Now that you’ve had a chance to try Songbird 0.6, here’s a view to the road ahead.
Today we are launching the Songbird Release Roadmap. Behold the next three Songbird release codenames and themes:
- Fugazi: Improve performance and focus on usability.
- Genesis: Continue to improve performance and add features consumers expect in a music player.
- Hall: Integrate Web services.
The roadmap has deep links to feature specifications, Bugzilla implementation tracking and your feedback powered by GetSatisfaction. We’ll continuously update the roadmap with the most current planned features, specifications, release dates and more.
Please have look and give us a chirp. We’re listening.
43 Comments
SubscribeFor anyone wondering, I’m looking forward to linking to all the Fugazi feature specifications very soon!!
Hopefully the next release will be stable/fast enough to replace my media players!
I think I’ve mentioned this before, but one feature I’d love to see is the ability to play media WITHOUT adding it to your library?
@Koppah
Interesting idea…we’ll definitely think more about how that feature could work. Thanks for the feedback!
Directory watching has been punted. That mean it’s going to the next release or not at all?
This and smartlists would make me use songbird.
I would love to see disc burning in Songbird, to me it’s the only thing that is missing.
@Derek Buranen
Unfortunately, it looks like watch folders are not going to make it into the next release. It was a tough call but when we looked at the amount of work associated with the next release we just couldn’t commit to it. We’ll definitely get to it soon (work has already begun on it.) And, who knows…maybe some magic will happen, but we want to be transparent and set expectations early. All in all, the next release is looking pretty exciting!
@Sam
Thanks for the feedback, as soon as we land gStreamer this is going to be a lot easier to tackle. It’s one of our most popular feature requests and we will make it happen!
Hello,
For me, the next revolution is to do songbird portable, to use on usb stick
and maybe to have playlist by filtring (play only, by date to add betwen ??/04 and ??/05, with at least ****) and a button in metadta editor to not palying a track in shuffle mode (for track off audibook and long-long track of woodstock,
it would be useful).
But thank you for all the work already done
Please see to it that atleast the smart playlist options are present in the next release. Btw am using songbird 0.6 and it is consuming 185mb ram. Do you think it is usual??? The CPU usage is high but not too much (when i run songbird, the fans are always on).
But then its still not a completely finished product so am excited when yyou say new release!!!!
All the best for the next one but dont forget the smart playlists and please tell me more about this RAM usage.
Cheers
@Totoche
Thanks for your feedback and the kind words! We’ll definitely explore your suggestions further. Also, I agree, some additional options to skip certain tracks when in shuffle mode, such as audiobooks, would be nice. We’ll get to it!
@Vivek
Rest assured, we’re doing our best to finish implementing smart playlists for the next release – in fact, we’ve already started working on it and made some progress (you can see a very rough, early version of the feature is already showing up in 0.7 nightlies.) And, we’re currently looking into additional ways to reduce RAM usage by exploring enabling jemalloc as our memory allocator for the rest of the application. We’ve already started coding the next release so we should have some additional news on the blog in a few weeks. Appreciate the feedback!
Personally glad to see podcast support for the “Hall” release. Songbird is very coming along nicely, although proper support for podcasts is sorely missed. It would be nice to have them all displayed on one page with a brief description, and a number of unlistened podcasts displayed in the sidebar. RSSOwl has got it right in this regard.
Oh, the shoutcast addon is brilliant. Perfect way to integrate to shoutcast into Songbird. Just wish it would segment tracks so I can skip back to previous tunes, for a second listen. Guess this would mean caching the stream. Do remember Real player could archive for over an hour, though the temp file grew very large. Anyway, awesome feature. I’ll keep praying.
Otherwise, songbird keeps me hooked. Originally on the philosophy of the application, now on the implementation. Watching, listening, blogging with ultimate eagerness. Love to see you at Lugradio Live UK? Any chance?
The feature that are missing the most:
- A way better support for Podcast. Right know is not really usable.
