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Songbird Blog

Play music. Play the Web.


1.0 Add-ons!December 4 2008

For everyone downloading Songbird 1.0, make sure you check out some of our recommended add-ons.  These are add-ons that aren’t part of the first-run bundle, but are still awesome and add a ton of features to Songbird.

  • LyricMaster (more than just fetching lyrics… LyricMaster lets you save them back to the file, edit them via the metdata editor, style/theme the panel to match your Feather, etc.)
  • MediaFlow (lets you flip through your album art)
  • Music Recommendations (pulls up Last.fm recommendations based on your currently playing track)
  • LiveTweeter (post your listening status and tracks played to Twitter, MSN/Windows Live Messenger, Pidgin, & Mercury)
  • Notify Me (uses Growl [Mac], Snarl [Windows], or libnotify [Linux] notifications for track changes)
  • seeqpod (an awesome search interface for the SeeqPod search engine)
  • Mac Remote Control (adds support for the Apple Remote Control to Songbird for Mac users)
Songbird 1.0 is Here!December 2 2008
Songbird 1.0 is now available for download!

We set out to build an open, customizable music player. Today, we’re launching with dozens of integrated services, hundreds of add-ons, and a growing developer community. We’ll be the first to admit that there’s plenty left to do. And, while we’re not ready for everyone, 160k users a month are expressing their vote for an alternative music player.

If you think like us, you’ve got huge aspirations and you’re out to change the world. You gotta start somewhere, this is our 1.0.

New Features

GStreamerGStreamer
We now use GStreamer as our main media playback system, across all platforms - giving us higher performance, better reliability, and a platform for much more media-related functionality in the future.

mashTapeImproved mashTape
When you listen to music in Songbird you’ll have the option to see Flickr photos, YouTube videos, last.fm biographies, google news (and more) for the currently playing artist. mashTape has


Performance Improvements for 1.0November 26 2008

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 2008

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 2008

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!
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