Songbird 0.6rc2 is now available for download!
If you’re interested, you can also read the release notes.
New features and changes that we’d appreciate your feedback on include:
- Performance improvements such as: support for larger media libraries, smoother scrolling, faster filtering, speedier search; significantly reduced memory footprint on Windows and Linux builds for many common tasks; and for Mac users the latest Quicktime add-on greatly improves playback performance for local MP3 and M4A files (no more latency issues before playback begins.)
- Improved ease of use through: adding the ability to search for text within a webpage using cmd/ctrl + f; enabling the Edit menu options – copy, paste, select all and delete now work; providing a way to filter and sort your library by bit rate; making the View menu options more intuitive – it’s now easier to switch feathers; adding the ability to hide/show display panes; enabling feathers to now be auto-loaded after being installed by choosing the option to restart the application; revisiting the scan for media and metadata reading progress bars by making them modal to prevent scenarios where the application can lockup during these intensive tasks – we’ll be improving the flow in the next release so it’s not two dialogs, Mac users should note, sigh, that a XULRunner bug will cause modal dialogs to appear on top of everything in the OS; and enabling popup window blocking as the default.
- Brand new features include: a new metadata editor that allows you to make changes to your media and write the edits back to the file(s); a Shoutcast Radio directory integrated directly into Songbird that makes it easy to discover and stream music; new contextual menu options in the browser component of Songbird.
- Improved device support: on windows, MTP devices now support Sync functionality; on all platforms, iPod performance has been greatly improved.
As always, please file any issues, bugs, or crashes you find in Bugzilla so that we can address them before 0.6 final!
Finally, some might be wondering why there wasn’t an RC1? If you correctly guess what happened we’ll send you a Songbird sticker. And, if you provide feedback on RC2, we’ll send you two! 
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Songbird 0.6rc2 is available for testing…
Songbird 0.6rc2 is now available for download! If you’re interested, you can also read the release notes. As always, please file any issues, bugs, or crashes you find in Bugzilla so that we can address them before 0.6 final!…
[...] you, too, are interested in the latest Songbird 0.6 release candidate, you can read the overview, download the executable or peruse our previous coverage of the [...]
[...] 0.6 [Homepage] [Changelog] [Mirror] [Review] Operating System: Windows; Mac; Linux Release: Release Candidate [...]
[...] Songbird 0.6 nuo šiol leidžia klausyti Shoutcast radijo stočių. Opera 9.5.10048 turi naują „Sharp“ išvaizdą. Spybot Search & Destroy 1.6.0.25 dar paspartino kenkėjų skenavimą. UpdateStar 2.2.596 dabar leidžia eksportuoti ir importuoti programų sąrašą. [...]
53 Comments
SubscribeOk here is some guess :
- To follow Firefox 3.0 devellopment
- Last-time annoying bug
- Preed was sick…
@GeekShadow
Keep guessing!
When I was following the menu to the “edit metadata” from clicking right on the mouse, I had an idea (Feature Request):
Can you put a “Open file location” or “File Explorer” in the context menu when I right click on the music item.
@William
Thanks for the suggestion, I filed a bug with your request if you’re interested you can follow it here:
http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/show_bug.cgi?id=9653
Sweet, nice release, a bit buggy though….
William: yeah, I really want that feature. I was hoping to sneak it into this release, but looks like we’re out of time.
az060693: what sort of problems did you run into?
I was playing with the pre version and found that its CPU usage was just way too high for normal playback! I hope this is fixed (or on the way to being fixed) in this version!
Well, I’m using it on my Windows XP box and it’s using very little CPU, but a HUGE amount of memory! I’ll give it a go on my Mac when I get a chance to see if the CPU usage (and memory) have improved.
Still, nice work!
I got it! I got it! the Songbird rc1 was the songbird laser edition? And thanks for finally getting songbird to write the metadata to the music files. that’s basically all that’s been keeping me from switching over from itunes to songbird, that and that it does tend to run a little slow, but you fixed that. woot!
(feature request) and it would be really cool if songbird could sort the actual music files by artist and album (like iTunes and WMP do)
Nice
I like the new website skin, you should modify the songbird feathers according to it (or create a new one with the same look&feel).
Songbird winning the race against Firefox thus no RC1?
Am I crazy or is it now impossible to search your library?
@koppah
On Windows/Linux we’ve enabled jemalloc for xulrunner, we are seeing 15-20% reductions in the memory footprint when performing many common tasks (for a variety of reasons it’s not enabled on the Mac). We’re hoping to enable jemalloc for other parts of the application in the next release but we need to first do some explorations to determine if it’s gonna help.
