IT Advice

Disable Banshee Pop-Up Notifications on GNOME Shell 3 (Linux)

Date:
By:William Paul Liggett

Banshee Logo

Banshee is a fantastic music, video, and podcast player. It is similar to Rhythmbox that many are familiar with on Linux. This article is not about comparison, as both are great projects. The purpose of this article is to simply explain how to disable the pop-up notifications that occur in GNOME Shell 3 when, for example, the next song plays in your playlist. This article exists as I was unable to find a quick and easy method to do this within the latest stable release of Banshee (v2.6.2), and the various forums I found online focused on more obscure configuration routes via the terminal by using the "gsettings" command. I appreciate the vastness of gsettings, but it is not the simplest method to memorize. So, instead, I found a graphical means to accomplish the same thing.

This trick works as tested on Fedora 20 (64-bit), which uses the default GNOME Shell 3 desktop environment. So it should also be applicable to any Linux distribution that also uses GNOME Shell 3. With this said, this will likely not work on Ubuntu (13.10/14.04) that uses the Unity shell for the underlying GNOME desktop environment, especially since Unity uses a different GUI design than what I will showcase.

If you're confused by what I mean by a pop-up notification from Banshee, here is a screenshot of me changing to a song (called Early) created by the artist Chicane:

Banshee Pop-up Example

To stop seeing these notifications, all you need to do is the following:

  1. Open the Notification Settings Menu: This can be accessed by moving your mouse pointer all the way down at the bottom of the screen in a hard manner by forcing the mouse deliberately far out of view of the bottom edge of the monitor. If you do this correctly, a hidden menu will pull-up to reveal a bar across the entire bottom of the screen. The section of this menu to focus on is the gear-like icon on the bottom-left. It should look like this: Gear Icon for Notification
  2. Change the Per-Application Notification Settings: Click on the gear icon and you'll see another menu where you can select "Notification Settings", click on this and you will see a dialog similar to: Notification Settings
  3. Find Banshee's Notifications: Locate Banshee in the list, click on it, and you will be presented with something similar to: Banshee with Pop-Ups
  4. Modify Banshee's Notifications: Now, all you need to do is toggle one setting. Just change "Show Popup Banners" from ON to OFF. It should now look like: Banshee without Pop-Ups

That's it!

If you enjoyed this tip or have questions, feel free to send me an e-mail at junktext@junktext.com. Also, you can follow me on Twitter at @junktext.

  --William

Boring Legal Footnote:

Warranty:
There is no warranty of any sort provided by this Geeky IT Advice document. I try my best to provide accurate information, so you should likely not experience issues as long as you follow my instructions correctly. However, in order to protect me from any potential legal suit, you are hereby informed that any data loss or computer system problems caused from you following my advice will be your own responsibility to fix. Although, you can e-mail me to alert me of any technical inaccuracies that this document might have and I will revise the information accordingly. Thank you for your understanding.

Attribution:
Banshee is copyright of www.Banshee.fm (Aaron Bockover, et al.) and is a trademark of Novell.
Rhythmbox is copyright and part of The GNOME Project.
GNOME Shell is copyright of The GNOME Project.
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.
Fedora is a registered trademark of Red Hat, Inc.
Ubuntu is a registered trademark of of Canonical Ltd.
Chicane is the stage name of musician Nick Bracegirdle.
Lastly, at the time of this writing, none of the above trademark or copyright holders are associated with junktext.com.