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Songbird Blog

Play music. Play the Web.


Performance Improvements for 1.0November 26

Optimization requires taking a step back to observe, measure, and experiment. Somehow it seems like a luxury, and features or bug fixes are always the priority. This release though, thanks to the survey and GetSatisfaction feedback you’ve been sending, speed was a primary focus.

dbradley, pvh, jacklu, kreeger and myself had a lot of fun working on performance problems that had been annoying us. Our goal was to improve basic every-day library management, and the results are a huge step forward.

Scrolling is much much smoother, searching is thousands of times faster, databases are 60% smaller, and importing is nearly twice as fast and many times more efficient. Songbird is much more pleasant to use, and can now easily handle 20,000+ track libraries. In fact, it seems to scale about as well as other popular players.

OBLIGATORY INFOPORN

This is (mostly) the output from a new performance lab that marcc and toks set up. Every night we get performance reports for the library API, allowing us to verify progress and avoid regressions. Don’t worry about the times, these are stress tests, not actual user use-cases. The lower the time, the better the performance.

Read on if you’re interested in ho

Songbird 1.0 Release Candidate 3 is Available for TestingNovember 21

Songbird 1.0 RC3 is now available for download!

Thanks to everyone who has been providing feedback to our latest RC’s. This update contains bug fixes and final tweaks. We’re closing in on a Final build and would like to make sure that you don’t see anything you might consider a show stopper.

To learn more about what’s new, check out the RC3 release notes.

As always, please file any issues, bugs, or crashes you find in Bugzilla so that we can address them before 1.0 final!

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Songbird 1.0 Release Candidate 2 is Available for TestingNovember 14

Songbird 1.0 RC2 is now available for download!

Here are the most noteworthy and complete features we’d like to call out in RC2 and get your feedback on:

  • Importing iTunes libraries will no longer trigger a hang.
  • Using the the Windows Media Playback and QuickTime Playback add-ons we’ve brought back the ability to play pre-authorized DRM media: WMA DRM on Windows; Fairplay on Windows and Mac.
  • mashTape has been updated and will no longer invoke Flash player security warnings.
  • We’ve adjusted the buffer size for streaming media but we’re still working on the final setting. If you think it’s too high you can adjust it by following these steps.
  • Video support has been temporarily removed from the application. Our move to GStreamer introduced some new video related bugs that couldn’t be addressed in time for this release. Since video has been an unsupported feature we decided that this was the prudent thing to do for now. You can absolutely count on us re-introducing video support in a future release down the road!
  • When viewing Album
Rock on, Commonwealth of Nations!November 5

Thanks to some awesome work by Songkick, the Songbird Concerts add-on now supports concert listings in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand!

Commonwealth of Nations, FTW!
If you’re in any of said countries, you can either just wait for the locations to be automatically refreshed (they refresh once per week - you may already have them!), or you can go force a manual refresh by following these instructions:

  1. Go to the advanced prefs editor by opening a new tab in Songbird and typing ‘about:config’ in the URL bar
  2. Modify the extensions.concerts.locations.lastupdated preference and set it to 0
  3. Restart Songbird

You can then just go to your Concert listings page, and click on the pencil icon at the top right hand corner to change your location and see the new cities for Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

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Help Songbird QA Rock 1.0!November 4

Putting out a bird call for our community to assist our QA team in testing Songbird! Announcing a new Songbird QA Home Page which will continuously hatch new/updated information for ongoing testing support. The following information is available to kick off your flight:

  • Improve Your Bug Writing: We have posted a recommended New Bug Template to ensure we get the details needed up front to move your bugs along the runway quickly. Information on Common Duplicates for single stop check in on high profile issues we already know about in QA.
  • Community Test Runs: Songbird QA is using Litmus to write, run and document testcase execution. We will be setting up ongoing community test runs for you to help make the bird rock solid. A sanity test run for 1.0rc1 is up and ready for take off…so come on and join the flight in progress!
  • Helpful Testing HowTos: Check out the Helpful Information section on our QA Home Page to learn how to add Crash Reporter IDs to your bug reports as well as other assistance to support your testing .

So fly on over an