In the midst of end of the year holiday cheers, we’ve busily been planning the release to follow Songbird 1.0. Based on the great feedback you gave us via Get Satisfaction and those pesky surveys you diligently filled, we will focus on improving the audio playback and management experience as well as continue to enhance performances. This is what we’re working on for the next release known as Hendrix:
- Automatically fetching album art
This will allow Songbird to fetch missing album art from the web. - Watch folder
Provide a way to watch a folder hierarchy for changes and auto-magically import media. - Replay gain support (normalization)
If a track’s metadata contain replay gain (including iTunes-specific) information, Songbird will adjust the playback gain appropriately. - Better sorting
We’ll be introducing unicode collation and better handling of leading definite and indefinite articles. This means that “The Police” will sort before “Portishead” and the mandatory diacritics such as ö and ü contained in the name of heavy metal bands will sort as regular o and u. - Better gapless playback
Modern mp3 encoders place metadata information to indicate the exact beginning and end of the audio. Songbird will be able to read this information and use it to skip padding data that does not contain audio leading to perfect gapless playback. - Media core improvements
We’re going to improve some low level aspects of the media core which will lead to better playback performance and lower cpu usage on Windows. - Performance improvements
We continue to work on making the application more stable and zippier in all sorts of ways. Amongst other things, you should notice a smaller memory footprint.
Our plan is to ship Songbird 1.1 before the end of February 2009. You can follow our progress directly on our current working plan. We’ll continue to update the Roadmap to reflect our plan for the rest of 2009.
Thanks for your continuous support. The Songbird team wishes you a Happy New Year 2009.
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SubscribeNote that ignoring diacritics in sorting is NOT expected in all locales.
For example, in Sweden, å ä and ö are distinct letters that are last in the alphabet and so should be sorted as such.
Yippee! Watch Folder
Ya know, if you want to put a 1.0.1 out now with just Watch Folders….
I’d be cool with that.
Keep on the great work
Watching folder will be one of the features I awaited
@Håkan: I agree, and ideally I think this should be under user control via preferences rather than handled automatically based on localization. Those of us with large collections of international artists (and relatively little heavy metal) would like that option, even if we are using an American English version of Songbird. I realize, however, that implementing it this way might be less that straightforward…
@Håkan, boffo
Songbird will use standard unicode rules for sorting these characters which should enable it to respect whichever language the data is in. For example, the character å in would not decompose to the letter a + the symbol, but é would decompose to e + the symbol as it is a diacritic.
@Wayne
I wouldn’t hold my breadth for that if I were you
Watch Folders is a pretty big project lead by our Filesystem ninja Nick Kreeger. He’s got his hands full with this baby for 1.1 
WavPack support under Windows would be greatly appreciated. Any chance?
Now, all you need is to get rid of that EULA.
I really hope that a future roadmap will include developing support for mass storage devices, for large percentage of us without iPods or Zunes.
Are you planing to watch only a single folder? What if I have more than one folder with music? Maybe on another partition.
Gaaahhh I can’t wait! Any 1.01 to tide us over would be fantastic.
A big w00t for the new features! Thanks, Songbird Team!
Or a 1.01 with album art would be welcomed.
Can’t wait!
For files without metadata relating to gapless playback, is there any plan to support for detecting silence at the start/end of files and writing this metadata to files? (Or simply storing it in the library.)
@Markus
It will be possible to have more than one folder watched.
@Blair McBride
Phase two of Normalization support includes analyzing files without gapless information and saving that information in the id3 tags.
@Catherine
I assume you mean album art fetching since we have support for embedded album art already?
Status Messaging has a big line through it on the Hendrix page on the wiki. Does this mean that this feature has already been completed or does it mean that it’s no longer a goal for this release? And if so, will this mean that CD-ripping will likely get delayed for a later release than originally planned (i.e. later than Isan?) I’ve been waiting a long time for CD-ripping to be included in Songbird. I realize you have a lot priorities, but this seems like a no-brainer feature that every other media player contains and it’s very frustrating to see things like normalization get priority over such a basic, fundamental feature.
keep up the good work!! songbird’s the best program ever!
i just want to say thanks for to the songbird team for all there hard work in 2008 and i wish you all the best in 2009 making songbird bigger and better more features and more MP3 player support and more market share!!!!
cheers
Looking forward to this new release, thanks Songbirg guys!
By the way, are there any plan to implement auto-magic IDtag info retrieval/completion from the web, based on whatever content recognition, beyond album art itself?
I don’t want to be rude, but “streaming MP3 support” should be on that list too… I’m still not able to listen to my radio streams using Songbird (e.g. http://mp3.streampower.be/klara-high - full list: http://www.digitaleradio.be/dab/hoeluisteren/pc/help/Links_streams.html)
I hope you will notify us here, if a blessed Nightly is available.
