Weekly Birdbath

By Laura Laura Jul 2, 2009 3:20 pm
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Foxy + feathers = sexy music

We’ve fielded a request or 12 for Songbird integration with FoxyTunes, but we were pretty stoked to learn that they’ve had a request or two as well. Yesterday they announced that they can now support Songbird. In just a few simple steps you can control Songbird from FoxyTunes in Firefox on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux! Sometimes getting beat to the punch doesn’t suck. Woot!

Crossing the border

We’re super excited that Stevo and his family are bidding a fond farewell to Canada so he can begin working with us locally. The San Francisco office is thrilled to have you here. What do you want for lunch next week? You can have your choice as long as it’s not burgers, we had that today, or pizza, Kreeger had that for dinner last night. Otherwise, anything you want!

Goodbye Canada Day, Hello 4th of July

To celebrate the arrival of Stevo (and our independence) we thought we’d turn off the internets for a long weekend. Don’t call us, we’ll call you. Enjoy the fireworks but hold the fires!

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Weekly Birdbath

By Laura Laura Jun 25, 2009 11:35 pm
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Hello Dirty Birds, it’s time for some preening. I tell you, feathers have been so ruffled over our 1.2 release I feel like I’m molting! A flock of issues cropped up on our manage music feature that sadly were not detected in all of our beta testing. Turns out we just weren’t being bad enough to our test flight birds and a lot of you unwittingly became members of our extended QA team. While we know that it’s no fun being test case birdies, we really do appreciate you posting the problems you found and filing bugs against those issues. It’s never our intention to bust your bird but when feathers go flying your participation in the process is the key to our little music player taking flight in the future and we are grateful to you for it.

While we wait for bug fixes and feature requests to roll in we’ve documented your findings and indicated how to prevent issues or repair the damage in our Importing & Managing Your Music page. Thanks to Michael Purses for his efforts so all of your suffering was not in vain. Also a huge thank you to Andrew Luecke who effectively diagnosed and triaged many of your reports on Get Satisfaction over the weekend. These guys are two outstanding members of a phenomenal community.

Speaking of our network of super duper peeps, it looks like there’s a new ideator in the house. What? Ideator is totally a word…

TheParadox2 has been collaborating with longtime songbird ideator, Murphy on an awesome idea: the awesomest awesome bar! Even more exciting for you add-on developers looking for your next project, atrieu has some pointers for getting the awesomeness under way.

What’s more awesome than an awesome bar? How about a pimped out pony? Ali called for glitter and streamers and GeekShadow and atrieu delivered. So sparkly.

Take Me Out to the Ballgame

Amidst the crunch of pushing Isan out of the nest last week, we all took a long lunch and walked the 2 blocks to beautiful AT&T Park where we enjoyed an afternoon outside, hot dogs, peanuts, garlic fries and most importantly, beer. The Giants lost, but it still beat the lunches we’d been eating at our desks up until then.

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Songbird 1.2 is here

By Georges Auberger Georges Auberger Jun 18, 2009 9:18 am
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Songbird 1.2 focuses on improving library management and provides full integration with iTunes, in case you want to live in both worlds. We continue to listen to your feedback on Get Satisfaction, our blog and Bugzilla. Please let us know what’s important to you.

New Features

Manage LibraryAutomatically Organize Library Files
Songbird can now automatically organize the files that are contained in your library. Once enabled, it will consolidate your media in one location. You can customize the structure of the folder and file names based on metadata contained in every track.

iTunes sync2-way Sync with iTunes
If you’re using iTunes Music Store to purchase content, you can now automatically expose iTunes library tracks and playlists into Songbird. You can also export tracks and playlists added to Songbird back into iTunes, so that they can easily be synced to your iPhone or iPod touch.

last.fm radioLast.fm Radio
Last.fm Radio supports artist, tag, and user stations, mapping station links on the Last.fm website to play internally in Songbird. It includes the Radio Directory allowing you to conveniently browse and explore the tag and artist relationships on Last.fm. Additionally, the Radio directory includes quick links for playing stations based on your Last.fm library, your Songbird library, and friends/neighbors’ libraries.

equalizer10-band Equalizer
Now you can tweak the frequency response of the audio playback to match your room’s acoustics or your personal preferences.

Performance Enhancements

We’ve continued to make the application more stable and zippier in all sorts of ways. Mainly:

  • Faster search
  • Deleting many tracks at once is faster
  • Selecting a large amount of tracks from the library is no longer slow
  • Reduced the amount of threads required to be running at all times by 50%
  • Fewer Crashes: We’ve worked hard to identify and fix some of the most common crashes in Songbird.

What’s Next

Our goal is to continue to focus on building a world-class, open music player. Our next release will consist of continued focus on performance and stability gains, implementing additional audio features, and much more. Stay tuned to the blog to keep up to date, or if you like to live dangerously check out one of our nightly builds and see the progress for yourself!

We’re always interested in hearing your feedback so please comment below and file bugs and/or feature requests in Bugzilla.

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Equalizer = Pony

By ali ali Jun 12, 2009 1:12 pm
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You’ve probably all noticed by now that we added a pony graphic equalizer to Songbird for the 1.2 release.  The community started asking for a pony an equalizer in 2006. There were more requests in 2007. The requests really started pouring in during 2008.

In short: we heard you. We knew you wanted a pony an equalizer. We were just super-duper busy. Our product ambitions nearly drowned out your desperate pleas. Aus never forgot you guys, though. Even though there wasn’t room for it on the product schedule, and he had to do the whole thing on the weekends and during late nights, he wanted to make sure that you got your pony equalizer.

Aus Presents: A Pony!

Next time you nudge those low frequency sliders up on your pony equalizer to enjoy some bangin’ booty bass, remember that it was Aus who made it possible. (Also, major shout out to awesome community member Franco, who did a lot of the groundwork for us!)

Now then.  You’ve seen your pony equalizer, and you like it, but… some of you now want a glittery mane equalizer presets, jeweled hooves more bars to slide, a pink saddle with hearts stored settings on a per-track basis… and we hear that too.

But here’s the thing: the pony is in the code base now. It is YOUR pony.

You, the community, can collaborate to improve and enhance the pony.  Our Developer Center contains lots of links to help you get started.  We have a Google Group where you can meet and collaborate.  Let Community Manager Extraordinaire Laura help you use the wiki to plan and track your projects just like we do.

Project Pimp My Pony. Is anyone interested? Grab your tail brush, some pretty silver streamers, and your best glitter.  Let’s see some fairy princess rainbows equalizer presets happen.

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Songbird 1.2 Beta 2 is available for testing

By Georges Auberger Georges Auberger Jun 11, 2009 8:24 pm
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Records

Songbird 1.2 Beta 2 is now available for download!

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

  • 2-way Sync with iTunes
    If you’re using iTunes Music Store to purchase content, you can now automatically expose iTunes library tracks and playlists into Songbird. You can also export tracks and playlists added to Songbird back into iTunes, so that they can easily be synced to your iPhone or iPod touch.

The Beta 2 release notes contain additional details about this build including a list of known issues.

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

Bloggers & Press: This release is not our final release and is not ready to be reviewed. Since we’re still landing code we suggest postponing any review of the Songbird Player until our final build. If you’re interested in reviewing the final build contact us at: press [at] songbirdnest [dot] com. We’ll be more than happy to give you access to it prior to its release. Thanks for the care and attention you’ve shown Songbird over the past year.
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