How can I browse by genre in Banshee?

Currently, Banshee doesn't have genre browsing by default and there is no way that I know to enable a genre browser like there is one for artists.

However, you can get very close to this functionality by using smart playlists.

To create a new smart playlist go to Media -> New Smart Playlist.

You can select Genre from the dropdown menu in the dialog window.

Using 'Genre | contains | genre_text' works really well. For example, if you want to play all of your Thrash Metal, you could use 'Genre | contains | Thrash'.

You can then select the smart playlist along with all of your other playlists in the left hand column.

There is a slight problem with this approach however. You can't select multiple playlists at once like you can with artists. You can work around this problem by creating playlists for combinations of genres. Use the drop down menu to choose to 'Match [any] of the following' and use the plus button to add another query.

Here I have created a playlist for all heavy metal and thrash metal.

This works to give you a playlist containing both of these genres.

You can search by genre. To find all your Thrash Metal, type genre:Thrash in the banshee search field. The same works also for other fields.

I'm sure you already knew this, but just for good measure. A method of sorting by genre, is to right-click on the sort-by columns, and add genre.

You can, now, categorise your music by genre. Just select 'View' from the menu, then select 'Browser Content' and check 'Show Genre by Filter'.