Hi Everyone,
It’s been brought to our attention that the iPod Add-On has some really nasty issues which may cause it to delete content from an iPod without asking the user first. Because of this we are pulling this add-on from the list of recommended add-ons.
If you have this add-on currently installed we highly suggest you disable or uninstall it for the time being.
We apologize for any problems you’ve encountered because of this issue and I assure you we’re looking into this with utmost attention. We will post more information about this issue in our bug tracking tool here.
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[...] problem, which the Songbird team is already aware of, lies with a buggy iPod add-on that can corrupt and even delete music from your [...]
Bug in Songbird-Addon löscht Tracks vom iPod…
Die Entwickler von Songbird warnen vor einem Bug im beliebten iPod-Addon. Dieser Bug kann dazu führen, dass Songbird alle auf einem iPod gespeicherten Tracks löscht.
Sie raten dazu, das Plugin umgehend zu deinstallieren oder zu deaktivieren.
Wer …
[...] update on this blog, of course, when it’s fixed. Thanks (but also sorry!) to Steven. iPod Add-On Woes [Songbird [...]
[...] it might be a good idea to look into some free software tools for recovering deleted files. [Songbird via [...]
[...] update on this blog, of course, when it’s fixed. Thanks (but also sorry!) to Steven. iPod Add-On Woes [Songbird [...]
[...] Guys, Ada yang mendownload dan menggunakan software gratis music player Songbird? Jika anda penggunanya, segera hapus add-on iPod support pada Songbird anda karena ada bug yang bisa membuat lagu di iPod anda tiba-tiba terdelete. Rekomendasi menghapus/uninstall add-on iPod support ini dimuat pada blog Songbird. [...]
[...] it might be a good idea to look into some free software tools for recovering deleted files. [Songbird via [...]
[...] la deshabilitación inmediata de dicho Add-on para no tener que sufrir las consecuencias. Songbird blog vía [...]
[...] español: bitelia.com/2009/03/19/cuidado-una-extension-de-songbird-borra-tu-musi/ Blog de Songbird: blog.songbirdnest.com/2009/03/16/ipod-add-on-woes/ sin comentarios en: tecnología, software libre karma: 20 etiquetas: songbird, extensión, [...]
[...] información: Songbird Tags: ipod, Mozilla, Songbird Otras entradas que te pueden interesar…:Songbird 0.3, el [...]
[...] usam o Songbird e têm um iPod, vão ter um nada pequeno problema. Ao que parece, este addon remove ficheiros do leitor sem que o utilizador dê permissão para essa acção. Por [...]
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[...] Songbird-Nest (englischer [...]
[...] el blog oficial de Songbird han lanzado este aviso instando a desinstalar o desactivar este complemento de Songbird para evitar la pérdida de datos y [...]
[...] uno di questi, che permette di sincronizzare la propria musica con un iPod, aveva mostrato seri problemi subito dopo il rilascio dell’applicazione. In molti casi, infatti, eseguendo [...]
[...] pare dal blog degli sviluppatori che la sincronizzazione del proprio dispositivo causasse la cancellazione di tutto il contenuto dell’iPod, senza previa autorizzazione da parte dell’utente [...]
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86 Comments
SubscribeSo how do I get my music back?
You can always attempt to use a file recovery tool and pointing it at your iPod. It may be able to recover the delete files. Otherwise, there’s not really any way to get the files that were on the iPod back (unless you have them backed up somewhere else).
All the file recovery tools cost too much money and its not a solution.
You should at least provide some form of file recovery. I don’t think I’m the only one facing this problem.
This is my punishment for straying away from Itunes.
Yup, quite a few users who encountered these issues.
Hopefully you can find the cause of it rather sooner then later.
Thanks for the heads up!!
Tyler out!
On Windows there is this free tool that is available that should work: http://www.officerecovery.com/freeundelete/.
I couldn’t find any tools on OS X that are free however
Pfffffffff…
Un lecteur multimedia qui se dit être le concurent d’ITunes… Alors qu’il ne gère pas les podcasts, et pour le sIpod c’est lamentable (pochettes et paroles non incluses)…
Déçu…
Songbird doesn’t “have” to provide anything. If they went out of their way to help a user like that, then that would be exceptional service, but it’s not as if we’re paying for Songbird. Some people learn the hard way that important data is not something you just leave one copy of, ESPECIALLY on a mobile device. That’s just not smart. Always have backups.
Insens, actually, in all fairness, iPod data used to get corrupted all the time , and I never saw Apple provide a recovery tool either. In fact, part of the procedure for Applecentres is to restore your ipod (which wipes it), to fix problems, without worrying about the data (this is even on the iPhone).
In fact, Applecentre’s wont even try to recover your iPod data.
They get away with it because you’d probably need a copy of your music on your computer anyway generally to get it on there in the first place. And as the iPod Touch and such doesn’t work on Songbird last I checked, then how did you get the music on without a computer?
