Get Onboard
Download Songbird 0.5 (release notes)
New in 0.5
0.5 Final has entered the station with hundreds of bug-fixes and several new features:
MTP Device support
Windows users have a shiny new MTP Add-on that introduces MTP Device Support! Most portable media players and cell phones integrate the MTP spec so try plugging in your device and share your findings on the MTP Device Compatibility Wiki Page. The extension requires Windows XP-SP2 or Vista, as well as WMP v11.
Media Views
Tired of music players that look like spreadsheets? Media Views provide new ways of displaying, manipulating, exploring, and contextualizing your media library. Songbird ships with two default views: a traditional playlist view, and a second playlist view with three filter panes. Developers can create new Media Views and upload them to the Add-ons site. This example media page replaces the standard playlist filters with tag clouds. To experience your music web 2.0 style, load your library, then select Tag Cloud from the View menu. Click the tags to toggle the filtering on and off.
Improved Filter Picker
Genre, Artist, and Album aren’t the only useful ways to filter your music collection. We’ve streamlined the filter picker list and fixed a few bugs that make it easier than ever to navigate your collection.
New List Background
After several requests from our community we’ve made our Library and Playlist backgrounds easier on your eyes. Keep sending us your ideas, suggestions, and requests, your feedback helps us improve the ‘bird!
Improved Rating UI
We’ve clarified the rating widget display by showing circles for unrated items and improved usability by allowing you to more easily change or un-rate a track.
Hot Keys on the Mac
Mac users, you can now use common hot-keys to quit, hide, or open Songbird preferences just like the rest of your applications. We also fixed the issue which allowed the application to be dragged under the menu bar, yay!
Always on Top
Never lose your Rubberducky Mini Player under a stack of windows! Now you can set it to always be on top. Any Feather developer can expose this feature in their feather.
Developer Resources
New Webpage API Events and Listeners
The Webpage API features new events you can observe. The events, and examples on how you can observe them, are detailed here.
Media Views Guide
We’ve created a Media Views guide to help you get started.
Always on Top
It’s now a simple install.rdf change for Feathers developers to flag their Feathers as capable of supporting Always-on-Top.
Feather Updater Guide
We’ve also added a guide on updating 0.4 Feathers to be 0.5 compatible.
Release Notes
We’re in the early stages of migrating our iPod Device Support Add-on to Songbird’s new device API so you’ll notice it’s missing from the 0.5 Add-ons bundle. Note that while you can still manually add the iPod extension to 0.5 it is known to exhibit issues. Fret not, the update will be released either in 0.6 or shortly after the launch (which should land in late May/early June.) Stay tuned, additional details on what’s planned for 0.6 coming soon!
26 Trackbacks
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76 Comments
SubscribeGreat job devs
I will post a entry on my blog soon !
WOO HOO!!!!
Blogging as I type! (well not really since I can’t type two places at one time, yet) =D
I just noticed something when I was downloading, when I click to download, the i686 build for Linux will download, while I need the x86_64 build. So I think it would be wise to link to the download section, rather than the dev page, since the download button may not work correctly for some people. (I think it does this because I used 32bit Firefox with 64bit Ubuntu)
So I think this would be a better place to link to: http://www.songbirdnest.com/download
Just my $0.02
You’re doing an amazing job, guys. I love what you do, but I just can’t have 80MB of RAM on a jukebox. I’ll stick to Mediamonkey 2.5.
In the meantime, I’ll still be playing around with songbird.
@Superkoop
I just updated the link, thanks for pointing this out!
@ignacio
Thanks for continuing to be along for the ride! Agreed, we absolutely need to spend cycles on improving memory management in Songbird. We have it as a definite action item on our roadmap (in fact, we’re planning to try and get jemalloc working in 0.6) so expect to see at least some improvement not too far down the road.
so excited for .5, just one step closer to 1.0.
my real wish is for songbird 1.0 to replace my iTunes.
And right now, I believe it could happen
I am so excited for 0.5. Well done SB Team.
I write a review on my blog soon.
Hey there, good job on 0.5.
Am I wrong, or did you forget to mention the uberdelicious new shuffle function that came with this version??? For me that is number 1 new feature (rather then dots in stead of unfilled stars :-P)
Woohoo!! Nice one! I think the last RC went a bit wrong on my machine, so i’m looking forward to having the new version installed.
One question: the x86_64 for Linux, does that work on Debian amd64?
