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.
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Songbird 0.6pre Blessed Nightly (the laser edition)…
Songbird Blog announces the release of Songbird 0.6 blessed nightly. They encourage any/all to download the latest blessed build and send in feedback and bugs as they work toward their final 0.6 release which will be shipped in early June….
25 Comments
SubscribeThank you!! Songbird grows up quite fast.:P
Again, fantastic work! Will give it a go as soon as possible.
@alex and hoshi
Thanks for the kind words! Look forward to hearing what you think.
Is the iPod support working again?
Hawt.
Very cool
I have to checkout this new build 
Can you link the button “edit” (right click in a song) to the new edit window ?
For multiple song it already work…
@djc
Yes, the iPod is working again. Thanks for asking! I just updated the blog post with links to try it out.
@GeekShadow
In the Final 0.6 release we’ll definitely make it work that way for individual songs (we just haven’t enabled it yet.) I appreciate the reminder to make sure it gets hooked up right, if you’re interested you can follow this bug I just filed about it.
Great job guys!
I have some idea for the next SongBird release.. songbird has so much connection to the web by the browser in it, but the isn’t any secial feature to PodCast… it will be nice if we could just add out podcats rss feed to the left menu and the program will auto download new chapters when they come.
The mozilla folks were alble to get another 10 -15% enabling PGO (Profile Guided Optmization)… Are you douing this also ?
@Goolic
Yes, we’re also doing PGO.
Still no news about Universal Mass Storage for our Walkman or other music-oriented phones ?
Please please…
Three questions:
Will Songbird import iTunes library?
Will Songbird sync with the new and old iPods?
Will Songbird sync with Microsoft smartphones such as the HTC Touch?
One more question,
What about the CPU usage? Has anything been done in this aspect???
I’ve been using this for a few days now and I’m hooked
I have completely stopped using anything else like WMP or Foobar as Songbird is now speedy enough and behaves the most sensibly (no data spamming like WMP, grrrrrrrr).
Very nice work guys!
Much better than before
But when I scan a new directory Songbird half-freezes the whole pc on Windows. Is this a known problem?
@ Doug,
Songbird imports the iTunes library, supports almost all iPods except the iPhone and iPod Touch. As for the HTC Touch, we don’t officially support it, but it might work with one of our device support add-ons.
Vivek, CPU usage has improved. We still have improvements to make, particularly during media scan, but I think you’ll find that CPU usage is better in 0.6 than 0.5. Please remember that some add-ons increase Songbird CPU usage significantly.
@pm:
Yes, this is a known issue and is scheduled to be fixed, though I can’t say for certain how soon we will get to it.
Looks great, but having trouble with ipod xpi. Downloaded ipod xpi and installed, but it caused Songbird to be unstable and wouldn’t startup. Disabled the add-on in safe mode, then restarted.
Doug: I had the same problem with the newest nightly of the iPod extension. Try the 20080509 nightly, this more or less works for me.
A very good player, but some simple features, where are?
The listener for MSN Messenger?
A lot of people wants it, they likes SongBird, but don’t use it becouse of this.
Why we cut out a big part of the customers for a simple add-on?
This is not the only one, it was just an example.
But i think that we must “think” more in a “commercial” view.
To help the OpenSource software, we must give people what they want, not what we think they must use.
Yes this software gives us the security we need, but 70% of computer users, wants a simple interface and some stupid things, befor a thing like security that the doesn’t live time by time.
Over all, It’s only my opinion..
>>The listener for MSN Messenger?
Not a bad idea. I hope the folks who develop Adium for Mac OS X do something similar. “We don’t all use bloody iTunes!!”
Since it now uses jemalloc does this mean that visual studio sp1 professional will be required to build from src?
@Jaman
Great suggestion, a number of users have asked for the ability to set their IM status using Songbird. We’ve noted your request as another vote for this functionality. Thanks for your feedback. We’ll work on prioritizing this into our Roadmap as well as engaging the community to see if someone can take this project on before we can get to it!
@Steven:
It depends on how much you’re compiling; right now, we’re using jemalloc at the XULRunner level, so if you use the binaries in our vendor-binaries area, you should be able to use the same compiler you always have.
If you want to rebuild your own XULRunner with Songbird’s patches, you will need Visual Studio 8 SP1 to compile, so the custom CRT patch will apply correctly against the CRT sources.
any chance of piclens integration for mediaflow album art covers and buying new music ? Seems like a perfect fit