The first blessed nightly build for this release is available for testing! Although we are still finishing up development, we appreciate any attention the QA community can give to the following changes:
- New UI – We are still adding the final touches to the UI but we went ahead and made it the default in the hopes of getting more eyes on it. The new UI includes significant visual and functional changes such as:
- A new dedicated tab that contains all of your media content
- Ability to show/hide the service pane when viewing webpages (it’s automatically hidden when viewing web content, but a button will allow you to toggle show/hide)
- Ability to choose where the player controls live, the top or bottom of the window, based on user preference (View menu -> Player Controls or right click on the player control pane)
- Faster Media Scan – Scanning for media on your local drive should be super fast now. We did a quick test and saw that scanning in 1,000 tracks took half as much time as before. We’re curious to hear what kinds of improvements you see when scanning in your music collection.
- First Run Wizard – The wizard will walk you through EULA, media scanning, and installing recommended add-ons when launching the application for the first time. You’ll need to create a new profile to be presented with the wizard.
- Drag & Drop – You should be able to drag and drop all sorts of things in the application now. Give it a try and let us know if you think we’ve missed anything that you think you might want to drag and drop.
Any feedback or bug report that you send us is going to make the final release build that much better – please keep them coming!
59 Comments
SubscribeOMG, scanning for metadata takes forever, why can’t we make it in the background so I can play music while it is going on, like in 0.6.1?
Looks lovely, but it’s not scanning for media at all for me. Tried from 1) setting the directory to scan at first startup, 2) choosing “Scan for Media…” from the File menu on second startup and 3) dragging my music folder onto the main window.
Running Ubuntu 8.04.1, top says my Songbird is sleeping.
Hi Ian:
Which is taking more time, the “Reading Metadata” phase or the “Finding and removing duplicates” phase?
This change cut the reading phase time in half, but the removing duplicates phase still sucks. Hopefully we’ll have both fixed for this release.
As for making the window non-modal, I completely agree, but there isn’t much we can do right now other than get it over with quickly.
In 0.6 we made library scrolling smoother, but as a side effect it became impossible to use the library while a media scan was running. We couldn’t lose the scrolling performance, so we were forced to lock you out of the app while importing media.
Once we’ve fixed how the library works we should be able to move to a non-modal status update similar to something like what this wireframe shows.
fanfan:
Hmm, so it just sits there and nothing happens? Can you check the error console (Tools menu -> Error Console) for messages?
Thanks!
Why did you remove the “switch to mini mode” button beside the minimize button?
@Ryan Fox
We took a look at all the buttons in the UI and tried to eliminate as much as possible. Removing the “Feathers Button” and offloading its functionality to the title bar (so that right clicking the title bar area will display the same menu as the “Feathers Button”) was one decision we made to remove what we saw as clutter. Another example is how we’ve combined the “Create Bookmark” and “Create Subscription” buttons into one.
Do you miss the “Feathers Button”? Do you find that switching between layouts using the contextual menu in the title bar or the key combination (alt+shift+m or command+shift+m) is lacking?
@Matt
I am having the same issue. Seeing you question to fanfan, I opened up my error console, cleared it of the plethora of entries already there(seeing as it is a prebuild, I expect these) and here is what pops up when I try to scan for media:
Warning: reference to undefined property Cc['@songbirdnest.com/Songbird/DirectoryImportService;1']
Source File: chrome://songbird/content/scripts/playerOpen.js
Line: 528
Error: Cc['@songbirdnest.com/Songbird/DirectoryImportService;1'] is undefined
Source File: chrome://songbird/content/scripts/playerOpen.js
Line: 528
UI very cool in terms of usability etc but lacks a bit of contrast in my opinion. Still, great release.
Congrats for the release! Just a question… do you plan to implement “watch folder for media” by the time 0.7 final ships?
0.7pre is another big step in the right direction:
)
- for me the finished gonzo will be the best mediaplayer gui I’ve seen so far.
I like the clean, efficient, logical layout and its possibilities to toggle and costumize everything. In this version everything is on the right place.