@Killpack
Glad to hear you’re excited about the Metadata writing, give it a shot and let us know what you think! And, thanks for the feedback, would you be up for adding your feature request to bugzilla so we can track it and keep you informed? It’s located here:
http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/enter_bug.cgi?product=Songbird
@Wagaf-d
Thanks for the feedback on the new website design, we’re looking forward to getting everything ported over to the new design. We’re planning an overhaul of the UI of Songbird in the next release which should include a new default feather and, likely, changes to the layout. As we make these changes we’ll definitely be looking at the site a lot more and intend to make things compliment one another.
@Greenery
Lovely guess, but keep guessing.
@Chris
Yes, you can still search your library – and, it’s much speedier now, too! First, click on the Library in the service pane. Then, go towards the top right corner of the application and you’ll find the search box. It’s possible you might have selected a different search engine – you need to have “Songbird” set as the default option to search locally (you can change your default search engines by pulling down the menu option and selecting the one you want.)
@All
We’ll be following up next week to get you out some stickers, we really appreciate the feedback (and the guesses – RC1 is still a mystery tho…)!
You skipped RC1 because the stickers were not ready?
You skipped RC1 because you want to stay on trac for release,
but you wanted to wait for the new addons site?
@Daniel: hey there, thanks for the quick reply. I’m in the filter pane view of the library but the problem is that when i type my query into the search box and hit enter nothing happpens. After this, when I mouse over items in the artist and album panels they just disappear. I think now maybe i should delete the library db files and try again. I’ll have to do that once I get home from this wedding :p
Since I’m an addict to nightly builds (i don’t test them, i just like having strong experiences), I was wondering if there’s a way to upgrade automatically the program (like in firefox, the nightly builds are downloaded with Help:Check for updates).
Thanks for making such a fantastic program!
PD: Sorry for my bad English!
@Chris
The same happened to me (Search was broken)… My solution was deleting the whole Profile folder and set up a new one… If you cant find your profile folder you can use the Profile Manager to do that… Its a good choice to use the Playlist Exporter Add-On before doing that if you want to restore your Playlists… You need to change the max version number in the install.rdf file in the add-on (its just a zip archive) before you can use that Add On in RC2
And yes i also assume its called RC2 because of the Laser Edition
@cellarmation
Soooooooooo close, keep guessing!
@Anna
When we release Songbird 0.6 Final if you’re running a previous version of Songbird, specifically a previous Final release – we don’t upgrade from nightlies, it will prompt you to update (similar to the way Firefox works). BTW your English isn’t bad!
@Chris & Clamm
Thanks for letting us know about this issue! We’d like to try to reproduce this asap so that we can track down and solve what’s going on, would you be willing to add some additional details to this bug I just filed about this – such as what OS you are running (and perhaps be able to answer any questions our QA/Engineering team might have when they dive into this):
http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/show_bug.cgi?id=9664
We really appreciate it!
@Chris & Clamm
Good news, looks like we already know what the issue is (more details in the bug listed above) – thanks for helping us catch this, it will be addressed before final release. Unfortunately, in the meantime, this means that people who update from a previous Songbird and run RC2 don’t get a new profile when they install – so for now Clamm’s comment is a good temp fix.
So far so good…my favourite part of this release is that it makes use of my back/forward buttons on my mouse! I’ve been waiting for that for a long time in Songbird…thanks!
http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail/Songbird/1139446766/1
rc1 XD
Does the new addons site work slightly differently? e.g auto detecting the songbird version to change the page content? (i thought it might have done that before)
If that is true, maybe the new addons site was finished just before RC1 came out, and that feature was broken in RC1? So you waited untill RC2?
guesses
because the addons didn’t work for rc1
because 6/2 is 3
because… rc1 is now .7pre?
@Clamm
Deleting the profile did the trick, thanks!
@raffel
Wow that was a quick diagnosis. Keep up the good work, 0.6 final is gonna be great
Great release, been following songbird since the 0.1 days and it really has come on leaps about bounds!
That being said, does anyone else have a problem with maximising Songbird on a secondary screen, at least on Vista? I can maximise the songbird window fine onto my primary monitor, but as soon as I try to maximise the window on my second monitor, it seems to disappear…
I meant leaps and bounds, of course
@Daniel
The problem you described is a known bug and will be fixed in a future release. I am not sure what the bug number is right now. I would have to go digging through bugzilla to find it.
