Get your weekend started right with the latest Songbird 0.6 blessed nightly! Maybe you’ve already read our post about how Songbird is harder, better, faster, stronger? If not, we encourage any/all to download the latest blessed build and send in feedback and bugs as we work toward our final 0.6 release which ships in early June.

We’re excited to announce the following improvements for you to checkout:

• We have implemented jemalloc as our memory allocator for XULRunner on windows/linux. On these platforms we’ve been noticing Songbird’s memory footprint has reduced between 15-20%.
• There is a new metadata editor! To check it out select a track and choose cmd/ctrl+e. We’re working on improving the UI (the current CSS rules are placeholders.)
• We now write metadata back to the file. This feature needs additional testing before we ship the product so please use it cautiously until we get through QA and release a final build. While we are not aware of any major problems we encourage you to have your media backed up before using this feature.
• The iPod add-on has been completely rewritten to support our new device API. While it’s still going through a battery of QA tests you can get it here and give it a try with 0.6pre on your platform:
  Windows - Linux 32-bit - Linux 64-bit - Mac PPC - Mac Intel
• For Windows, the latest MTP add-on has been revved and we’re supporting more devices.
• Major performance improvements in the library when scrolling, filtering and importing (we now support much larger libraries too.)
• For Mac, the latest Quicktime add-ons for ppc and intel greatly improve playback performance for local MP3 and M4A files (no more latency issues before playback begins.)

We’re proud to share this day in history. Did you know on this day in 1962 a laser beam was successfully bounced off the moon for the first time? Ok, so we admit this release isn’t nearly as monumental, but still, it’s one giant leap for the ‘bird.

We’ve been looking for ways to get feedback from active Songbird users because your input helps us make Songbird better. In the next release we’ll be asking users if you’d be willing to take a quick, anonymous survey about the product. The details that follow will only apply to users running 0.6 Final and does not impact nightly users.

We didn’t want this to be a surprise to the community so we wanted to share all the details upfront and be as transparent as possible. To be totally honest, we don’t like asking users to take a survey any more than most people like being asked but we felt like it was critical to the success of the project to gauge the communities feedback to some open questions we have been basing some assumptions upon.

The data we collect will not be shared with 3rd parties. We are simply looking to have more data about what users want in order to help us prioritize implementing the features that you’re asking for. It’s really that simple, cross my heart and hope to die. In the future we might open up a survey on this blog to a larger audience but we wanted to start qualifying some of our assumptions against people who are current, active users of our latest release.

Since we are specifically interested in feedback from Windows, Linux and Mac users who have spent some time running Songbird here’s what it’s going to take to trigger the dialog asking you if you are willing to take the active user survey:

* You will need to be running Songbird 0.6 Final, and
* Have launched the application more than three times, and
* Run the application for at least 30 minutes in total, and
* Satisfied all of these requirements before June 30, 2008

If the above described conditions are satisfied, the next time you launch Songbird you will see a dialog like this, asking you if you’re willing to take the active user survey:

The active user survey will end on July 1st, 2008. If you elect to take the survey a tab in Songbird will open the website hosting the questions (the survey itself will be hosted on SurveyMonkey.com.) If you elect not to take the survey the application will continue to operate as if nothing happened.

Please note: we will only ask users if they are willing to take the active user survey once. If you say no we will not nag you again and we will set a preference in your profile indicating that you didn’t want to take the survey. In the future, assuming you don’t nuke your profile and that we elect to run another survey in the application, we’ll respect that choice and not nag you again. No stats regarding your preference about opting-in or out of the survey will be shared with us, it’s a local setting on your machine and we are not transmitting that data.

Finally, Windows users who uninstall Songbird 0.6 Final will note that going forward there is an option to give us feedback regarding why you uninstalled the application. If you elect to take the uninstaller feedback questionnaire your default browser will launch and open the website hosting the questions (the questions will be hosted on SurveyMonkey.com.)

We want to make clear that we respect your right to choose whether you want to provide us with feedback. Our goal is to simply make Songbird better and we really appreciate hearing from you. Thanks for considering to take the survey and our most sincere apologies to anyone who might take issue with this. We’re open to your feedback including on this subject! Feel free to share your thoughts with us in the comments below or via email, you can reach us at: customer [ a t ] songbirdnest.com. BTW for those wondering Songbird 0.6 will be out in early June!