I like the (Just a suggestion: I miss buttons to open/show the panes & sidebar when they are closed/hidden. Buttons – maybe near the place where they are hidden – would be faster than always open it in the “View”-menu.)
- finally the search/filter-function works really fast and is useable.
Great Job!
Thank you very much and keep going the good work!
Can’t wait for 0.7final!
moribund
> right clicking the title bar area will display the same menu as the “Feathers Button” Do you miss the “Feathers Button”?
I like having the feathers button, but I don’t want it to show me a menu. I’d prefer a button that simply toggles between main and mini players with one click. If I’m working I prefer to have the mini player on my screen. Then I want to “click”-”choose song”-”click” and get back to work – I can do that virtually on auto-pilot. Choosing something from a menu is ever so slightly more distracting, if that doesn’t sound like too small or petty a concern.
The performance of switching players is also important in this, but you’re doing such a good job optimising the rest of the app, that I’m sure it’ll come. Good work on the new interface too.
Hi,
Not sure I’m a fan of the new UI. Seems a little to compact, and much to iTunesy for me…Will that be the new default?
But good to know you can still switch into Rubberducky. Although my own feathers look like they might need quite a bit of tweaking for 0.7. If I update my current 0.6 feathers to work in 0.7 will that break them in 0.6?
I’m getting the media scanning but it’s much slower than it was before. Dedicated tab for media is a really good idea, and I also notice that double clicking next to a a tab creates a new one. Excellent.
Are the maximize and restore icons reversed? Shouldn’t it be one rectangle when minimized and 2 when in maximized mode?
@Matt
Only thing in the error console is
Error: Feathers Metadata Reader: The element in install.rdf is deprecated and will go away in a future version.
Source File: file:///home/fanfan/Songbird_20080724/components/sbFeathersManager.js
Line: 177
I also tried deleting the .songbird2 folder again (I had done this anyway before first startup of 0.7pre) and still no success. For what it’s worth, .6 was working fine.
“why can’t we make it in the background so I can play music while it is going on,”
I agree… Anything that shows a progress meter to stop use of the app should be done in the background. A progress meter could appear somewhere non-modaly
—- GUI —-
I am loving the new theme, but it has a couple usability tweaks I believe would make it a bit easier to use:
1) The target areas in the new theme are far too small. I have difficulty reliably hitting the scrollbars, the titlebar, the navigation buttons and so on. A major complaint of mine would be the titlebar, which is very short making it hard to move the application around. The play/track seek buttons are large, which is a plus.
2) In the Options window, I first noticed the rather large area to the right that is unused. This is reserved for the OK and Cancel buttons, but seem to be a rather large waste of space.
3) The Addons window does not use a border on the right side of the content, making the grey area to the right seem like a UI bug.
4) The Options window will resize itself when clicking on Tabs, Content and other small UI sizes, but does not enlarge itself when switching back to a large options pane, cutting off items in the Addons pane, Advanced pane, Privacy pane, etc. The Options window will also never scale upwards, cutting off panes that need extra vertical space.
5) The pink selected color in the Addons pane seems out of place, and made me think that the selected addon was disabled. I had to click other addons to discover that the pink was the selected state. Not very intuitive.
6) As others have said, the contrast on this theme is lacking. The lighter grey colors are much easier on the eyes than the black theme (the black theme was the main reason I didn’t use songbird before), but the gui’s small target areas lacking a large contrast change means it is difficult to figure out what does what.
7) The menu items (file,etc,controls,etc) should have a hover state when the mouse rolls over them.
http://jink.us/bugs/Songbird-Options_Menu.png
I love the new theme, it is worlds better than the black theme. One of the ’small’ tweaks I enjoyed was the new highlighting of the panes in the show/hide menu, the red color makes it easy to identify what you are showing/hiding.
I still have issues figuring out what pane an add-on can be displayed in, and I have to dig through many menus and options to turn on addons that affect the appearance of the application. I am not sure of an enhancement in this area, but it has aggrivated me since I first used 0.6. I am never sure how to show or hide an addon, SongBird never helps in that area by highlighting menus or showing dialogs that would allow me to show or hide the addons.
