Banshee 1.5.2 compiled from source code on Ubuntu 9.10 worked flawlessly until a system update around the end of November. From that point on, it locks up randomly when in shuffle mode.

So far I haven’t found out exactly why, and have worked around the issue by killing off the old banshee process and restarting:

kill -9 `pidof banshee-1`

Not elegant but it works…