The Songbird team recently had to make a difficult, but necessary, decision that will affect all Macintosh PowerPC users. Beginning with 0.7, and including all subsequent releases of Songbird, Mac PPC builds will no longer be officially supported.
Specifically, this means that Songbird 0.6.1 will be the last official Songbird release that supports the Mac PPC architecture.
All other other Songbird platforms and versions Windows XP/Vista, Linux 32- and 64-bit, and Mac OS X Intel will continue to be supported.
Beginning with Songbird 0.7, scheduled for release in August, there will be:
- No official Mac PPC support, there will be no official Songbird 0.7 for Mac PPC.
- No more Mac PPC nightly builds, effective 07/20/2008.
- No updates for Mac PPC users running previous releases.
This decision was made for a variety of reasons. We’re a small team with limited resources and we have decided to to focus our efforts on platforms where we see the highest numbers of users. For those interested in understanding the reasons behind this decision in greater detail please read/discuss in this thread.
We’ve created a set of anticipated Frequently Asked Questions specific to Mac PPC users regarding details outside of the scope of this post. Please feel free to reach out to us with any additional questions or concerns.
This has not been an easy decision. Our apologies go out to all Songbird users who are running a Mac PPC build. While we understand that it might not feel like it now, we appreciate your interest and enthusiasm for our project. We sincerely hope you’ll give us another try on one of our officially supported platforms in the future.
Developers:
The Songbird team is extremely eager to continue to support the Macintosh PowerPC developer community. If there is desire out there to maintain an unofficial, community-contributed Songbird Mac PPC build, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us if you’re interested!
Songbird Mac PPC developers will continue to be able to:
- Checkout the Songbird source code from our subversion repository.
- Submit patches to bugzilla that apply to Mac PPC builds.
- Review the results of integration builds, Madison is the builder you’re interested in looking at.
- Upload Add-ons for Songbird Mac PPC users.
2 Trackbacks
[...] Songbird 0.7 Beta, Mac OS X 10.4 ve üzeri sistemleri desteleyen, açık kaynaklı bir yazılım. Kötü haber şu ki, Songbird artık Intel işlemcili sistemlere özel bir yazılım. Maalesef geliştiriciler sürüm 0.6.1′den itibaren PowerPC desteğini geri çektiler… [...]
Songbird 0.7.0 for MacOSX PPC…
So the folks behind Songbird have dropped official support for the Mac PPC crowd.
So I’ve decided to do my own build to test it out. The build process isn’t as straight forward as with the its cousin Firefox. Getting the dependencies layout correct …
19 Comments
SubscribeIt’s very sad decision
as it includes some features which i desperately want
But then I think its justified as you can concentrate more on the other platforms (especially LInux where songbird is the only ultimate player available). Eagerly waiting for the 0.7 release…
64bit Linux, but no PPC? Just admit it that if “the small team” did NOT produce a Linux version, it’ll get flamed by the Linux community since you’ve taken something from them (Mozilla and VLC) without giving anything back.
@comctrl6
there’s no conspiracy here! mac ppc is a very different build to support than the rest of the x686 platforms (including 64-bit linux which btw is a larger download/install base for us than mac ppc - and unlike ppc, linux 64-bit is growing). honestly, this is a bandwidth issue.
That’s the reason, the floodgates on getsatisfaction got struck wide open this night and were flooded with directly answered questions about this…
@comctrl6 & Mr. Raffel: I have to agree with Raffel. PPC is a dieing system and on the way of the dinosaur, while 64bit OS’es are on the rise and in the future will be the next standard. It may happen as soon as 2 years, when the standard PC user will stream/download/manipulate HD Videos out of the net and we all need rigs with at least 4gb of ram.
The only reason I’m not using a 64bit built right now is the poor support for it. No flash, no Java and foremost no Firefox built onto it is just a showstopper for now. When that gets fixed, I’m all in.
Tyler out!
… or it could be that getsatisfaction has an annoying registration process, and it wasn’t worth the hassle. Dunno what you’re talking about on 64-bit, Tyler; I’ve had all the things you mentioned running under Ubuntu AMD-64 for months.
I’ll be sad to lose Songbird; had it on my Mac, Linux box, and two Windows boxes.
It’s too bad… I was thinking of a Wii build (Wii is PowerPC)
@GeekShadow
The community could still take on maintaining and supporting a Wii build if interested - this decision doesn’t prevent that.
@scruss
Since we’re only discontinuing official support for Mac PPC, I hope you’ll consider continuing to run Songbird on your Linux and Windows boxes!
With a little luck Songbird will still build and run on Fedora-ppc, so Mac users will just have to install Fedora
Can you please please please get an officially working GStreamer-based PPC release out before turning off the respirator?
I understand the resource issues and see the reasoning behind your decision, but that’s a big hump to get over on our own, especially since it’s so tantalizingly close.
My FLACs skip like Spicoli. Pls snd hlp.
@Underlying Patterns
we’re very happy to help the community attempt to land gstreamer on Mac PPC and would certainly provide useful instructions to anyone who reached out to us to give it a try. however, since we’re dropping official support for Mac PPC we won’t be spending time landing gstreamer on Mac PPC ourselves.
Oh well, my sad old PowerMac G4 gets another reason to eat the dust. Shame I can’t blame you really. Heard the next version of Gecko is dropping PPC support as well. So maintaining a PPC would be just prolonging the inevitable.
Congratulations with shipping the latest windows build with gstreamer.
But, it don’t work
I’m sure with the cool Songbird-team it will next week, when I’m back from holiday
Daniel - can you let us know (via getsatisfaction) what’s not working about the gstreamer stuff on windows for you? It’s working well for us here.
@msmith
I will try out the new build, if it doesn’t work I report it on satisfaction.
I couldn’t play songs (play button did not start song, right mouse –> play did not start the song).
^^both feathers gonzo and rubberducky btw^^
Today’s build worked
I hope it will bring much wanted features to Songbird
whywhywhy??? :v(
This is really sad for me. Anyway, is there anything like songbird, that is compatible with ppc?
@PPCFan:
Apple no longer supports PPC, Mac OS X 10.6 will remove PPC support, new Macs use Intel processors, etc.
@insertwittyname: You could port Songbird unofficially or use VLC or (god forbid) iTunes.