—-Playback—-
While playing shoutcast streams, I ran into an issue where I paused the shoutcast for a few seconds to allow a co-worker to talk to me. When I resumed playback the stream played fine for a few seconds, but then started garbling. The stream would not correct itself, and I had no way to “restart” the stream. I had to navigate back to the page I started the shoutcast and find the stream again to force songbird to dump it’s cache and start playing the stream back correctly. The lack of a stop or restart button made this a difficult operation to perform, and would be a show stopper for novice users.
You are doing a great job! Please keep up the work and post a ton of blog entries, I love reading them on planet.mozilla.org, and it keeps me interested in the application.
@Derek
Thank you so much for your detailed feedback!
We agree that the options/preferences dialog is a bit of a mess right now. There are 3 pending bugs that would address the brokenness that you have reported:
bug 10991: movearound boxes in pref pane window
bug 10993: dont auto-resize the hotkey prefs pane
bug 10635: replace all placeholder images and colors with final-feather-candidates
Your thoughts about contract, visual hierarchy, click target positioning/size is exactly the kind of feedback that is going to help us refine the application UI – keep them coming!
@komi
Thanks for the response. As I use the application today I will try to post more comments. My apologies for not looking in bugzilla first, would you prefer these comments to be added to bugzilla in the form of new bugs?
The organization of the new UI is step in the right direction. I’d like the color scheme to be the same as Rubberducky, though.
One nit: open a new tab, enter URL substring, wait for the pull down menu and hit ‘arrow down’ to select one of the alternatives. Then hit enter. Nothing happens. Hit enter again and the URL is displayed. In Firefox one enter is sufficient.
Also, draggin-and-droppin whole Genre into existing playlist is a no op. In fact, I cannot diplay playlists at all.
I hate to be such a negative spoiler but: select a genre, select an artist, double click on it so first song from the artist starts playing. then click on another artist (in the upper half, not the listing in the lower half) or genre. then click on the song name next to the play controls. I’d expect this would take me back to the listing which contains the currently playing song but nothing happens.
To provide some balance: kudos for taking out the Shuffle control of the play controls rectangle and displaying them separately.
I don’t know if this is a recognized problem.
I have several MP3 files (maybe VBR, I don’t know) that, in SongBird, pause every few seconds during playback for a moment before continuing. In every other music app they play fine, and streaming the same files in through GNUMP3d works perfectly. This was happening in 0.6, but I assumed it was because I had edited the meta data on these files in 0.6pre right after that feature had been added and it broke something. However, I just copied these over from an “untainted” source as well as playing them in iTunes/QuickTime and they playback fine except for in SongBird. I’m on OSX 10.5, by the way
This didn’t happen in 0.5 and earlier that I know of.
Any thoughts?
The new blessed crashes everytime I add songs to my library…right at the end of the reading metadata stage.
Chris: are you running Windows XP? It’s probably choking on a WMA file. See
http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/show_bug.cgi?id=11057
Fanfan, Warren: thanks for the help. I’ll see if I can reproduce this problem.
I’m running into the same problem as Warren and FanFan, and my error console output is the same as Warren’s is.
I’m running Songbird on Linux, in case that helps
Aaron, fanfan, Warren: Thanks, I’m able to reproduce the problem. See http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/show_bug.cgi?id=11074 if you are interested in updates.
Aaron, fanfan, Warren: were you by any chance trying to scan a network folder?
@Matt
Not I. All my files are on my internal hard drive. This doubles as a home theatre pc, so there isn’t anything fancy about my setup. I’m running on Linux btw.
Actually, on the topic of media scanning, something I would LOVE to see added to this feature is the ability to detect missing/deleted files and folders in relation to a library already created. When it detects any missing/deleted files, if it could show a pop up advising us and ask if we would like to have the corresponding entries removed from our library.
I recently came in to possession of a couple discographies, much better maintained than the files I already had. So I deleted them and copied over the new versions. Now, these are for korean bands and my original ones had the names romanized, where as the new ones are in hangul(korean), so to save me the step of having to do it manually, if the scan could do it for me, that would be great
Warren:
Check out SteveL’s ‘Ghostbusters’ (http://addons.songbirdnest.com/addon/214) and ‘Attack of the Clones’ (http://addons.songbirdnest.com/addon/216) add-ons.