Just some perspective..
@Jerome
ça va venir !
*sigh* sucks that of all the days that I decided to install Songbird on a fresh comp, I find out that this iPod add-on is gonna corrupt a good number of my songs.. uf! Hopefully this file recovery works!
Recuva seems to help in recovering your lost songs off your iPod.
http://www.recuva.com/
In my situation, Songbird nearly formated the ipod AFTER i said NO to it doing so.
the other problem with the Ipod add-on is this:
Everytime i plug in my Ipod, whether it be my Classic 4th Gen or Classic 5th, or my Nano 3rd gen, Songbird asks me to reformat the ipod via Itunes. When i do that, Itunes asked to reformat it. Its a no win situation for me there. So for me to use Songbird, the add-on has to work without faults in recognizing Ipods, pretty much plug and use. Until then, I won’t use Songbird. When i tried, it was awesome, but the hassle w/the ipods is too much to be worth it.
Even if I’m an advanced computer user, its not worth the bogus effort of some cheap method around it, which in the end wouldn’t have mattered anyways.
OOo – thankfully i still use itunes or rhythmbox for my ipod management. (It used to be slooooooooow in songbird)
nice warning though!
this happened to me, several times. but each time, i recovered all the tracks fairly painlessly. there’s a free (trial version) ipod management tool called anapod. search for it. if you go into the anapod options, there’s a button to recover tracks that are physically on the ipod, but not listed in the ipod’s interface. i think it’s only for windows though. i may be wrong.
If anyone can’t get the windows undelete tool, I also use recuva by piriform if you need some more options. It’s still not totally bug free however, so use undelete first!
Please don’t judge too hard on Songbird.
Things like this can also happen in other programs. I remember, 3-4 years ago, i reformatted my PC (Win XP), reinstalled iTunes and plugged my iPod with about 5000 tracks. Without asking, iTunes deleted all the files from my iPod.
It looks like the ipod extension has been officially revoked now (you will get a message warning you that the module is a bit dodgy, will be removed automatically and you need to restart songbird).
Lesson learned: always backup your files. Having one’s entire library on a portable device only is a nonsense. Don’t blame Songbird in that case, rather blame the user:-(
Anyway, some tools like Recuva on windows are totally free and very efficient to undelete files (http://www.recuva.com/)
Yet another lesson learned: there is an efficient process to recall a buggy extension. That is nice.
@Klint, even though, I wonder where they got the music if they don’t have another copy anyway..
I have yet to have met anyone who would wipe the music off their computer once its on their iPod, and I cant think of a single reason why one would do so anyway.
Sounds mostly like a bunch of sea pirates complaining to me…
To be honest this has never ever happen to me and I`ve synced my Ipod Nano 3d gen. and Apple Classic 40gb for ages with Songbird….
@Joren If the guys at Songbird are going to provide an add-on that effectively comes with Songbird (it was there when I installed v1 so it must have just got upgraded when I upgraded to 1.1) then they should make sure that they have tested it properly for its release. If it’s not ready to be released, then it shouldn’t have been. If they didn’t write it themselves and don’t have faith in it, then let users add it themselves if they choose to.
Gah, 10gb of music on my iPod gone… its a 30gb so I don´t know what music is gone so a complete format is necessary. Fucking iPod pisses me off, always something.
@Andrew Luecke
Well, the annoying part for me is that most of my collection is backed up… on another continent
@Joren last I checked iTunes was also free and the plugin comes with the install, so there is some realistic expectation that it should work.
I had worked down my iPod songs to the perfect mix. guess I have to start over?
sad thing for songbird is that a lot of people have switched form iTunes recently, and now will lose faith in its reliability. my wife is pissed to quote her: why did we even switch from iTunes when it worked fine (this after she spent two hours refilling her iPod with new songs that are now deleted).
please fix soon. thanks for all the hard work.
RIP: perfect mix
Yeah.. I understand what you mean.. Although, I’d recommend Winamp for iPods anyway (as I do), because it will also transcode your flacs and such.
At the moment I use Songbird only for playback of music, and winamp for Replaygain/ripping/ipod.
However, that being said, I’d be hoping that the transcoding added to songbird 1.2 (in May), the ripping and replay gain calculations will be enough to let me dump winamp entirely. But you are right for now I guess if you are an ipod user. You do still need an additional application.
Unfortunately, MTP/MSC seem to be the other problem, but I’m sure they will get back on track too..
MOTHERFUCKER just lost about 70gb of music. Thanks.
Going back to iTunes ASAP.
Btw, when I say I recommend winamp for iPod’s, I still prefer Songbird for actual playback..
“Songbird doesn’t “have” to provide anything. If they went out of their way to help a user like that, then that would be exceptional service, but it’s not as if we’re paying for Songbird.”
