Banshee was a cross-platform open-source media player, called Sonance until 2005.

[3] Built upon Mono and Gtk#, it used the GStreamer multimedia platform for encoding, and decoding various media formats, including Ogg Vorbis, MP3 and FLAC.

[4] Other features include Last.fm integration, album artwork fetching, smart playlists and podcast support.

Banshee was the default music player for a year in Ubuntu and for some time in Linux Mint, but was later replaced by Rhythmbox in both distributions.

It was based upon the Banshee core, but with a plug-in to add support for the Helix framework for playback and transcoding, in addition to GStreamer.