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banshee telepathy extension

Speaking of Banshee extensions and Jabber, I've recently came across a very interesting Banshee extension which I'm sure many of you will find to be useful.

The extension is called Banshee Telepathy Extension and you can use it to share or stream music through Empathy instant messaging client with your contacts (Jabber (including GTalk) only) through a p2p protocol.


Banshee Telepathy Extension features:
  • Download your friends' Banshee library metadata and check out what they listen to, their ratings, BPM values, etc.
  • View your friends' playlists and export them to disk
  • Share what you're listening to with all your instant messaging friends by advertising the track, artist, and album of the currently playing track in Empathy's status message. This can be toggled on / off
  • Download your friends' music; one track at a time or a selection. You can cancel ones in progress, queued, individually or all at once. The sender has the option to cancel all in progress / queued only. Both sender and receiver get a progress bar. File sharing can be toggled on / off
  • Stream your friends' music. Streaming can be toggled on / off.


If you use both Banshee and Empathy IM client, you should give this extension a try.

A note before you try it out: it seems you need to restart the plugin after both you and your friend(s) have logged in for Banshee to see you. This can easily be done by going to Banshee: Edit > Preferences > Extensions and disable and then re-enable the Telepathy plugin.

I tried testing this plugin but I then realized the computer I use at work uses an firewalled internet connection with most of the ports blocked so it seems it's up to you to try out this great Banshee / Empathy extension. See the installation instructions below.


Install Banshee Telepathy Extension in Ubuntu


Installing Banshee Telepathy Extension in Ubuntu is pretty easy as there is a .deb package available (if you want, you can also add the PPA) but unfortunately for Ubuntu Karmic only. However the package might work in Lucid too (please let us know in the comments if you try this in Lucid).

Download Banshee Telepathy Extension .deb:



Ubuntu Karmic users will also need a newer version of Telepathy-gabble:

Install Banshee Telepathy Extension in openSUSE


There are also packages available for openSUSE (including dependencies). Grab them from HERE.



If you don't use Ubuntu or openSUSE or just want to install the latest version of the Banshee Telepathy Extension, see it's github page.

For more info and how to use, see this README.