Birdonauts to Ground Control:
Today, we proudly launch Songbird 0.2 “Developer Preview”. Start your download now.
Songbird 0.2 is a preview release to let developers and early birds who can’t wait for 1.0 explore Songbird’s potential. Check the release notes.
Songbird has already attracted some birdwatchers. Ross Karchner at Ross Notes says, “It’s like taking iTunes, ripping out the music store, and replacing it with the rest of the internet.” We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.
If you haven’t yet, have a look at our Songbird 0.2 screencast to learn what Songbird can do today: http://songbirdnest.com/screencast
New in 0.2:
- Cross-platform support: Windows, Mac OS X and Linux
- Multi-language support: 30+ languages
- Play the Web: Play as you browse, Web pages as playlists
- Developer life-cycle tools: Doxygen, Trac, SVN
Note: We strongly encourage you to completely uninstall all previous versions of Songbird before installing Songbird 0.2, by following these instructions. There are known bugs in Songbird 0.2 RC3 that will not be fixed by simply updating.
Also, if you use the built-in update functionality in Songbird 0.2 RC1 or Songbird 0.2 RC2, it will only update one release at a time (and only one each day unless you manually trigger “Check for Updates…”). Known bugs will also remain until you install Songbird 0.2.
Don’t forget to let us know what you think in our forums.
Major Rob, over and out.
15 Comments
SubscribeThe Russian users have loaded first.
Enormous thank you.
Huge props to you all
Downloading now, excited to try it out now that it’s finally 0.2000
ps. you need to update your roadmap
;-( I am still unable to subscribe to the roadhousepodcast.com podcast. can somebody help me with that? ;-( it just doesn’t work!
Windows:
When the configuration screen comes up the first time and checks for extensions, it realises it can’t connect as it’s behind a proxy and offers to let you go to connection settings. However when you enter the settings they don’t ‘take’, so it still can’t connect, and even if you skip and go onto run Songbird it can’t get to the internet until you visit connection settings from the preferences menu and enter the proxy settings there.
Workaround: find out what proxy keys you need (possibly by installing first, though you will need to uninstall and delete the data directories afterwards), then install, run, close the preferences window when it comes up (X top right) and edit “Documents and Settings//Application Data/Songbird/profiles/aaaaaaaa.default/prefs.js”
to add the proxy configuration eg:
user_pref(”network.proxy.autoconfig_url”, “http://www.example.com/proxyconfig.pac”);
user_pref(”network.proxy.type”, 2);
user_pref(”pref.advanced.proxies.disable_button.reload”, false);
Run again and you should be presented with the first run preferences menu with the four extensions listed.
That’s really odd, these setting do ‘take’ for me on every machine I’ve tried.
In any case, another way is to remove the line that reads “user_pref(”songbird.firstruncheck”, true); from the prefs.js file, after you’ve set your network prefences correctly and closed the application.
Or even simpler : enter the following url in the songbird location bar: chrome://songbird/content/xul/firstrun.xul . It will load the firstrun window in the browser, and if you have set your network settings correctly, you should then be able to download the extensions. If you do this however, *remember* to only click OK if you have selected at least one extension ! (otherwise the application will not close correctly)
Clearly we’re going to have to figure out why these settings don’t take for some of you…
Good job guys! I can’t wait until Songbird is more polished and complete. There is a lot of potential.
make a bug. we’ll look at it.
http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/
Yes we do.
First we have to get done figuring out what it’s going to be. Then we’re going to share it all with you!
I want this to be my “primary” audio browser. It’s very close.
Thanks to all who have worked on it.
In the RC3 release, someone mentioned that the Songbird team had not yet decided on a “Single centralized media core.” Have you considered VLC? It plays practically any media format and doesn’t seem to be reliant upon a framework like GStreamer or Xine (particularly important in the Linux port). Just a thought.
Actually, we use VLC under Windows right now.
In the short term, for 0.3, we may use VLC under both OSX and Windows.
In the long longer term, we’re more comfortable with the gstreamer architecture and believe the world would be best served by helping bring gst into the Mac/Win world.
Nice. I wondered why nobody really seemed to use gstreamer on Mac or Windows even though their site says it should be possible. This will be awesome.
“Should be possible” is about the right way to describe the current state of gst on Mac and Windows.
However, we like the idea of an open, modern, lgpl media core on lots of different platforms. It will give us more flexibility to support a single core deeply and have supporting cores supported shallowly for special media formats only they play.
You should totally hire that Ross guy, he sounds sharp.
thank you
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