I’ve been reading a lot of reviews recently about the upcoming Banshee 1.0.  ( Arstechnica and Linux Magazine, for example)  It looks like it’s going to be an awesome release, but I wanted to see where it is now and compare that to Rhythmbox.  As I mentioned here, I switched to Rhythmbox in May 2007 (a year ago!) from Banshee which I had been using approximately from May 2006 (when Mono programs were first introduced into Fedora).  Back then Banshee (and other Mono-based programs) were around version 0.1, but it was the new cool thing and everyone was talking about how awesome Mono would be for Linux.  (This is before everyone turned against it and Miguel de Icaza)  Eventually I left Banshee because it was slow and bloated (as are most Mono programs), couldn’t handle podcasts (which I had recently discovered), crashed when updating my large music library and when I changed Metadata it wouldn’t stay changed.  Since then Rhythmbox has been meeting all of my needs.  For Banshee to be worth switching to, it would have to provide all the features of Rhythmbox along with adding some new features.