The first time I used banshee, it was an older release supplied with the Foresight distro. After that, I decided to try it again, this time building from source code on FC9. I wasn’t very concerned (or surprised considering it was on Fedora) that configure generated warnings about missing mtp and ipod libraries. I didn’t have a device I cared to sync anyway, so I disabled them altogether by passing configure a couple of arguments:

–disable-mtp –disable-ipod

Shortly thereafter, I had an opportunity and decided to test it using a friends Sansa e520. So here is what you need to do to get Banshee to work with most MTDs.

MTP

Ignorance on my part, MTP is not just used by Windows Media Player and Zune but by a host of other non-Apple mp3 players including the SanDisk Sansa. Download, build and install libmtp prior to banshee. Or install libmtp and rebuild banshee removing any –disable-mtp flag.

Ipod

Takes a some different files, but not really much more work to set up. You need podsleuth and ipod-sharp – both are part of the Banshee project. If your distro doesn’t provide the most recent packages, you can get them from: http://download.banshee-project.org/

Don’t forget to rebuild banshee if you originally installed with the –disable-ipod flag.