Whoa nice work guys (and gals)! I’ll give it a whirl soon!

I’m trying to figure this out, as I am very interested in Song. But I have a library that I would consider to be BIG, but not LARGE. Your new version is touting to handle 10,000 songs, but that in my opinion would be a “beginners” sized library! When I first started to put my music library into iTunes, I had more than the iTunes program could handle, over 30,000 songs back in 2002.

You have a user mention Song handling 140 GBs of music, but then again, that’s a puny sized Library. I have more than 4 TB or 4000 GB of Apple LossLess files!

And I do not have a large library, I have just a big one.

Should I try loading my library into Song?

Sound Thinker

@Sound Thinker
We’d love for you to give Songbird a try and we’d be curious to hear how your library performs. We’re going to continue to improve the experience so feedback is greatly welcome. That said, for this release we certainly haven’t been optimizing for your kind of library - so we’re just not sure what you should expect. Consider yourself our first TB lossless tester on 0.6 (that we know of)! If you do hit any issues, we’d love to hear more feedback in the form of a bug so that our QA and engineering teams can explore it further! Thanks!!

@Hunter
That’s our goal! We’re working hard to earn the spot. Thanks for the kind words, it means a lot to the team. And, if there are things you’d like to see us focus on please let us know!

I updated and immediately noticed how much faster SB was running! Although I did lose all the tracks I had downloaded from blogs and whatnot (not my purchased tracks) in the switch, somehow. Either way I remedied that and am LOVING the new version! I just wanted to thank you all for the hard work!

Also Jkoshi I love all of the art! I’ve been meaning to comment on how much more enjoyable this entire project is having such amazingly talented artwork with your unique style. Really. >_0

Oh and finally, anyone on the team is there an easy way to add a google search to the toolbar? That’s the one thing that’s been irking me, as I haven’t been able to find a way.

Thanks!
-FoX

@Fox I’m glad you like the new version, the team put in a couple extra intense weeks to make this release especially good, I think it really speaks for itself.

As for the artwork, it’s my pleasure! I’m glad you like it. We’ve got a couple of new t-shirt designs coming soon and we just got a bunch of new stickers, watch for the blog for more on that soon.

As for adding Google search to the toolbar, you should try the Mycroft Project on mozdev.org. They’ve got an extensive list of Google search plug-ins that can be added to the Songbird search box.

Hi, congratulations on finally releasing Songbird 6.0 =D

I just want to know, is there anyway to update from 0.5 to 0.6? I tried checking for updates, but theres nothing. Im running songbird 0.5 on ubuntu hardy.

Thanks!!

Amazing! I’ve just installed 0.6 and it runs like a dream. The speed that it loads and lets me search my music (approx. 6000 songs) puts iTunes to shame. I’m even considering trying allowing Songbird to manage my iPod (though does it support podcasts?).

Thanks everyone for the good work.

@Koshi, will the pirate t-shirt be making an appearance? I’m a proud owner of the ninja birds, but while I like ninjas, I LOVE pirates

First, great job with the DB backend ! Runs pretty fast on Fedora Core 9 with 1.9GHz AMD CPU with 43GB music collection.

I have the following feature proposals:

In the Library view there are 3 Genre/Artist/Album panes and the pane with listing of individual tracks. It could be cool if one could drag and drop e.g. an artist from the Artist pane (meaning all tracks produced by the artist) to iPod Library. Currently this does not seem possible.

Library auto-sync: as I add (or remove) more tracks to/from the directory which houses my music collection I’d like Songbird to pick up these changes automatically.

I had an exam yesterday and didn’t have time to check for updates 26th comment? Im gettting slow. Anyway, great to see 0.6 is finally here, its great end to all the exams, next firefox 3 on tuesday!

Great, after trying 0.6 out for a while, I feel I can use it as my default media-player. So long, iTunes! Yay!

Just started using Sonbird. However once I’ve imported my library I have to play each song individually before Songbird appropriately names it and uses it’s meta information.

At present I just have a very long list of mp3s with titles. When I play one, it correctly formats the song name and the other details. Is there a way to get around this rather than having to play each of my 7000 songs?

