubuntu One Music Store. The GNOME Foundation, via Banshee, will get 25% of both. I shall focus on the Amazon MP3 plugin. There are two ways to look at this. The first way is to consider Banshee an involuntary customer of Canonical, buying the service ‘broader access to customers’. The win for them is more income. The second way is to consider Amazon a customer of both Banshee and Canonical, who jointly provide the service Amazon pays for.

How does this happen? The Banshee Amazon MP3 plugin, developed by the Banshee project, is the direct means used to make the Amazon MP3 Store available. Other important factors are the attractiveness of Banshee—courtesy of its developers—and distribution via Ubuntu, the most popular Linux distribution on the desktop.

We have seen that both Canonical and the Banshee project deliver a part of the service that Amazon pays for. Canonical is the final distributor, bringing the product to the customers’ doorsteps, Banshee can be compared to a more specialised producer, providing a specific product to the distributor. If we look at the real world, we can see that it is often the distributor at the end of the chain that determines the prices. Farmers, for example, earn often very little for their crops. Most of the revenue on produce goes to the supermarkets that distribute the goods to the customers. Supermarkets may not be the sole method of reaching customers, but they are by far the most important channel; the farmer depends on the supermarkets. This simple fact allows the stores to dictate the prices. It is an economic law that says that when a good—in this case access to the customer—is scarce, the costs will go up. Here it means the costs for the farmer will go up in the way of lower revenues.

Canonical can be compared to the ‘Superunie’, the joint procurement organisation of the major Dutch supermarkets. Like supermarkets, it doesn’t actually make everything it offers itself. Instead, it is responsible for the selection, integration and fine-tuning of the components, and maybe for baking the fresh baguettes. Its large market share in the Linux desktop world gives it a lot of power. Some people are principally opposed to it and say it abuses its power.

Access to many potential customers makes Canonical’s contribution to the ‘service’ provided to Amazon much, much more important. It is very likely that 25% of the Banshee Amazon MP3 plugin’s revenue when enabled by default will be higher, than 100% of the same plugin disabled by default. The service of enabling the plugin by default is therefore a valuable ‘product’, which is sold to the Banshee project at a not unsubstantial price.

This high price can be justified by the fact that Canonical is selling a scarce good to the Banshee project. However, Banshee has little choice than to accept whatever benevolent offer Canonical deigns to make. Because they’ve chosen for a free license, there is no real transaction to be made. If Canonical doesn’t like what Banshee demands, then it can just replace the affiliate code and keep everything for itself. Banshee is powerless. That is the difference with the farmer-supermarket analogy, in which the farmer can decide to reject and offer and not give his or her produce.

So, what  amount can you ask for this substantial additional value? It is impossible to determine the true economic price of it when only one side can make demands. The 75:25 ratio is therefore not a representation of the true values of what both sides have to offer, but instead the representation of what the only party with any power over the matter considers the values to be. It is a subjective determination.

Whether or not you agree with the chosen ratio depends what value you attribute to the services provided by Canonical and by the Banshee project to Amazon. It is not possible to do this fully objective, and in any case you need extra data to say something definitive.

To me the demands from Canonical don’t seem very unreasonable at all. The value of the huge user share Ubuntu has to offer seems to be worth the 75% slice at first glance. However, we’ll first have to see the statistics from the Amazon MP3 plugin in action on Ubuntu to verify this assumption. If it turns out that Ubuntu brings in a lot of revenue, then the 75% fee is justified. If it turns out that the revenue is relatively low, or average, then Canonical’s share should be lowered to compensate for the proven lower value of the ‘service’ offered by the company. I would propose to do this check not too long after the launch of Ubuntu 11.04, make the results public and swiftly announce change when change is justified.

What do you think? Do you agree with my conclusion? Did you spot any mistake? Please leave a comment!

You should still keep in mind that Banshee does not have a DAAP server of its own. Its DAAP plugin can only consume shared music. One thing that may have been added since 1.4, though I’m not sure on this, is the possibility to connect to remote DAAP servers. Go to ‘Media->Add Remote DAAP Server’, enter the domain name or the IP address of the server, make sure the server port is correct, and press OK.

DAAP servers on your local network should be detected automatically. How do you set up such a server? In my post from 2008 I recommended Tangerine. However, apart from a fix to the menu shortcut in January this year, there has been no active development on it since August 2009. The project seems pretty dead.

However, the only other DAAP server I can find in the Software Centre on the Ubuntu 11.04 alpha release, is ‘mt-daapd’. Its description says it is part of the Firefly Media Server, but according to Wikipedia the latest release of that project comes from 2008. The website mentioned in the description does no longer exist.

What alternative do we have? It seems that we have none but to stick with Tangerine. On my system it worked, and I am running the Ubuntu 11.04 alpha, so new software versions don’t seem to have broken things.