@ ai mee.mychores.co.uk: Yes, x86_64 works on any 64-bit computer with a 64-BIT operating system installed.
Great job, Songbird team!
Very Well Done Songbird Team,
You guys are currently rocking!
I guess, your upcoming releases will replace every iTunes Player/Zune Player. Yeah, I hope, you somehow integrate the support for Zune players. I don’t like the Zune software at all
Finally and more importantly, please make it portable compliant. I guess, few folks like John are already working on a portableApps version for the 0.5 release of songbird though.
Anyways, nice release. Keep going. Keep entertaining. Keep being useful.
Many thanks,
Many congratulations from me, too.
I’m very greatly looking forward to replace many many media-players on the machines I play admin on. I did it with Firefox before and will help to repeat that success story with Songbird.
Keep on Rocking and chirping, guys.
Tyler out!
I have been using Songbird since around the 0.2 release. Every release there seems to be great improvements and I can’t wait until the 1.0. To be honest this is the only player I use now because I am tired of all the other ones. I use to use Winamp but once AOL took over I was done with it. Keep up the good work!
songbird is great with jamendo (http://www.jamendo.com)
Birdbuilders, you guys have really found a groove. It’s exciting to see our releases get more stable and more regular.
‘Bird fans, thanks for your continued support of our project, and keep your feedback and suggestions coming in. It’s your contributions to our project that make us successful.
I’ll hop on board once it’s compatible with Last.fm and WLM Now Playing.
@Alex
Just wanted to let you know we’re part of the way there…we have a Last.fm addon (if you have a second check it out): http://addons.songbirdnest.com/extensions/detail/106
Agreed, auto IM status message updates is something I want too. While it’s on our ToDo list we hope someone from the community will beat us to it!
Excellent update, while it is able to detect my Zune and even recognize the device name, storage capacity battery status it gets stuck in an endless loop while trying to mount the device. I think the issue is caused by the fact that Microsoft decided to use .MTPZ for all Zune extensions instead of the traditional .MTP used by other devices. You’ve come a long way since the beginning though, just need to add OPML support.
Update, okay even better news the device mounted! It takes a while, you guys did it Zune support! Detected all three types of media on my Zune 30, allows me to browse and edit the library, recognizes playlist as well. You can’t sync or transfer files yet though. Someone needs to update the Songbird Wikipedia page.
Great update, been using songbird solely for some time now, this will keep me going till 0.6!
Thanks guys for continuing to improve on the best media play the web has to offer (specifically the “always on top” in mini-mode!). Been with you guys since RC .2, and I can’t wait to see what other cool tricks you guys have up your sleeves!
It’s still far too laggy for me. Hopefully 0.6 will have huge speed improvements. At the moment, itunes runs at about 90,000 k mem usage, while songbird runs at 250,000 k.
even itunes can lag at times, so unless songbird improves greatly, it will merely be a nice looking interface that crashes a lot.
Love it, and the best release yet for me (I’ve tried every release to date). Would in fact be my default music player if only
1) Memory usage was about 40MB (like iTunes with no fancy stuff (coverflow etc) on OS X)
2) CPU usage wasn’t always more than 10%, it’s now always around 14% or more
Really great work though! And already an impressive collection of great add-ins. Can’t wait to see your next release.
Thanks to everyone who is leaving such specific comments on where you’d like to see improvements in Songbird. This is **extremely** helpful to us and we hear you loud and clear. We’ll continue to do our best not to let you down!
hey guys, are you bringing coverflow to this player anytime in your future builds?
Any plans??
please update the addons page so it automatically goes to 0.5 as thats the main release now
@maddy
While we don’t currently have plans to implement the functionality you’re asking for the Media Views feature makes it technically possible for someone to create it. In the near future we will be posting more about Media Views and demonstrating how developers can use an Add-on to access album artwork.
@cellarmation
Thanks for the catch. We’ll fix this soon! The good news is the 0.5 client will take you directly to the 0.5 Add-ons (but we agree the default landing page in any other browser outside of SB should also be 0.5.)
Love what you guys are doing,keep it up.
I have been unhappy with all the media players out there for a while, but Songbird looks promising.
The only thing that keeps it from fulfilling all of my media player needs is the lack of CD ripping burning support. I guess I am a little old school.
Does anyone have a suggestion of a good open source CD ripper/burner?
Is there an extension that I have missed for Songbird?
Thanks again for all the great work.
