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73416ba
(Get the code!)
The second part of this bug report is fixed for me as it is for Kévin: when I reopen Banshee, it resumes displaying playback progress of the current track. But that leaves the first part: music is being played by an application that isn't displayed as running in the launcher.
The sound menu, which predates Unity, is based on the idea that whether music is playing should be independent of whether a music player has any windows open. You can play music without opening the player, and conversely, you can close the player without stopping the music. This is implemented in both Banshee and Rhythmbox.
Then Unity arrived, and Unity's Launcher shows how many windows a program has open, up to a maximum of three. Usability tests show that most people don't even notice this. But some people, like Kévin, interpret it as a representation of whether the program is running at all. This is true most of the time, but it isn't true for screencast software (for example), and it isn't true for Banshee or Rhythmbox.
I can think of several possible ways to solve this problem, none of them particularly compelling.
1. Remove the music player integration from the sound menu, so that you must have a player window open to play music. Not only would this add clutter and reduce convenience, it wouldn't solve the problem for screencast software.
2. Show unpinned applications in the Launcher when they are running but have no windows open. This would be fiddly and maybe even impossible to implement reliably.
3. Give up on the pips in the Launcher altogether.
In conversation, John Lea just pointed out the extreme case where your music player isn't pinned to the Launcher, and you open an audio file in Nautilus or the Dash. The music player appears in the launcher and the song starts playing. If you then close the window, it's not at all obvious how to stop the music; you can't just reopen the player from the Launcher, because it isn't there. John suggests a solution specific to this case: when opening an audio file like that, don't open the window in the first place. This would force people to learn about the sound menu.