Setting Tangerine up

My Tangerine settings

First install the ‘tangerine‘ package, either by searching for it in the Software Centre, or by looking the package up in Synaptic. Tangerine will automatically start when you log in, all you need to do is configure it properly. Launch ‘Tangerine Media Sharing’, either by searching for it in Unity’s Applications place, or from—if you’re using GNOME 2.x—’System->Preferences->Tangerine Media Sharing’, and set it up to take its songs from Banshee. You might want to compare your settings to mine on the right. The Tangerine service starts right away when you enable music sharing in the settings.

Banshee’s DAAP extension is enabled by default, so it should show up automatically as soon as Tangerine is started. However, it seems that currently it crashes/freezes when Tangerine is started while Banshee is running. Restart Banshee and everything will be fine. I have been able to share my music without any problems.

(Note: it seems that for now the MPRIS extension is causing problems for Banshee in Ubuntu 11.04 alpha. When playback won’t start, disable that extension, restart Banshee—since it will have frozen—and try again. This will break Sound Menu integration, though.)

Lean menu, slick icon!

It has been a while since I blogged about giving Transmission an Application Indicator. In that post I said I was also working on giving Banshee an Application Indicator, bug #518171. Since then we’ve decided to not provide the indicator in the Banshee.NotificationArea extension, the default tray icon in Lucid still. Instead I’ve moved the code I already had over to a separate extension that has become part of the Banshee Community Extensions. The Banshee Community Extensions project, or BCE, is a set of extensions that are not part of the Banshee core, but shipped separately. The entry-barrier for new extensions is lower — useful if you’re submitting yours just before the 1.6.0 release — and they are hosted at Gitorious, which makes cooperation a lot easier.

Bertrand Lorentz accepted my merge proposal at 27 March and was so kind to clean up the code a bit and since then the Banshee.AppIndicator extension has been available from the BCE code repository.

Using Banshee.AppIndicator on Ubuntu 10.04 “Lucid Lynx”

Thanks to the hard work of Chow Loong Jin Banshee.AppIndicator was one of the community extensions that got packaged in Debian and later synced by Ubuntu. If you want to use the Application Indicator for Banshee you first need to install the banshee-extension-appindicator package. Install ‘banshee-extension-appindicator’. At the moment there is a small packaging bug in banshee-extension-appindicator, it should depend on the libappindicator0-cil package, but it doesn’t. You can work around this issue by manually installing libappindciator0-cil.

Once you’ve installed you first need to disable the Banshee.NotificationArea extension. Go to Edit->Preferences–>Extensions, scroll down and untick the checkbox for the “Notification Area Icon” extension. Now scroll up again and enable “Application Indicator for Banshee”. Done!

When I was adding my music to the player again I noticed a nice function in Banshee: press with the right mouse button at the music player’s entry and you can select the type of music file you want. Select OGG and all files you copy to the player will automatically be converted. Now you’re finally able to easily !

But after a while I did miss the functionality and searched in the menus of Banshee for it’s configuration dialog. I couldn’t find a thing, so I checked the preferences window. DAAP was indeed enabled, so that couldn’t be the problem. I searched at Google but couldn’t find an up-to-date guide.

Fortunately it turned out to be very easy to fix. I just disabled and enabled the DAAP plugin and there the network share was! I could start importing the music from it with an option in the context menu, Banshee automatically looked for duplicates.

Now all I wanted was the ability to share my own music too. It turned out that the DAAP server ability was removed from Banshee and you now have to use another application to handle that. Tangerine was recommened on the maillist were they discussed the removal of the DAAP server ability from Banshee, so I tried it.

Install Tangerine

Tangerine has three different ways of selecting the music it should share: automatic detection, a specified music player and a manually selected directory. The advantage of this is that you don’t have to have your music player running to share your music, although some would see that as a disadventage because you can’t easily turn it off; you’ll have to disable it in the preferences menu.

The share doesn’t show up in Banshee’s Shared Music tab. I like it, but I’m not sure if it’s a nice feature or caused by one of the bugs mentioned in the many bug reports about Banshee’s DAAP plugin I found on GNOME’s Bugzilla. I’m at least responsible for one, I reported the problem of having to reenable the plugin before it works: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=561059

Banshee has always had a dedicated group of fans. In the discussions about Intrepid Ibex there were a lot of people proposing to replace Rhythmbox with Banshee. I had a quick look at Banshee at that time and wasn’t that impressed with what I saw.
Maybe I was too much used to Rhythmbox, or maybe my bad impression was caused by the Hardy Heron just including the 0.13.2 version of this musicplayer maintained by Novell. Anyway, I kept using Rhythmbox.

However, yesterday I read Banshee Kickin’ It on the planet and the screenshots made me curious. Since the Intrepid Ibex ships version 1.2 I searched for a PPA at Launchpad — long live PPAs! — and found the PPA for the Banshee Team.