I’m sorry… you can sort songs by completely useless things like “Last Time Skipped” or “Primary Image Location” but we still cannot sort by BITRATE?
Forest… trees…
See, now I feel bad about complaining about a free, user-made product.
The overall product is still an excellent job, folks. Thanks for it.
@endblink
If you download the latest 0.6 nightly (http://publicsvn.songbirdnest.com/wiki/Nightly_Builds) and re-scan your library you’ll have the sort by bitrate feature you asked for! Granted, I’d suggest you wait for a blessed 0.6 build before starting to use it - but the good news is we’ve already implemented it. In the future, feel free to file bugs (http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/enter_bug.cgi?product=Songbird) for things you’d like to see us improve or fix! Thanks for your feedback.
En algun momento le piensan poner ecualizadores…
Me gustaria un buen plugin para eliminar la voz, pero que sea bastante fiel.
I am used to the double-click in open space to the right of the open tabs for opening a new tab in Firefox.Its faster than Ctrl+T.but in songbird (linux version) it just minimizes or maximizes the main window.No tabs open.When are you going to implement this in Songbird?And will you leave space to the right even when many tabs are open?Firefox doesnt leave any space once the tabs get filled up.
@billy
Thanks for your feedback, while this feature request is currently on our ToDo list we don’t currently have plans to implement it. If you’d like to keep track of its status you can follow, or add to, the bug here: http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/show_bug.cgi?id=7395
Cheers!
There are quite a few rippers floating around, the best ones use the open source cd paranoia code for ripping. I know that EAC and Max are available for windows and mac respectively, but surely there’s a linux gui integration floating around on google as the ripper was built open.
I may download the new version. I must be honest I was dissapointed at v.4s handling of my quite large library, but I’m very much looking forward to v1!
@Izaak Gray
Just curious, how large of a library are you working with in Songbird? And, where were your pain points? We’re working on some definite improvements for 0.6 but it’s gonna be an ongoing effort for us on the road to 1.0 (not just a one release fix) - appreciate you sharing the problems you faced so that we can look into them!
I like the web and music integration concept of Songbird.But many times I access non-music websites and then I find Songbird a bit cluttered because of the panes.At such times I do not need the side panes, the top bar, album art etc. and then I open them in firefox. Yes, you can always resize the panes, but I would like to have a shortcut so that all these panes are hidden and I have just the tabs and necessary buttons like stop back etc.Then I can press the shortcut to return to normal mode.
Thanks raffel for the earlier quick reply.
Hello my friends
I am very enthusiastic about Songbird. I am not able, however, to find answers to two questions I have.:
)
1. Is smart or auto playlists being considered (Please say yes… sincerely
2. Any estimate of when the first official release of Songbird will be?
and…. Could you PLEASE include an equalizer? I would just like to be able to tweak the sound.
Every update gets me more excited for 1.0 to come out! i need a mac alternative to itunes, its just not cutting it anymore, and it looks like songbird could be my new program once most of the issues and bugs are fixed! keep it up!
@Jahk
We’ll be adding, or more accurately re-enabling, smart playlists sometime in the next 2-3 releases (so definitely this year). Regarding when we’ll hit 1.0, we’ll be posting our current best thinking regarding our roadmap very soon - stay tuned to the blog! I appreciate all your feedback and have noted your request for equalizer functionality. Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts with us!
@Logan
Thanks for the support! It means a lot to the team to hear feedback like this, we’re excited too!!
@raffel
Thank you very much for the responses. I am looking forward to the releases. Many of us are eager to move away from Itunes.
Congratulations for the 0.5 release. Keep up the good work!
The application is still to heavy.
I’m a new user to Songbird after looking and looking for a new media player. Overall, I have to say that the player is very nice both in looks and usability. I just have a few problems that I wanted to bring to your attention, perhaps they will be rectified in future versions.
First, the one really big issue that is bugging me is no audio CD support. I’m still one of those ‘old school’ people who love to buy CDs and I don’t like to waste my harddrive space on CDs that I already have, so I don’t burn them to my computer. It would be awesome if you could add in audio CD support.
Second, the program runs a little clunky, it takes a while to load everything up. Making it smaller would be a great idea. How about a medium sized version of the player? The smaller version is too small for me…
Third, integration with FoxyTunes would be useful.
Thanks for taking the time to read this. As a new user I’m very impressed with this player, it’s waaaaaaay better than iTunes! I’m looking forward to future releases of Songbird!
Kay
I’d just like to second or third whatever that I’d love for you guys to have good zune support. The zune desktop software does suck. majorly.