@Anthony
Good to know, I couldn’t find it earlier, but I didn’t want to file a duplicate either! Thanks
So will there ever be CD-ripping in Songbird?
Also, why can’t the new and improved ipod addon see my ipod?
The news about editable metadata is music to my ears. To echo others’ comments, this was absolutely essential for daily use. Congrats on achieving this milestone!
@All,
Now that I’m actually able to speak again–laryngitis sucks–I thought I’d shed some light on why we went directly to RC2 for the 0.6 release, beyond the obvious “because rc2 was cooler than rc1!”
In the 0.6 release, we had a lot of backend infrastructure changes, both on the build/release side, and on the Nest side. As mentioned, we landed jemalloc in our Windows and Linux builds. Because Software Update utilizes different components than normal daily Songbird use, we wanted to ensure that we released a build that people could update from, so we spun an RC1 build, and then to perform this update test, an RC2 build to update to. We ended up not pushing out RC1.
“So, why didn’t you rename RC2 to RC1, then,” you ask?
Well, version numbers are an important communication tool in the software release process, and there’s a basic assumption, both in the release process and the build system, that version numbers never go backwards. As I mentioned to Daniel: “It’s like Back to the Future; you could go back in time, but you’d have to get struck by lightning to make everything better again.”
@Nick
We’re in the process right now of standardizing our media core to gStreamer on all platforms. The reason I bring this up is that this work is a pre-requisite for a host of features we’re excited to implement, including the one you requested. Our current estimate is that gStreamer will land in 0.8 (~Oct). For planning purposes until gStreamer has landed we’re waiting to commit to implementing features that require it.
Regarding your problems with the iPod add-on, can you tell us which iPod you’re trying to use (and which platform you’re running)? In the meantime, you bring up a good point which is that we need to post a list of which iPods that we support – sorry that’s not clearer, I’ll get on that.
@cellarmation
Yes, Songbird version detection on the new add-ons site has been improved. Thanks for noticing!
@Brian
Thanks for the compliments, I’ll make sure to pass them on to the team! Please let us know if you have any feedback for the Metadata editor.
Hello Songbird team!
I´ve just installed the Songbird RC2 release on my macbook that is running OS X Leopard. Unlike before, when I ran the first nightly build that was released sometime in the beginning of may, the program now freezes when I search my library. After I type in 3 letters in the searchbox, say that i’m about to search for ‘bruce springsteen’, I only have time to type ‘bru’ (or if I’m really fast ‘bruce’) and then the program freezes for about 1-2 seconds before displaying the results.
I have all my mp3’s connected to my macbook through a portable USB disk. I don’t suppose this is why I am experiencing this latency?
@ Erik
Are you using Mac OS 10.5.3? There are many apps having problems with this release including Songbird. This is a known bug.
I’m using version 10.5.2 of Leopard. My library is holding about 12,500 songs but I suppose Songbird 0.6RC2 should be able to handle that amount?
Love how fast the library is now!
Not sure if you already know about this, but for me on Vista x32, a lot of the chrome acts as a “title bar”, for example, I can use the spare space in the tab bar to drag the window around and double clicking it maximises the window, which is quite strange (took me a while to pinpoint what was causing it). Also all the dark grey area around the faceplate acts like this.
My guess:
Because Songbird is so awesome, you didn’t NEED an RC1.
I think the discussion went something like this:
Nigel Tufnel: The RC goes straight to two. Look, right across the board, two, two, two and…
Marty DiBergi: Oh, I see. And most RCs start at one?
Nigel Tufnel: Exactly.
Marty DiBergi: Does that mean it’s better? Is it any more stable?
Nigel Tufnel: Well, it’s one better, isn’t it? It’s not one. You see, most blokes, you know, will be playing with RC1. You’re on RC2 here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you’re on RC2 on your Songbird. Where can you go from there? Where?
Marty DiBergi: I don’t know.
Nigel Tufnel: Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?
Marty DiBergi: Put it up to RC2.
Nigel Tufnel: RC2. Exactly. One better.
Marty DiBergi: Why don’t you just make RC1 better and make RC1 be the top RC and make that a little more stable?
Nigel Tufnel: [pause] These go to RC2
OK, using 0.6rc2 on the Mac has some weird results.
Attempting to do a search simply does not work – it has auto-complete and all that, but the results do not come up.
That said, idle CPU usage is much better, but playback usage could seriously be improved – why does it need to use 20% of a dual core processor for simply media playback?