Great Great Great!!!! Love it guys. Am trashing wmp (windows) and rhythmbox (ubuntu). Songbird is the way to go. Great response and its extremely resource friendly (though more work can be done in this field). Even the cpu utilization is good. What i would love to see is an equilizer. One more suggestion is the auto playlist. Since you guys have addressed majority of the issues in this release, i think now you can concentrate on adding new features like what i mentioned. Once gain congrats on your work. Songbird is the way to go and my audio player from today.!!!!!

@tomvw
We’re so excited to have you onboard, it’s only going to get better! Look forward to hearing more feedback, we’ll be working extra-hard to keep you from switching back!!

@Vladimir Kotal
We’re looking into the iPod Linux bug and hope to have it addressed shortly! Thanks for providing feedback for us in bugzilla.

@Jon Pritchard
Sounds like there was an issue during the metadata scan. If you’re up for trying to re-import your collection I think that could possibly fix things. The easiest way to do that would be to first remove everything from your library (by choosing select all and delete - you don’t have to worry about loosing anything as this doesn’t delete the actual media, just Songbird’s link to it.) Before you re-import, I’d suggest you quit the application and restart your machine. Then, you can re-import by launching the application again and doing a “scan for media” which is located in the File menu. If that doesn’t help we definitely want to look into this further. Feel free to share what happens here or via email at support [a t] songbirdnest.com. Sorry this happened and I hope it’s easily fixed! Thanks for letting us know.

@Shamus Omalley
Thanks for the kind words, we’re blushing. We really appreciate your support and you have our word that we’re gonna work hard to keep you onboard! So keep the feedback coming, it really helps make Songbird better.

@Vivek
We appreciate the kind words and great feature ideas! We’re not too many more releases out from having gStreamer as our media core. When that happens, OMG - things are gonna get really exciting. The engineers who work at Songbird are gonna have a field day implementing new audio (and then video) features - such as the ones you requested. It means a lot to us to have your support. The feedback you’re sharing is unbelievably helpful to us, so please keep it coming! And, welcome aboard, we’ll do everything we can to keep you coming back!!!

@Ignacio
We’re excited to hear Songbird is using less resources on your machine. We’re continuing to work on ways to improve performance, so there will definitely be more progress to report in the next release. That’s awesome that you’re listening to live radio and fetching the album art for the tracks via the web, super cool! Also, rest assured, we’ll be improving our audio specific features. As soon as we land gStreamer as our new media core you can expect to hear a lot more about those plans! Please let us know if there are specific features we’re missing so we can make sure it’s on our ToDo list. Feel free to share your request here, via email at support [a t] songbirdnest.com, or even better - file a feature request with us so you can track progress on bugzilla. Thanks for both the kind words and your feedback!

@Chris
Thanks for the feedback and for continuing to try out Songbird. I’ll make sure to pass your kind words onto the team, your comments mean a lot to us. We’ll continue to work hard to keep you interested!

also…
is there a way to update versions without loosing playlists made on the previous version of songbird?

Excellent work! Any chance of you building in support for Google Gears and Mozilla Mesh?

Is it planned podcasts support? And correct podcast sync with iPod’s?

Linux lacks a media player with podcasting support at iTunes level (podcast support, management and correct bidirectional sync) in iPods. I tried with Rythmbox, Amarok, Banshee, gtkpod, gPodder and Songbird, and all failed with podcasts.

Still no support for albumart. That’s one of the main reasons I stick with another player. But I’ll keep waiting…

I don’t have, nor want an Ipod. Have no use for something sticking in my ears all day.
Will I ever be able to download music and burn to a cd from Songbird?
Pay or not. Don’t care.
My library is only about 8G’s. I have never shared on the net with anyone.(used old Napster years ago)
Seems like all the people making comments are still in their nickers.Oops! Does that date me?
Thanks for listening,
Samuel Nunn.

I can’t seem to find some kind of “currently playing” list - A list containing all the items in the play queue.
I like to be able to see what I’ve got in the queue so that I can edit it.

The “Jump to” window close button doesn’t really work for me. If I click it, nothing happens. If I then right-click the item in my task bar, it disappears. (Without me clicking close in that.)

The text in the search box doesn’t update while songbird is actually searching. It can keep up with the first 3-4 letters in terms of updating the text in the searchbox, but after that it just doens’t updated untill the search is complete. (It isn’t noticable unless the search result containt at least a dozen songs.)

