Just in time for hallowe'en

Banshee music player is back from the dead (well, kinda)

A revived Banshee music player is now available on the Snap store, making it possible to use it on modern Linux desktops decades after its last stable release.

Packaged by Alan Pope (aka popey), this new Banshee snap lets you run the old Banshee 2.6.2 release – the final stable one from 2014 – on modern Linux desktops.

Not merely a code repack; the Snap Store description says the snap build features ‘compatibility fixes and restores selected online services’. It does notes that not all ‘historical’ services may work, though.

Is it an official continuation? No.

Think: ‘reanimated corpse’ rather than reincarnation. The Banshee snap is sort of like software preservation, which is something container formats like Snap are great for. Old software dependencies can be bundled inside the snap without the host system being affected.

Nostalgia curio aside, the Banshee snap is a real, working music player. Point it at a folder full of tracks to load them in to browse, manage and play (to read files stored on an external drive you will need to give the snap permission¹ to do it).

I tried it out on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS.

On first run it prompted me to select a music folder, and loaded in the tracks quickly. Every music format I had, it handled. It also had no issues rendering and display album cover art. And MPRIS and media keys were cued in and working, which was great.

Even the original tray applet appears.

I was unable to login to my Last.fm account (the snap store listing did say not every feature works). Trying to auth, it throws a ‘Could not launch URL’ error dialog when attempting the auth process.

Video playback also didn’t work, but I didn’t expect it would. Formats, resolutions and codecs have changed a lot since 2014. I also didn’t bother to test DVD playback since, honestly, it was never that good in Banshee back in the day either.

Banshee and Ubuntu go way back

Banshee enjoyed a spell as Ubuntu’s default music app between 2011 and 2012. Its inclusion was a big deal at the time – not just because it replaced the ever-popular Rhythmbox – but because of what it what it was coded in: Mono.

Mono is (it still exists) an open-source reimplementation of parts of Microsoft’s .NET stack, the C# language and related libraries. It was created by GNOME co-founder, Miguel de Icaza.

Many in the Linux community deeply dislike Mono, fearing that its use was a trojan horse effort to capture Linux, and that distros and developers who used it could be threatened with legal action by Microsoft.

That never happened.

Microsoft did become stewards of Mono, but handed it over to the Wine project in 2024.

Ubuntu did end up dropping Mono-based apps, Banshee, gBrainy and Tomboy, from its default install. However, that was because of disk space and dependencies concerns rather than any jump scares from the patent boogeymen.

But Ubuntu users last heard the Banshee’s wail in 2018. The package was dropped from the Debian archives as it continued to rely on deprecated libraries Debian maintainers were in the process of retiring.

Install the Banshee Snap

Ubuntu users just need to open App Center and search for Banshee to install it, or fetch it via a terminal:

sudo snap install banshee

The Banshee snaps relies on the Core22 runtime, so if you are on a newer version of Ubuntu where that’s not preinstalled (like Ubuntu 26.04 LTS) that gets pulled in too.

Worth using? As a trip down memory lane, sure. I’m tempted to pull the curtains and pretend it’s 2012 and we’re back existing in the good timeline – for full-on reenactment vibes, I may even grab a pitchfork to complain about Mono.

Even so, Banshee is of its era. It is a GTK2 app. In 2026, that can be an issue since UI doesn’t ‘scale’ all that well on modern displays that use fractional scaling – some parts do, other parts don’t. Any bugs it had in 2014 are still there.

Do you remember using it back in the day? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

1. Run sudo snap connect banshee:removable-media ↩︎