Meaningful technical documentation for this application is nearly non-existant.

Database

At least as of 1.4/1.5, Banshee stores its information in a sqlite database. By default, this database is located:

$HOME/.config/banshee-1/banshee.db

To manually work with this database, you need to use the already installed tool: sqlite3.

Start sqlite3 and open the database:

jeff@phalanx:~ sqlite3 .config/banshee-1/banshee.db

The program returns some version information and leaves you at a sqlite> prompt.

Show the tables:

sqlite> .tables

Album Art

In releases 1.5/1.6 inline album art is cached in:

$HOME/.cache/album-art

Image files names are based on the album name, so they’re easy to figure out what you’re working with.

In releases 1.7x/1.8, the art is cached in:

$HOME/.cache/media-art

The art is no longer stored based on album name, so figuring out which image is which got harder.

In either case, Banshee generates versions of the artwork at different resolutions and caches those too. Look for them in the following directories under {album,media}-art:

300
36
48
64

If you have any problems with an image, or change the album art for a track, you will need to remove all the cached copies from all these directories before the updated image will display in Banshee.

Upgrades

When upgrading to the latest release using the source code, make sure to (as root) remove the previous shared libraries. These files are in a directory called banshee-1, so if your install prefix is /usr, remove the following:

rm -fR /usr/lib/banshee-1