Other then that, I’d just like to say that I like Songbird. It has a simple, clean interface, preformance is good and it managed to import my library much faster then winamp does. (Though I’m not sure how much that means.)

Hmmm I tried to import one of my music folders and it seems to stall on a directory I have. Unfortunately, I have no net at home, so I can’t do much useful debugging for now. I’ll try again to narrow down what file is causing problems.

Congrats on releasing 0.6 final! Easily the best music app on all supported platforms. I would vote Songbird for Minister of Sound

Songbird is definitely the most impressive music focused mediaplayer i have ever used. i started out with winamp as my favorite, then jetaudio, tried amarok (pretty awesome), but songbirds builtin browser and cross platform takes the prize, and being pretty usable and stable at only .5/.6, not even 1.0 yet.

Now it supports gContextMenu. That’s great

the release performs well for me.. a first on windows! i have been using the software since .3 and have tried every new release hoping to fall in love. big question: is there any way for me to change the soundcard? i use my motherboard’s one with $2 goodwill speakers for windows audio and lofi internet streams and i use a firewire interface hooked up to nice studio monitors for music and movie playback (mediamonkey, vlc, etc). am i missing something in the preferences or an extension? it seems like the preferences window is filled with lots of lush options about encryption and other junk that make me feel like i’m customizing firefox instead of a media player.

I’ve been following Songbird since before 0.1 was released. I was very active in the forums, I even tried to read EVERY new post in all the forums. As time went one, many pieces got rewritten, and to a non-developer such as myself, it seemed almost like nothing new was really happening. I lost touch with the project. I even went for a couple moths without even visiting the site. I never really gave 0.4 or 0.5 releases a real try. Then somebody contacted me and asked me a few questions about it. I decided to take a look at the site and see what progress had been made since my last visit. 0.6 rc’s were coming out, but i decided to wait for final as i remembered how fickle the old nightlies were. I am very impressed. With additional addon’s such as glossy feathers to give a more native look in Vista, and the Now Playing List add-on, Songbird is now almost ready to replace WMP as my main player. What will really make me switch is CD-ripping and transcoding capabilities, which will come after gStreamer is implemented (apparently in about 2-3 releases for gStreamer so I figure a couple releases after). I’m beginning to get back into the project. Great work POTI, and of course all the developers who contributed to both the app and the add-ons library. Thanks.

New Songbird and new Firefox on the same day.

Is it Christmas already?

I just tried to import a CD, apparently songbird lacks that feature. I also get problems playing ogg files and the songbird has a dependency on a gstreamer plugin I have apparently not installed. I am also missing support of torrents.

would like to add. one feature of itunes i enjoy is its ability to keep my music tidy. will this be done in songbird when adding a new folder or ripping a cd?

I am using the 0.5 version on Ubuntu Hardy and the update feature still tells me I am running the latest version. Is there a way to update without a reinstall?
Thanks,
radamo

I’m running Songbird .6 on Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) and everything is working great I really love this program) — until I tried to sync my ipod nano (1st gen). It recognized it fine, could play the music, etc, etc. When I sync’d it erased what was already on it (what I had loaded previously from iTunes, it’s OK), just as it was supposed to — but it never put anything back on. The music from Songbird didn’t transfer to the ipod. Did I miss something?

Awesome work guys, you are going to be software superstars in no time.. this product is an amazing tool as a DJ.. Keep up the amazing work!!!

Peace from Vancity BC~
Frost

@radamo
Due to some hiccups that occurred we have yet to post an automatic 0.6 update for Linux 32-bit (we’re working on it). In the meantime you can manually update by simply downloading the update from the homepage.

@changturkey
This is currently on our ToDo list but we haven’t planned when work will begin on implementing it. I’ve noted your request as another vote for this feature, I want it too! Thanks for the feedback.

@Dj Frost
Thanks for the kind words! I’ll make sure to pass this along to the team.

Erik,

great update!

i’m using songbird since 0.3 and it’s a prefect itunes alternative for me!

please REMOVE THE BROWSER

it’s useless, and in fact, when i need some music (and many others), we use rapidshare instead of those shitty musicblogs

Nice job, but what happened to my large collection of bookmarks when I upgraded to 6???? It took me ages to accumulate those pages, all with great free music, mixes, etc…GONE!!!!!

Someone help!!