As for media scanning, I lied, I can’t reproduce it. I was hitting an old bug with scanning network folders.
If you run Songbird from a terminal window do you see something like “Operation not supported by backend”?
@Matt
Tried running from terminal per your suggestion to Warren. I get the “*** UPLOADING METRICS ***” message, then nothing. Running Songbird from my home folder and my tunes reside there as well. On behalf of this lazy commenter, thanks for filing the bug.
Nope im running vista.
Dunno if it was my pc, instability or if there was an update.,.. or my eyes, but the maximize/minimize buttons are just fine now.
I know it was not a significant issue, but thought any feedback helps while you guys focus on the major stuff.
@Warren: the detect-missing-deleted-files is I believe part of the Watchfolders feature but it was ditched for 0.7: http://wiki.songbirdnest.com/Roadmap
This build has problems with non-english locale under linux.
By default I have:
$ locale
LANG=ru_RU.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE=”ru_RU.UTF-8″
LC_NUMERIC=”ru_RU.UTF-8″
LC_TIME=”ru_RU.UTF-8″
LC_COLLATE=”ru_RU.UTF-8″
LC_MONETARY=”ru_RU.UTF-8″
LC_MESSAGES=”ru_RU.UTF-8″
LC_PAPER=”ru_RU.UTF-8″
LC_NAME=”ru_RU.UTF-8″
LC_ADDRESS=”ru_RU.UTF-8″
LC_TELEPHONE=”ru_RU.UTF-8″
LC_MEASUREMENT=”ru_RU.UTF-8″
LC_IDENTIFICATION=”ru_RU.UTF-8″
LC_ALL=
with first start it tries to download ru-RU (Russian) localization and than has infinite error loop with messagebox, which suggests revert to english. I press “switch to english”… and has the same error after restart.
Error:
parseError:[JavaScript Error: "undefined entity" {file: "file:///home/astar/bin/Songbird_20080724/chrome/songbird/content/songbird/bindings/firstRun/firstRunEula.xml" line: 66 column: 9 source: " <xul:label class="sb-first-run-header""}]
parseError:[JavaScript Error: "undefined entity" {file: "file:///home/astar/bin/Songbird_20080724/chrome/songbird/content/songbird/bindings/firstRun/firstRunWelcome.xml" line: 61 column: 9 source: " <xul:label class="sb-first-run-header""}]
if i switch my locale to en_EN.UTF-8 first start works well, and then i can use it with my main locale.
And i can’t really interrupt localization downloading. If i press cancel it tries again.
New interface is pretty good. Looks very promising. Good work!
my system:
ubuntu iterpid ibex alpha bla-bla-bla (with all updates from repo.)
This build crashes everytime I run it. So I tried 0.61 instead. That works pretty nice. Then I started scanning my files and it crashed. That’s fine. But now it crashes EVERY time I restart it. So it’s basically useless.
ipod doesn’t work for me under linux.
do i need to install smth. additional (except ipod extension)?
I’ve been usiong Songbird for years
However the tab customization is still poor….
It screwed up my library. (i had backup) But now even with clean profile and fresh install i don’t see Library option in left pan. Seriously…and When i select scan nothing happens. switching back to 0.6…Please..when yuo relaunch 0.7 please don’t as us to create new library…:)
Mmm so looking great so far.. my only gripe is that (1) the eula first-run window doesn’t have any chrome, so you can’t move it, kind of a usability issue, and (2) songbird (without asking me) downloaded the en-NZ locale, then repeatedly whined that it couldn’t find a certain string in a file somewhere (I forget where). I fixed this by starting songbird without an internet connection, so it couldn’t download the locale.
I like the skin (I tried it out when it was a feather add-on and I liked it then, too)
Only a few problems:
Control buttons (close, maximize, minimize) are missing hover/pressed state graphics.
Songbird crashes while scanning my metadata. There is no indication which files it was scanning when it crashed so I have no easy way to narrow the field down from 7000 files to a specific one.
Addendum: It could be Chris’ WMA problem since I have WMA files in my library.