Downloaded version 0.5 and tested my iRiver Clix; worked very well. Great job.
On the downside: the iTunes library importer did not import my play count and BPM data, which is important to me. I wonder if this will be present in the near future.
Some of the menu options, while navigating with the mouse, kept lit up (selected) while I moved away to another option.
The track number is not right aligned; this causes a confusing column of numbers.
The full path is not displayed in the Tools | Options | Main page. I found this annoying.
On the whole a good job; nice playback, loads of features, but i.m.o. still not good enough for me to move away from iTunes (however much I would like to
Hey, songbird is definitely a first classy music player for whole GNU/Linux OS. One bad thing is it looks exactly like itune player. Formula for success is individuality and ingenuity. Please change the look of the bird.
@Ciccio
Thanks for the kind words, I’ll be sure to pass that along to the team!
@pacsum
Would you be willing to email me at support [ a t ] songbirdnest.com to further explain what you mean by “too heavy”? We’d love to better understand your concerns. Thanks!
@Kay
Appreciate the feedback and kind words, thanks so much for reaching out to us! While we’re working on a number of improvements, audio CD playback isn’t currently high on the list (but we definitely intend to support it.) Thanks for your vote for the feature, it’s definitely been noted!
Regarding the app being clunky, there’s some good news to report on this front, we’ve been making a lot of performance gains in the current 0.6 release (should be out in early June). Here are some of the performance improvements we expect to ship: search is better and faster, the library can reliably handle far more data, scrolling is smoother, filtering is significantly faster, and, if you’re on Windows RAM useage has decreased!
Would you be willing to email me at support [ a t ] songbirdnest.com to share what sort of integration with Foxy Tunes you would like to see? Thanks!
@Sam
We’re looking into what it’s gonna take to support the Zune, thanks for the request!
@ceyeber62
Thanks for all the feedback! We’re looking into the iTunes library importer issues you mentioned to see what’s going on. As for right aligning the Track #, I just filed a bug to sort that out, nice catch.
Would you mind emailing me at support [ a t ] songbirdnest.com? I’d love to followup with you on a few things: Can you recall what menu options lit up, we’d like to look into that? Also, I’m a bit confused, what full path are you referring to? And, I’d love to hear more about what it would take from us to move you away from iTunes.
@jay
Thanks for sharing your feedback on the design of the ‘Bird. We agree with you, and we’re hearing it from plenty of others too, that we need to spend some cycles revisiting our aesthetic choices. Working on changes to the appearance is one of those projects where it’s hard to satisfy everyone but regardless we know it’s time for more than just a new paint job. We’re definitely going to begin a project to make some changes after we release 0.6. Look for a visual refresh to land in the ‘Bird sometime in the mid-late summer timeframe. In the meantime, I encourage you to try installing feathers that others have developed, you can find them on the Add-on’s site. FWIW I really dig Highligter and Sidecar that said I’m on a Mac and they don’t yet work on other platforms.
voy experimentar por primera vez.
Nice to hear that smart playlists are on the way back. I simply can’t live without them, so I’m not even going to bother downloading any versions until it’s back in again. For now, It’s still Windows + iTunes for me unfortunately… (because NONE of the Linux media players can see the ‘comments’ field)
Awesome feature suggestion (that I haven’t been able to find anywhere, so forgive me if this is a repeat):
I’ve got X-amt of songs, but when I add up all the songs in my different playlists, I get a different number.
Is there any way to show songs that:
a: have NO playlist (songs I added to my library, but forgot to put in a playlist)
b: are in multiple playlists (and which lists)
I am repeating myself, but I have this much to say:
Equalizer and Smart Playlists, and I would be done with Itunes.
Songbird is getting even more impressive.
Okay, well, to re-phrase/refine my earlier suggestion, perhaps there could be a feature one could enable in order to color code songs in a playlist so you can see at first glance if they’re only in that playlist or if they’re in multiple lists.
I figured out how to find the songs that aren’t contained in any of my lists with the smart playlist in iTunes, but right now it looks like I’ll need several other smart playlists in order to properly find the multiples (since I have no one song that’s in all playlists).