- A support for creative products on Mac.
- A support of the Mac remote control.
Keep going your great work. I’m sure when the bird will come out of the nest, it will make a lot of noise.
Hi guys, we are building a new social network platform and want to have an audio player on the site showing the best from our members music. Does anyone know if songbird is suitable for this? (ideally we want a large player linke songburd for all audio and a small flash based plyer we can develop to sit on some of the sites pages and members homepages).
Any advice appreciated.
Keep up the good work
Great work so far!
Just wondering if there are any plans to implement MTP on platforms other than Windows? (maybe with libmtp?)
I was expecting to see under “features consumers expect in a music player”:
-the ability to play CD’s in Songbird
-the ability to play podcasts
-MTP device support for Linux
These all seem like features that you would expect to find in any media player. I know the focus of Songbird is different from your average media player, but if it’s going to be a complete, fully functioning replacement for iTunes by 1.0 then it really needs to have all of these features.
Anyhow, keep up the great work; glad to see the roadmap and thanks for all the hard work.
@Gareth
Thanks for the kind words. We’re looking forward to proper Podcast support too! We’ll be at OSCON this year which is almost exactly when LugRadio Live UK 2008 is happening. So, maybe we’ll be able to make it to LugRadio next year!
@Thomas
Great suggestions, I’ve added them to our Feature Requests page.
@Pete
Feel free to contact us at support [a t] songbirdnest.com – we’d be happy to chat with you about some ideas.
@Emlyn
We definitely intend to support MTP devices on Mac/Linux down the road but we are not currently working on it. When we do the integration it’s very likely we’ll use the libmtp libraries.
@forest
Good point, consumers expect a lot of features in a music player these days! We’re working hard to create novel new features while also crossing off more expected required capabilities. It’s a balancing act that we’re constantly adjusting – feedback from users like you help us focus on the right things! We’re committed to developing the best open, cross platform media player out there – so you can certainly expect that Songbird will develop all of these features (and more) over time! We’re just getting started. Thanks for the feedback!
I am hoping to one day replace iTunes completely, and Songbird may be the app I’m looking for… Once you’ve ironed out the issues.
What I’d really like is a Songbird Lite — the library organization, extensive file format support, and metadata editor — and that’s about it. I’m sure the integrated web ideas you have are great, but I’m sure many people would be very pleased with a simple, lean and able iTunes alternative.
Worst case scenario, I can ignore features I don’t use though. One thing I can’t ignore is poor playback. Please increase the quality of Flac playback! Also, support for 96khz/24bit Flac is a must!
Thanks a ton for your work, and good luck!
I’ve tested Banshee, a music player in C#/mono (yuck!) for gnome by novel.
The UI is great and it’s nice to use it because it’s integrated with gnome.
Maybe you should look at it.
@Gareth
Sadly SHOUTcast is a continuous stream without breaks in tracks. There are other radio services however that offer track by track with ability to skip. An example of a service that has this feature is LAUNCHcast. Maybe we can partner with a provider to enable that kind of experience in the near future
@Pete
Sounds like an ideal scenario for our mighty Web Page API to enable music to automatically show up in a custom library and create playlists as well for users of your service!
@Matt Midgley
I definitely agree with you, our FLAC support isn’t up to par currently. We’re definitely counting on fixing this using the mighty powers of gStreamer in a release coming to you soon (or maybe even sooner! *crosses fingers*)
“Fugazi”? “Genesis”? Are thier some ProgRock-Fans in the Songbird team?
))
I would definitely love to see a more customizable toolbar. Like how firefox has the ability to add or remove buttons from the main toolbar.
Firefox has the ability to add and remove buttons from the toolbar(s) Something like that would be awesome in a media player.
I’m going to sound like an ass for asking this, but I was wondering about Zune support. I’ve read that some people were getting (certain) Zunes working, but it was only on the PC. I am a Mac user, and would love to ditch my PC entirely, unfortuneately, I love my Zune too much. I know I can use BootCamp, but I would love to be able to sync while doing stuff in OS X.