This version looks so amazing, congratulations!!
Thinks I especially like:
-Ability to move player controls to the top of the bottom.
-Clean appearance (though a bit too iTunish maybe?… anyway, that will be possible to be changed with feathers…)
-Integration of the 5 stars rating in the status bar. It’s so much easier now, more logical to rate songs.
-Clicking on the song that is played takes you to the list that you are using. Really useful too, sometimes I missed a lot of time searching for the song that was being played in the library.
-Left bar hiding while watching websites. Reaaaally cool. I’d like buttons like that one for the rest of the pans, though.
Things I don’t like:
-The media searching is way faster, but the “finding and removing duplicates” still isn’t. SB crashed when it was doing so, by the way, but maybe it was because I was playing a song at the same time.
-SB crashed when I rated one song.
Anyway, big congratulations.
Thank you guys, nice work
The UI is absolutely phenomenal. I love the pictures, the tour dates, the layout, the colors; everything!
I’ve always been a minimalist as far as design goes, and this just makes me giddy. I love it.
So, did smart playlists made it in 0.7? That’s one of the features I really miss in 0.6
Yes, they did.
I’m trying it right now.
Interesting Nightly Build… good work!
The UI is great!
And now… gapless playback! Gapless playback!!!
thanks!
maurizio
Are you people using the nightly build with your IPOD? Is it now supported(i did search I think
)
I know the IPOD add on said it did not support .70 pre build.
I hope I am wrong. I cannot get the IPOD to show up.
Connor, the current official ipod extension doesn’t support 0.70pre, but if you download the nightly build of the extension it should work fine. That is what I am doing and it looks to work a lot better than the current official build. In my experience anyways
Hi!
I’ve just tested the nightly build of 2008-07-30, and I quite like it.
However, there are still a few things missing that would make it a true album player.
I am an avid fan of the Linux program “QuodLibet”, along with the excellent tag editor “ExFalso”. Both have the ability to display and edit any tag of your choice. On top of that, the player allows the user to have more than three filter panes, and to choose from any tag you would like, including things like “conductorsort”, “composersort”, “performer” or “album – part” (two tags in one).
The tags are listed in a simple and clean table, which makes it very easy to make changes to tags.
It also lacks the important (Ogg/Vorbis ?) “part” tag (at least, important for classical music listeners).
These things will hopefully arrive in a following release, like 0.8. But honestly, I must say that the Linux (x64) version works quite well, and is (or rather feels) much more responsive than the 0.6 version. Kudos!
Best regards
/Danai Sae-Han
Warren:
Thank you I figured it out after I posted and knew that there had to be something out there.
I am glad people are moving forward with small fixes and this looks to be something I would use as my replacement. I do not care if it looks like ITUNES because the interface on ITUNES isn’t bad it is just a resource hog and restrictive.
Thanks once again for the help!
Also as a suggestion. Could newer comments be posted on top ?
I am so demanding…haha
Hi, I haven’t downloaded this new release, but I was wondering if anybody knows if iPod’s are mounting faster? Mine takes anywhere from 10-15min to “mount” it, then it asks me if I want to sync…also, is there an option to have it sync automatically when I plug it in? If anyone could answer my questions, I’d love it (and I’m REALLY excited about smart playlists coming to Songbird!!!)
I’m running 0.6 by the way.
Build 2008073101 on Ubuntu 8.10 on 2GB Core Duo – ~24k tracks
‘Identifying and removing duplicates…’ – ~9 minutes
‘Reading Metadata’ – ~12 minutes
Not the fault of Songbird, but Ubuntu responded very slowly / locking up while scan running even though Songbird only took ~10% CPU max (could it not use more and work quicker?).
* FLAC tracking now works perfectly
* Gonzo looking very nice. Request scrollbars increased in size – too small in comparison to UI default
* maximize state is not remembered
Great work, guys!
@MonoApe
I’m not sure using more CPU would help much since scanning metadata is disk bound. That means that the performance is mostly tied to how fast the disk can read the metadata and seek to the next file and so forth.
hmm.. thank you very much. usefull information
Super. It took almost a day to find this info. Thanks, great job.