Yay. People asked for our roadmap and I posted it.
http://www.songbirdnest.com/development/roadmap
That’s what we’ll be busy on for awhile. And I still need to hire a programmer or two to make it happen, so if you know some kickass XUL programmers in the SF Bay Area, I’m sure we’re paying finders fees.
http://www.songbirdnest.com/roblord/pages/songbird_jobs
And, yes, there’s podcasting, that’s what the “Subscribe” button is, yes we load RSS just rightclick on a podcast/RSS link and say “Open as Playlist,” and no we don’t recognize the iPod or any other devices as of yet… funny how many people complain about the iPod and nobody noticed we have no clue about your CDRom drive either.
It’s unfortunate that VLC doesn’t want to read metadata from http or m4a… we’re working on offloading that task from them to our own api.
Hope you’re enjoying as much as we are. 
13 Comments
SubscribeI know ripping CDs is still months away, but I was wondering what formats will be included into the build as available to rip to. Such as, will flac be included by default or will we have to depend on extensions for such support. Thank you for bestowing upon us this great gift. I love the direction it’s taking. Even though it’s just a 0.1 release, I think I will use it as my main media player (though only because WMP is broken and I don’t have anything but iTunes *shudders* and Songbird to play music).
I know you guys are busy getting this off the ground, but thought I’d point out a problem I am having… xulrunner crashes whenever I try to scan my music files that are stored on a networked PC… I don’t know if it is because they are networked, or because there are 4000+ of them… just another thing to add to your roadmap… looks like this program is really going to rock…
looks good guys all I need is for the sort and the reading of ogg file id tags to work and I would be set to switch over from Winamp 5/MusikCube
Yah, so, as the comments in the releasenotes point out, the metadata scanning loop is kinda resource hungry.
When it’s scanning over your LAN connection, it’s more like a vicious predator.
I’d suggest not trying to do anything at all while the “Scanning…” text is up.
Once all that metadata loads, the system isn’t half as crashy.
Uhm… dunno…
Can VLC transcode to FLAC by default or do you have to go get an extension for it?
It may be that if you take VLC as part of your base install, you’ll have to download all of CDRip/Burn as an extension.
Maybe.
Those are some of the 0.3 issues we still have to discuss and resolve.
Actually, I was able to play music off my 4G 40GB iPod. I used the “scan for media” option and told it to scan my iPod. The playback was a bit sketchy, and it was kinda tedious to have to delete all those tracks from my library manually when I unplugged my iPod, but it did play them. I don’t have my iPod set up as a generic storage device or anything, either.
I just downloaded VLC. Sadly, I’m not very experienced in VLC or just about anything without a GUI.
There was an option to transcode to flac, but I’m not sure i did it right. The .flac file that came out plays fine in VLC of course, but i can’t get it to play in WMP or Foobar2000 and I don’t think songbird does it yet. The option is in the default install. I just didn’t do it right. But thanks for everything so far.
Actually, if you point to a FLAC file with File->Open, Songbird should play it.
It’s my fault I forgot to add the flac extension to our list of extensions we scan for.
That will be fixed in 0.1.1
Sorry.
Sorry for the long post, I just wanted to attempt to give you a somewhat detailed explanation of what’s going on.
Bad news. When I go to File->Open, and navigate to the folder containing the FLAC and some WMA files, Songbird will only recognize the WMA files. It doesn’t see the FLAC files at all. When I try to change the type of files it’s looking at, the only option is “Media Files”. Otherwise I would just change that to *.* All Files. When I right click on the file and select Open With… and then choose Songbird from the menu, it gets hung up on it and doesn’t do anything except appear to go around in circles trying to play it. And these FLAC files have been properly encoded as they play in WMP (with proper plugin), Foobar2000, and the regular VLC media player (though admittedly with some problems in VLC. It will play for a second, sound will cut out for a half second, and then come back when it starts, and then if you skip to another part, it will do the same thing). While songbird doesn’t suffer from that problem with my lossless WMAs, it does cut off the first approximately half second. This is really more of an annoyance and your attention should probably be concentrated on other things before worrying about a half second of music. But being able to play FLAC would be great. Thanks for taking the time to answer these questions. I really appreciate it.
Yah. Type *.* as the filename and it will show you the flac files. You can select and play one of them. It won’t work very well, but it will play.
Hello,
For M4A metadata, true, we don’t support it at the moment. Maybe it would be simpler to add support for it in VLC’s MP4 demuxer than using another external API ?
For HTTP parsing, the fact is that we force “file” access in input_Preparse to avoid “accidentally” parsing lots of HTTP streams (which can be very long). A simple fix would be stop forcing file here, and to add an argument to input_Preparse to force an access. Then, normal playlist could still force file, and you could force http (or not force anything) from your app.
We plan on extending both libvlc and the mozilla plugin to improve metadata handling, but I don’t know if it will be ready for 0.8.5. If it is not, I think we’ll merge your patch
Hello!
While we love VLC, our plan is to create an API that can swap different media cores underneath songbird (for instance, the WMP or QT plugins).
The plugins that come from the major players tend to have very shallow APIs, so we have to model our core-swapping API after an essential subset of what is available to us.
This means issues like metadata reading need to be separated into specialized interfaces.
Also, our vlc plugin has some seriously messed up memory usage errors that aren’t apparent unless you run songbird under a debugger and see all the user breakpoints that pop. I’d be careful with it. We ourselves haven’t figured out the magical incantation to make it work properly.
Thanks very much for your comments and participation, though. We love you guys!
I appriciate your suggestion, it seemed to work much better (I also had a newer version of Songbird, so not 100% sure if the issue had been fixed) I am still really excited about this project and love watching the progress. Keep up the good work!
Nikk Folts