(Yeah, I’m a typical Windows user that wants a dumbed down version at the price of disk space and memory….sorry, it’s in my blood)
Hey, how about you don’t rely on system detection for the download? Your site is incorrectly detecting my system as Linux 64bit, when it’s Linux 32bit.. At least be thoughtful enough to provide a link so we can download the proper version when it’s detected wrong, or if we want to download it for someone else’s computer!!
bien
all i can say is that i cant wait for the next update i think that this could really go somewhere i cant wait to move away from itunes especially since i recently had a lot of trouble getting my library to transfer to my new laptop . i wouldn have the technical no-how to be very helpful but i still thought some moral support would be appreciated so guys keep up the great work me and a number of my friends are really looking forward to the update
can one sync photos to the 30g ipod video
am using Ubuntu 8.04 (hardy heron) amd 64
This needs more marketing. Pleae keep us informed of any way to create awarness about the player.
cant wait for the next update
I use birdsong and I am an addicted to it, I dont use anything else for my media. Its a great product, the best I have ever seen.
Great idea but doesn’t appear to work.I have tried several downloads on two different computers both running XP Home and every time I get an internal core failure. Is the download available faulty or is it the programme ?
would love to see the development of this further. Right now I don’t think it is realistically usable for myself, where I have 1 terabyte of albums and it is very very slow. It makes the application hang and come to a crawl.
Hello! I’m one of many Musicmatch Jukebox (MMJB) orphans, so i’ve been googling to find a good alternative… without any success I must say. Anyhow that’s how I got to find Songbird. From what I’ve seen it still doesn’t substitute some of MMJB’s functionalities, however if I had to bet on one software that will do it someday I would probably say that would be Songbird. This being the case I’m begging you to implement functionalities similar to MMJB’s super-tagging or auto-dj, among others. It would be a dream come true if you could have us MMJB orphans in mind. Thanks a lot and keep up the excelent job! Rui
Hello, I just downloaded this program again last night after having issues with iPod support the last time. This time around it is much better, but I do have a suggestion. Not sure if it’s really a bug or has already been mentioned in the past. For my desktop’s taskbar, I have it set to autohide, but when I maximize Songbird, my taskbar does not show up.
Thanks for all your hard work.
Carlos
Oh I just remembered I installed 0.6-RC2. Not sure if it also applies to 0.5. Sorry for posting in wrong section. Hope it is noted anyways.
Thanks.
Carlos
hm… the features are awesome, and songbird is just getting better. But even before adding more features, we definitely need to fix a few basic things in order to make Songbird faster and make it use less memory.
Сексуальная стройная брюнетка ищет интима в москве,
секс за деньги не предлагать. мой тел. 8 926 112 00 56 Даша (не агенство)
Hi,
Nice to see things coming along so quickly… Nice to see a Firefox-like momentum going in another field…
Keyboard commands: Would very appreciate spacebar or something easy for pause/play, and regular shortcuts, at least back-forward in browser (alt-arrows) from FF. Find bar for browser too, please.
The black theme is too hard to read. I understand desire to be different, but besides being the first thing I look for to change, I think it might be a turn-off for others as well (Maybe if you gave an option at install as to which feather people liked, you’d know which was the most popular, and would give a chance for people to download alternate or additional ones then and there).
Get More Feathers link (http://addons.songbirdnest.com/feathers ) from 0.5 is dead.
thanks!
Also, really feel there is a need for the iTunes option to turn off the playing of a song (the simple checkbox). I’m often tired of a song or don’t like it but don’t feel like deleting it (maybe in case someone else in our home might want to hear it).
Good work!
Bye
great program.
same comment as above, good on my xp apart from 90-95k mem usage. cpu use is fine.
i like the interface, and don’t see lag.
cheers
thank you
thank you
Love it!
pros:
Customizable, integrated browser, just LOVE the design of it all..
Cons:
Someone should at least make an extension for one.. If its possible 
Im sure there are plenty of programmers with some free time?
I need an equalizer
I used rhythmbox.. then switched to xmms(used it a long time ago and liked that its winamp for linux).. Then I found this and fell in love. When my mp3 player isnt connected, instead of closing like xmms does, songbird just doesnt play the file until it is connected and mounted(Hated when xmms would close when I pressed play before i remembered to mount).
Just.. I like changing everything in the equalizer.. When I go to sleep I have a fan(yeah, im ghetto no central air) which runs at a frequency that needs a certain preset so I dont just hear the bass and a few bits of treble.. Luckily I can just turn it up and turn my subwoofer down or off, but then I have to reach down and turn it on to a level that isnt too much or too little every morning
Other than no equalizer.. Love it.. Keep up the good work!
Might Be The Best Ever Yet,