Please bless a Nightly and hand it out to us 
I love testing Nightlies, but I apparently have no luck in picking one, every time I tried, something was badly broken
@Niels
We support streaming mp3 already and it works quite well. The quirks you are running into has to do with playlist parsing, fixes for this should land in the upcoming release. See bug 6466.
I don’t want to be a nag (well, ok, I do), but: What’s happening to podcasts? I only ask because there’s a page at http://wiki.songbirdnest.com/Releases/Hendrix/Podcasts but it’s blank, as if there was some intention to move forward with this that has now been quietly sidelined. Is this the case?
Can’t wait for folder watching.
Once songbird gets folder watching, album art downloading ( and auto meta data tagging, the bugs fixed and lighter memory use) it will be the perfect media player.
I expect great things from songbird in 2009, can’t wait.
Oh and why don’t you release folder watching as soon as its ready? :). That could be the only update it would suit me just find :D, and then have a major update later on.
For me folder watching is a necessity.
@Andy
We’re doing some prep work to enable podcasting to land in Isan during this release. It will end up fixing some podcasting bugs, but it won’t go beyond that. Isan will have Podcasting as one of the flagship features for that release. We’re all pretty excited about it
aus: Excellent news! To be honest, as lovely as I’m sure Isan’s implementation will be, I’d be overjoyed just to see the back of the bugs afflicting the current podcasting, so here’s hoping…
I actually prefer my “The (X)” titles to be sorted under “The” and not “(X)”. Just always seemed easier to me. :<
I’m really excited to see this project progress into the next year. I’m very much looking forward to the Watch Folder and Gapless Playback. The only additional feature I can think of that I would like to see would be a way to scrobble iPod plays to Last.fm. With the amount of listening I do on my iPod I’ll never fully be able to replace iTunes with songbird until I see this feature (the Last.fm plugin also does not seem to scrobble plays from HypeMachine, which I would love to see).
Can’t wait for Kregger to bring us the feature that’s gonna make all of us music lovers shifting completely to Songbird at last ! Come one Watch Folder ! Keep on the good work guys !!!
I agree, watch folders before anything else purrrrlease! Thanks for the hard work, I love where songbird is going.
Sounds great! Very much looking forward to the album art and gapless playback.
Better podcast/subscription support would be great as well.
Keep up the good work guys.
@ atreiu
Songbird QA will definitely be announcing some blessed builds to pounce on once they are ready. Look for a blog post in mid to late January.
just noticed this in the roadmap:
“bug 10274 (Story)
Disable all Watch Folders UI Hooks on Mac OS X 10.4
The file-system API that will be used on the mac-side is 10.5 only. This means that we will not be supporting or implementing watch folders for 10.4 and should disable the UI and the associated hooks as well.”
Does this mean you’re asking all Mac users to switch to 10.5 Leopard ???
@Alex
Songbird will continue to be available for OS X 10.4. Unfortunatly, 10.4 and below does not expose the level of API required to handle large number of files. Because of this watch folder will only be available on 10.5 and above.
Hi,
Can you please consider:
Having the option of cutting or copying on the watched folders.
Have an on demand option for importing watched folders (So it won’t import half completed (legal) downloads.)
Better ways to organise and tag music and album art.
With these things and the things on roadmap songbird will be a perfect music player
I want wait for future releases!
What about an equalizer?
keep up the good work guys
look forward to the album art down loader
PODCASTS???? SUPPORTING THEM???? IN SONGBIRD??? PRETTY PLEASE????
Will the “better sorting” described in Hendrix also make track no. right when you sort by album artist?
When I sort by “Artist” track no. goes from 1-11 for an album with 11 numbers but when I sort by “Album Artist” it goes 1, 10, 11, 2, 3, 4 ect.
Great player by the way. Made it my daily player but I’m keeping media monkey for tagging.
How about rolling the “now playing list” into the core? I think it’s really odd that users are supposed to install a (currently not working) add-on for such a basic and essential function.
Maybe the developers should take a look at the suggestions on getsatisfaction.com once in a while - there are lots of requests for this feature:
http://gsfn.us/t/ltz
http://gsfn.us/t/pou
http://gsfn.us/t/pot
I don’t think that Songbird can compete with other players (such as Winamp or MediaMonkey) if this isn’t integrated!
@killersquirrel
“Now playing list” is certainly a popular feature and we’re following carefully all the input on the thread you’ve mentioned. As for including it into the core it is a difficult tradeoff. Songbird is a customizable player and as such most users expect it to do exactly what they want but nothing more, knowing they can customize it to their specialized needs if desired.
Will the “better sorting” described in Hendrix also make track no. right when you sort by album artist?