the upstream bug #612616 mentioned in the 1.8.0 ebuild is resolved fixed since 2010-08-25. Please proceed removing hal as a dependency.
From the ChangeLog for the 1.8.0 ebuild: *banshee-1.8.0 (30 Sep 2010) 30 Sep 2010; Arun Raghavan <ford_prefect@gentoo.org> +banshee-1.8.0.ebuild: Bump to 1.8.0. New stable release, lots of new features (Amazon MP3 store support, Miro podcast directory, better Apple device support, and a lot more). Reiterating that we are not dropping HAL till gtk-sharp-beans and gio-sharp get a little more mature (and are packaged).
Ouch, formatting got lost. Here's a link to the ChangeLog file: http://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/gentoo-x86/media-sound/banshee/ChangeLog?view=markup
oh. Ok, thanks for that information. Didn't see it.