Actually, if Songbird wants people to use their product, they HAVE to provide something worth using. They haven’t. I’m done with it.
“MOTHERFUCKER just lost about 70gb of music. Thanks.
Going back to iTunes ASAP.”
see, see, better get on this today fellas.
To all the self-righteous telling everyone they should’ve made backups…what about my star ratings? I had about 75% of my iPod collection rated, that’s gone now.
This is a matter of convenience and functionality, and there’s simply no excuse and no reason to fault the end user for trusting the software to do what it says it will do.
Here is a lifehacker article on recovering lost files:
(How to Recover Deleted Files with Free Software)
http://lifehacker.com/393084/how-to-recover-deleted-files-with-free-software
I’m really impressed with the way that songbird handled the buggy addon. Before I had even used it or read up on it on the blog I received a pop-up recommending I disable the addon. Pity about the bug, but well done on the efficient recall.
JG, sorry about your music, but please be nice or leave. Re-copying 70gigs of music back to your iPod can’t be the toughest problem you’ve ever had. I’m sure you’ll survive.
Nothing personal, I don’t mean to be rude, but I don’t give a damn about star ratings. I mean, if I’m gonna spend some time saving a song to my iPod, it better be a good one! For me, all my songs have 5 stars. If they’re not good enough, they’re gone…
If you start to learn programming yourself, you’ll stop taking everything for granted. Hey my iPod was swiped clean too, so I just re-synced my playlists which I have in Songbird (specially made for my iPod).
Don’t just trust stuff you don’t understand, always keep some way to recover your stuff.
File Recovery Tools can be dowmloaded for free… All those whining about this should trying doing a Google search every once in a while! (sheesh!)
Oh and learn to make backups.
Oh and maybe sack off the iPod.
@Piers
You’re making it sound like we didn’t test it which is not true!
@JG
Dude, I can understand that you are frustrated but there’s no need for that kind of language here!
@boo!
Actually, we were on it last week trying to confirm the reports and we were already starting to work on a fix on Monday.
The iPod add-on always worked for me, but I was always a little nervous because of all the people that had problems with it. Now I’m happy that the songbird team are back to working on it, and I’m sure they will make great improvement.
also, why not add ipod ratings sync back to songbird library feature btw? is it a hard question? i know nothing about programming but it seems easy to have it sync all ratings on the ipod with the desktop library. it doesn’t even need to ask =)
also please make the ipod image skinnable, the “default mtp device” image is present on the skin files, but i can’t find the image for ipod, or even the code that
is supposed to control it.
Thanks guys! You have our support! =)
<3 songbird
To be honest I’ve always had issues with the iPod Add-On although it could be due to me running custom firmware on my nano; on the other hand iTunes has never had problems because of the non-proprietary firmware.
@Antoine Turmel : J’aime SongBird mais je vois de superbes Add-on de la mort alors que les fonctions les plus basiques ne sont mêmes pas dévellopées comme les équalizer par exemple… Dommage
“This is my punishment for straying away from Itunes”
lol, no, it’s your punishment for “Having one’s entire library on a portable device only”. you seriously only have tunes on there and not on a computer as well? what if the ipod were dropped? or stolen?
What kind of content is deleted?
None of my songs seem to be missing.
That happened to me when I connected my GF’s iPod to Songbird.
Alas, I myself do not own an iPod (I really don’t like the whole “you need software, to copy music to it”-thing, I like those that behave like thumbdrives).
Go figure how pissed she was at me, once all her data was deleted. At least she has most of it backed-up, because her last iPod had a HDD failure…
On Linux it was working find…
Why is Equalizer always considered as a basic feature? I really don’t get it.You have plenty of other places on your PC to tune these settings (including the sound board itself), until this feature is made available in Songbird.
Désolé Jérôme
Well, that never happened to me, but you should generally put mor emphasis on debugging the iPod addon, as it is a key feature for many users. I also had a lot of problems with the addon (e.g. http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/show_bug.cgi?id=15675 , http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/show_bug.cgi?id=13641) that were never solved. However, the player rocks!
Ok Klint, I understand, but basic feature like Podcast are not!
Les gens qui utilisent Itunes ne se décideront pas à passer à Songbird si ils ne retrouvent pas leurs options favorites
@Klint Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7 does not offer an advanced Equalizer that Itunes or any other music player does. It provides the basic setup of speaker settings and volume. Vista and Windows 7 provide a more advanced sound setup, that you can silence one program or another entirely, but does not offer an equalizer for individual Hz ranges.
Thanks for ruining my ipod.
This isn’t meant as an attack, but I’m very curious as to why so many people have music on their iPods that isn’t on their computers. It’s just strange to me.
I love Songbird and I’m willing to ride this out. How many versions of iTunes came out since they started addressing the sluggishness?
