For some reason, the Banshee media player on my Ubuntu installation stopped responding and, as a result, its database was damaged. The result? Whenever I tried to play a video podcast, Banshee would attempt to start playing and then crash.

Rebuilding Banshee’s database to fix the corruption is pretty easy.

1. If you don’t already have sqlite3 installed, get it via the following command:

   sudo apt-get install sqlite3

2. Go to Bashee’s config directory:

   cd ~/.config/banshee-1

3. Dump out the database:

   sqlite3 banshee.db ".dump" > dump

4. Make a backup of the original database file, in case the repair doesn’t work properly:

   mv banshee.db banshee.db.backup

5. Reload the dumped data into a new database file:

   cat dump | sqlite3 banshee.db

Worked great for me. Thanks to boombox1387 for posting the info. I ended up putting these commands into a shell script called BansheeFix.sh, so it’ll be even easier to take care of next time.

Is your Banshee crashing for a different reason? Got a fix for it? Post it in the comments.