That said, as mentioned in a previous blog post, the scrolling is much, much smoother.
I posted this in 0.5final on accident…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.
I should mention that I am on XP home on this machine, I have not tried it on my XP pro machine yet.
Thanks for all your hard work.
Carlos
This isn’t specific to this release, but I can’t get most streams to play on this windows machine in songbird, the same streams also don’t work in vlc (says it can’t understand “ICY 200 OK” status) and foobar2000 (no particular error, just doesn’t play), but they do work in WMP. Does this sound familiar? The only stream I’ve found that any of those players will play is wcpe.org, which doesn’t seem to use that ICY stuff, but plain ole’ http. Any ideas?
@Jay K
Could you give an example of some URL streams that don’t play?
Thanks,
iTunes has serious performance problems when it has to deal with large libraries (like 20,000 songs/podcasts/etc or more). If Songbird has deal well with that many files you’ll get a lot of users who are frustrated with iTunes and it’s performance. Go, go, go Songbird.
hmm… looks like the spam filter catches my comments when I include urls… let’s try it without:
folkalley (dot com)
kcpw (dot org)
and everything I tried from shoutcast…. a packet capture shows that it makes the request and the server sends headers and starts to send data and the connection breaks… again, it looks like anything that responds with ICY status header fails, and ones with HTTP status header works.
@Erik
Yes, starting with Songbird 0.6 the application should be able to handle libraries your size (and larger). I’m running a slightly more recent Mac build and just imported 16,000 tracks and played around with Search and had no performance issues – typing in queries resulted in near instantaneous search results. We’d like to continue to investigate, could you share more specifics about your system: RAM, CPU, Model, etc? Thanks!
@Necimal
Thanks for the feedback! Yes, we’re aware of this issue but we still appreciate you bringing this to our attention. We are currently working on a re-design project and are hoping to disable this awkward behavior with the new design. On a sidenote, we’ll post some updates about how the design project is going in a few weeks to get some feedback!
@Haydre
hehe!
@koppah
Sorry about that, our bad! We’ve been busy fixing a bunch of issues affecting Mac users and I’m excited to say we’ve made some tremendous progress. Unfortunately, at the moment you’ll have to take my word for it but if you can wait until our final release of 0.6 (which should be less than a week away) you’ll see the Search bug and several other problems are now gone. Currently, we aren’t sure if we’ll spin another RC before our final release. Thanks for reaching out to us! We’ll also continue to look into ways to reduce CPU performance – performance improvements and optimizations are definitely important items on our ToDo list these days. To be fair though, we’ll probably have to wait until we switch MediaCores from VLC to gStreamer to do a tremendous amount of CPU optimizations during playback. That’s still a few releases out for Mac/Windows users.
@Carlos
Appreciate the info, we’ll be looking into that! Thanks for bringing it to our attention.
@AM
Thanks for the support! We’re working hard to provide a great, open alternative. Amongst other performance gains, we’re pretty excited about our improvements to library support in this release, give it a try and let us know what you think!
@Jay K
Thanks for the extra info our QA team will be in touch shortly!
@Carlos
Your Taskbar issue is known http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/show_bug.cgi?id=6116. It is listed in the 0.5 Final Release Notes @ http://www.songbirdnest.com/release-notes/0.5. And this issue is still open with all 0.6 Release Candidates.
@Daniel
The problem with maximizing Songbird on a secondary screen is filed at:
http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/show_bug.cgi?id=8535
@Carlos
Problem with the taskbar, when Songbird is maximized was filed and fixed earlier.
If you use tasbar auto-hide option, make sure, option in Taskbar ->Properties->Keep the taskbar on top of other windows is checked.
There are some other issues related to that filed in a mozilla bug.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=321595
@Carlos
Oops….
http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/show_bug.cgi?id=6116
Jan is better in finding dupes, I thought it’s fixed
@Erik: I’m seeing this behavior with searching, too. It all depends on what I search for. If the first 2 or 3 letters are really common, it hiccups. If they aren’t, it’s smooth. This is some brand-spanking-new searching functionality, so I’m not surprised that we have a kink to work out.
This issue is now in Bugzilla: http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/show_bug.cgi?id=9833. You’re welcome to add yourself to the cc: list if you’d like to keep track of it.
hello i just bought a mp3 player for my daughter and am looking for a free web site where she can down load free songs any information would be greatly appreciated thanks
I am using it at Windows XP Proffesional and it’s using so little CPU resources, but a HUGE amount of memory resource. Thanks for advice.