Installing

In order to get the latest version of Banshee, use this PPA:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/banshee-team/ubuntu intrepid main

You can add it manually by pasting it in /etc/apt/sources.list, or do it with the graphical interface:
Go to System->Administration->Software Sources;
Go to the Third Party Sources tab and add the line using the Add button;
Close the program and press the Reload button in the confirmation dialog.

Now you’re ready to install the latest version of banshee. Use the Add/Remove program or Synaptic or press this link: install banshee.

Use

As soon as you launch the program you’ll notice the sidebar on the left, which contains more items than the one in Rhythmbox.

As you can see, it has — next to the Music Library — a Video Library, Podcast support, integration with internet radio and Last.FM and a PLaylist Generator, which is taken care of by Mirage, which is still under active development.

Settings

Under Edit->Preferences you’ll find the settings, just like you do in other Linux programs. It never really made sense to me that the other two big OSes place it somewhere else.

The default directory for the music library is the one determined by xdg-user-dir specification.
Some functions that I find very nice and can’t find in Rhythmbox are the ReplayGain option, which tries to equal the volume of your songs to make sure you don’t get surprised when Banshee plays a song that was recored with a high volume level and the option that should automatically update the folder strucutre and file names according to the File System Organization options provided below the checkbox. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to work.

You can also let external media automatically be copied to your library, which I enabled, and manage the extensions. Their settings are managed via the Extra menu and/or in the extensions’ tab, which took a while for me to find out.

Music library

At first I wondered why it didn’t start to automatically import my music collection, which already was in the music directory. I couldn’t find the option to automatically add new songs, like Rhythmbox has. After searching for a while I found the scan option in Extra->Rescan Music Library. It completely goes through your music library and automatically downloads the cover art. The playlist generator Mirage also starts to scan the music, which takes a while and consumes quite some CPU time. I still haven’t finished it, since it’s interrupted when you switch user or shut down and has to be done all over again afterwards.

You can drag songs, albums and artists to the play queue to add them. Multiple albums and/or artists can be selected at the same time to filter the songs you’re browsing. At the right, above the songlist there is a small search box that you can use to search your collection.

A nice addition is that the program shows a list of recommended artists at the bottom of the program when browsing your music. You have to have the Last.FM extension configured in order to use this.

Last.FM

There are two ways to give your Last.FM credentials: use the Extra menu or press the button in the warning message at the bottom of the program when you go to the Last.FM tab. Both times you’ll get a pop-up asking you for your username and password. When you press OK it automatically checks if they are valid, so you don’t have to check the statistics to be sure that it does work, like you have to do with Rhythmbox.

You can easily add stations by pressing with the right mousebutton on the Last.FM tab in the sidebar. Every type and more are supported.

Podcasts

To add a po

dcast station, press the Subscribe to Podcast button on the right top in the Podcast section or use the context menu of its item in the sidebar. A small pop-up window will appear and the link that’s currently on your clipboard will automatically be pasted in the text box. By default only the latest podcasts will be downloaded.

On the place where you can find the album list in the Music Library, you’ll find the podcast station list. Downloaded podcasts are marked with a small blue dot in front of their entry.

MP3/4-player synchronization

Banshee makes it very easy to synchronize your MP3/4-player. If you want to it can automatically make sure that it has the same songs and videos as you have in the library on the computer and even sync podcasts. Be careful with that, it really copies all music to your player, even if it won’t fit, resulting in an error.

That error seems to have killed my Samsung T10, after the synchronization process — which I started to see what would happen — had halted because there was no space left, I deleted all songs to manually determine what songs I wanted to place on it. However, it seemed like the deletion gave the final blow and the MTP connection got lost. I didn’t find this that strange since MTP isn’t that stable on Linux, so I disconnected the device and plugged it back in. However, it now froze on the startup screen! Reset didn’t help and now I’ve got a bricked MP3-player.

If anyone knows how to solve this, please leave a message.

You can configure the behaviour of Banshee by selecting the main entry of the MP3-player in the sidebar. An overview page will show up with some information about the device and a few checkboxes. The content gets sorted by it’s kind. Please keep in mind that you can’t copy e.g. music directly to the device’s Music Library. You’ll have to drag the files to the device icon.

Make Banshee the standard music player

If you like Banshee and want to make it your main music player, you should set it to default in your system preferences. You can do this by going to System->Preferences->Preferred Applications and change the default music player to Banshee on the multimedia tab. Now the multimedia keys on your keyboard will automatically start Banshee and the music-applet also uses it by default.

Conclusion

I really like Banshee and feel it’s better than Rhythmbox. Although Rhythmbox isn’t bad, it just doesn’t have as many functions and doesn’t look and feel as good as Banshee. The progress bar at the left bottom of the program is one of those small things that makes a program look better and smoother. I find it also easier to configure and more extensive.

If the dicussion of what music player should be default is started again, I’d vote for Banshee.