Thanks.
@Karl
Hmmm, well, you’re not an ass for asking
But it is a tall order to fill. We’ll see what we can do when we add MTP support to Mac and Linux.
Interesting.. When i installed songbird from getdeb, the memory usage dropped from 180mb to 80 mb. That is nearly 100mb reduction. Wondering what made the difference
P.S. Before i was using the one downloaded from this site. Don’t know if its sort of a bug or something, but it is working just fine now!!!!
Haven’t quite read the entirety of the blog yet, so it may have already been suggested, but it would be great if there were an option to ignore “The” in artist names. ie The Beatles could be found under ‘B’ instead of ‘T’
I’m really waiting for full album art support. Great to hear that you are working on it.
I hope that it will work well with covers from id3 tags same as covers located in music folder.
Do you have any plans about improving iPod support?
* read\write ratings from ipod database
* read\write covers from id3 tags (the same as mention before) and from\to ipod’s album art db.
Looks great. Hopefully I can one day replace iTunes and WMP. Needs ability to play CDs, integrate with music stores (emusic, walmart, etc.).
How about online music storage so I can store my library online and access it from home or the office without having to carry my ipod or USB device around?
@rafel:
I know it’s a massive balancing act to get the break-through feature which differentiate your product from other media players, but I think that getting stable player features over the newer ‘play the web’ features would help your product penetrate more. I know this is definitely the case switching from IE to Firefox, back in the day. Firefox ended up being just as useful for the basic tasks, but it was the EXTRA features which really sold me, but only once I was already using it.
I’m probably preaching to believers here, considering some of you guys have already worked on great, successful products before!
Folks,
i love the bird but in the roadmap I can only see MTP sync related to Windows until v0.9. Same time I dont understand the focus on performance at the moment. With v0.6 it is enhanced already very very good.
Martin
@markus
Indeed…The names of the releases pre-date me!
@Ed & The Great Edhead
Thanks for the feedback, a customizable toolbar is definitely on our action item list. Once we are done implementing a new UI during this upcoming release we’ll be in a better position to explore and implement this feature. We definitely want it too!
@Vivek
We’ll look into this, not sure why that would be the case!
@Dave
Godo news: In our upcoming release, we’re planning to create new rules so that indefinite articles no longer impact the sort order on Track/Artist/Album Names. You can follow this bug if you like! Thanks for the suggestion.
@Astar
In a few weeks we should be posting about how implementing album art support is going, keep an eye on the blog for an update – it will speak to a number of your questions! We are constantly improving our iPod support – is there something specific you’re looking for feature wise? BTW we already read ratings from the iTunes database (but we don’t write back – nor do we have any upcoming plans to support write back). I’ll ask around to see what it would take to support reading iPod DB’s too.
@Doug
Great idea, we agree this would be an awesome feature. We’ve got this listed on our Feature Requests page and will definitely be exploring options to support it down the road. This could also be a very handy 3rd party add-on! For instance, ubucket has created an add-on that you might want to try out.
@koppah
Thanks for your comments. Our roadmap represents our current best thinking. As mentioned in the post, we’ll be constantly updating it as we go based on the progress we make and the feedback we hear from users such as yourself. I think your suggestions for our approach align with our intentions, which is to focus on creating a stable player with core media player features.
@Martin Nemec
Thanks for the feedback. We agree, we’ve made a lot of performance improvements in 0.6. That said, based on our own observations, as well as incoming user feedback, there are definitely additional areas in the application where we’d like to optimize. For instance, in the next release we’re exploring ways to reduce the time it takes to scan metadata, reduce the time it takes to cold-launch the application, and continue to look for ways to reduce the memory footprint. In addition to developing new functionality, we think ongoing performance improvements are important areas for us to focus on.
@aus Jun 20, 2008 11:47 am:
It could be implemented like the ring buffer recording of MythTV and other PVR systems. Keep the last hour (or whatever size) and let the listener pause and rewind within the buffer while Songbird keeps appending to the buffer in the background. You could also set some sort of markers when the stream sends a tag/title update.
