We’re putting the finishing touches on a big update to Songbird that will land in early August – look for a Release Candidate shortly! This upcoming release is a major milestone for the product as Songbird will be moving into beta.
We decided it was time to move from alpha to beta for the following reasons:
- Refreshed the UI
We’ve been working hard on making the application more consumer friendly. Hopefully, both new users and experienced users will find the new user interface simpler and more intuitive. We’ll continue to ensure that the Songbird voice comes through in the design. - Identified Songbird 1.0 Platform Support
We locked down the platforms we’ll be supporting for 1.0 they are: Windows Vista/XP, Mac OS X Intel Machines, Linux 32- and 64-bit. - Shipping a New Media Core
Nightly users have already had a sneak peak at running Songbird with GStreamer on all of our supported platforms. By default, it’s only supporting FLAC playback but in our 1.0 release it will be our default media core for all media playback! - Landed Numerous Core Media Player Features
We’ve landed metadata reading/writing, have enhanced our drag & drop functionality, enabled syncing to MTP and iPod devices, and are days away from shipping support for album artwork and smart playlists. - Performance and Optimization Improvements
We’ve worked on making the application more stable and zippier in all sorts of ways. Users will notice that searching, scrolling, importing media and reading metadata are at or very near the needs of a daily use media player.
Our plan is to ship Songbird 1.0 before the end of 2008. We’re putting the finishing touches on planning the feature work that you can expect in the 1.0 application. We’ll update the Roadmap as soon as our planning work is complete.
By going into beta we are signaling that a wider audience of users are qualified to start using the application. The more feedback we can get in the upcoming months will help us ensure that we ship a 1.0 that we can all be proud of and use daily. Now back to wrapping up the current release!
7 Comments
SubscribeWow. Beta. What a milestone that will be. Awesome. It’s close to the time, where I will deploy the bird to the masses. Nice. I’m eagerly waiting for this!
OMFG. This version of Songbird rules. You took ideas from the iTunes theme and made it even better (a lot better!). I still miss some things, but I don’t care. I LOVE to use this version of Songbird!
It still lacks cd playing/ripping
CD Ripping/Playing would be a major plus.
I’m also kind of wishing the web feature was more like Firefox 3 with bookmarks, bookmark-bar, the awesome bar, and other features…
I do love the new UI and feel of the media player, though.. It’s a really great job that is beginning to shape more professionally, like the new Winamp.
“Identified Songbird 1.0 Platform Support
We locked down the platforms we’ll be supporting for 1.0 they are: Windows Vista/XP, Mac OS X Intel Machines, Linux 32- and 64-bit.”
So, from now on its impossible to play music on Win 2000? At least, nothing happens when I double click a song. Everything else seems to work without any problems.
This is great !
I can’t wait to see the 1.0 !!!
Killing support for power PCs? You’re breaking my heart, Songbird.