Hi folks,
I have just came across the Nepomuk-Mozilla activities and I’m really enthusiastic about these activities… In all the docs i can see only Firefox and Thunderbird is mentioned..
Could you elaborate maybe a bit on the future connection of the Bird with the Semantic Desktop? Do we see this integrated in 1.0 already?
Spocky
Hello!
I really like Songbird and it’s my standard music player/ music library on my linux computer, but not on my windows computer, yet.
There is one feature that I miss. I want to be able to change the volume of my mp3-songs in Songbird. I use it to change the volume of my songs in my ipod to max, so that I can have a really loud volume when playing my ipod on speakers/soundsystems.
On my windows computer I do this in iTunes, and on my linux computer I do this in the application gtkpod. It’s open source so you can have a look at it.
Links:
http://www.gtkpod.org/
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnupod/
Ok. I love songbird, and I think that you have done really great things. I have to say I am INCREDIBLY frustrated by not seeing a ripping feature in the songbird roadmap yet. Not being able to pop a CD in and rip audio to the songbird library is very close to a deal breaker for me. On windows I use songbird because the options on that platform are bad enough that having a second ripping program is tolerable. On linux I use Amarok. I like the songbird look more. I like the feel more. I LOVE the integration with web browser, but Amarok lets me rip directly into my library. So it’s a deal breaker.
I was just about to import my rather massive music collection into Songbird and noticed that it doesn’t seem to have any support for grouping compilation records together! There isn’t even a “compilation” checkbox in the metadata dialog
I only have complete ripped CDs in my collection so it is very album oriented. This is a show stopper for me. 
@Victor
Ripping/transcoding won’t be coming until after they use G-Streamer on all 3 platforms. So we’re probably looking at Hall or later for that. Definitely post-Genesis. Trust me, it’s a feature many are also awaiting.
@Per Wigren
Sure, we could add something like that, but it still wouldn’t provide very accurate skipping to the previous or next tracks. As long as users are OK with some sloppiness there we may be able to do something. However, some streams also do not give any currently playing information so you’d just end up with one huge blob of something that you can seek through.
@aus
It’s still much better than nothing. Being unable to pause and rewind live media streams is so last century.
As an actually a more “conservative” media player user I tried songbird as a new alternative for winamp, just for playing my library on my pc – and not very interested in the possibilties of web 2.0 integrated in my media player..
))
But I have to say, looking at your roadmap and seeing much of the other great stuff you can already do with THE BIRD showed me, that songbird has so much potential to be also the ultimative web 2.0 mediaplayer.
Seeing the possibilities and services songbirds will provide, makes even “CD and offline music playing, radio and online music-deniers” like me interested in “musicWeb 2.0″.
So 2009 will be a great, world-conquerering year for firebird!
(And with Songbird 1.0 the Firefox download record will be history!
But enough of the praise.
I’ve seen in your roadmap, that the next important thing on the way to conquer the world is changing/improving the gui.
Here my 2 cents:
I’m one of these guys, who’s always too little space on theirs screen, always looking smallest skin with the tiniest buttons and most efficient layout for their internet browser, media player, etc.
)
With a media player, that has a library, tabs, panells, lyrics-, now playing- andmashtap-windows etc (certainly always open at the same time) it’s the more important to be efficient.
(F. e., one thing I didn’t like about the current itunes-layout is: “player section” it’s one fat bar using a lot of space downward, while to the left and right of it there’s a lot of unused space. I know I can collapse it, but then I lose some buttons and functions.)
What I want to say: lot’s of buttons and functions on as little space as possible would be great. The rest will do the right skin
Thank you for all taken into account our wishes …
I can come back on the possibility of having a portable version of songbird …
Do you think this is possible?
Thank you
TOOOOOO bad there is no media import possible yet. I’ll stay stick with itunes.