Seriously People, Your the kind of people that use cutting edge (and free) software such as songbird and then make the decision to switch to it from itunes. And at no time do you think it would be prudent to have a back up of that music before you make the switch or just have a backup in general like most barely computer literate people do. Im surprised songbird would let something like that slip though and it is bullshit. But if you havent learned to backup by now then I think its a lesson learned with songbird as the unfortunate professor
Not to mention that the music on my ipod is also on my itunes it is this way by default ive never even had to think about it i dont understand how the music gets “lost” unless once its on you ipod you throw it away which seems a little reckless
to all the peeps that are saying: back your shit up
think about this:
I lost all my songs and all my wife’s songs, after three days of going on and on about how awesome songbird is compared to the rest. but it’s not that people are LOSING all their data, it’s more that they are losing their iPod content that some people (like the two of us) had carefully weeded down to only the best of the best of the best from my 10, 0000 song library.
that’s why people are losing their minds, not because they’ve lost the original data files.
also,
I see the bug has been resolved in the bug fix thingy.
SO WHEN DO I AS A NORMAL USER GET TO REINSTALL THIS FIXED ADDON????
how does that work?
thanks!
@boo!
That is still to be determined at this time. We may release a specific update just for the iPod Add-On but we’d rather wait a few more days and see if we can add a few more bug fixes to make it worth it for everyone to update to a new version.
thank you very much AUS.
songbird is hands down still the best.
@Aus
I’d argue that there are plenty of people with Ipods who would like to sync without re-installing Itunes.
@Tarv
Oh yes, undoubtedly
@Aus
“but we’d rather wait a few more days and see if we can add a few more bug fixes to make it worth it for everyone to update to a new version.”
Having Songbird work with the iPod again isn’t worth it’s own update? I imagine many people, like me, just want to use their iPod with Songbird again
@Dave
I didn’t say anything that would indicate that we wouldn’t release an update for just the iPod Add-On in my comment. I simply stated that we _may_ and I emphasize _may_ wait to try and add more bug fixes.
Also, even though the bug is marked fixed. We still need to verify this fix on 3 platforms and ensure that no other problems arise from said fix. I think it’s only normal for us to err on the side of caution considering the ill effects of the problem.
Erik Staats is a stone-cold thrilla and uber bug fixah! Can’t wait for the update!
Just wanted to share my support for Songbird! I think it’s an awesome application, way better than iTunes.
I can’t tell you the number of times that music on my iPod has gotten corrupted and been lost (and this was with iTunes). It’s painful and taught me to always have back ups. This issue is not unique to Songbird in any way.
Incidentally, I updated my iPod using Songbird the day before this announcement was made. I didn’t lose any music, thankfully, but I noticed that only a fraction of my iPod’s music was showing up in Songbird. Is that related to this bug? Or was that something else entirely?
tried it around the 0.6 era, constant uncontrollable crashes.
tried it around the 1.0 era, most of the good plugins weren’t community maintained and weren’t available for the 1.0 build, still crashes all the time. even somehow corrupted my install of the flash plugin which would then crash firefox and others that used it until I worked out what it was and reinstalled it.
tried it around the 1.1 era, it wipes my ipod. still crashes.
seriously. feature freeze for a year if you have to. there’s no point releasing a great app with lots of features unless it’s stable. As a software developer myself I’m pretty unimpressed with the songbird devs, step up your game. Learn about the testing frameworks and use them rigorously. Expand your alpha testing groups and focus on reliability over features. You’ll become better coders for it and the software will flourish. You’re severely turning away a lot of potential users at arguably your most critical point of development (your 1.x releases)
Still far and away the best media player on linux, on KDE or Gnome. I keep my music backed up three places. I’m sticking with Songbird. Simple, fast, and elegant. Looking forward to the updated ipod plugin.
@boo There is an option in itunes where you can check that little blue box or un-check it, so that it will or won’t be synchronized. In songbird, i don’t know if that’s there.
@Aus I’ve included several pieces of feedback, because i’m interested in pushing Songbird to become the best of the best (i like many of the features and the blazing speed compared to itunes). I honestly would switch to songbird, from Itunes, but I mentioned earlier, that i would only do that if i could just plug the ipod in and sync, along with getting the smart play lists to work.
@boo
That’s exactly why I used playlists and ratings in iTunes, and now in songbird.
Even if I lost all my iPod data, or I just got a new one, I’d still have exactly the music I want ready to sync.
Funny, I just installed the iPod support cause I was psyched to see that my new 120G iPod was now supported.
Worked fine too. Didn’t delete anything on my iPod.
Obviously I’m pretty damn annoyed about this, as will be anyone who handles their iPod library manually.
Can’ quite understand how such an obvious and serious bug could not have been spotted.
I’ve been evangelising for Songbird for a while now, without a great deal of success, and this is not helping. Grrr!
@aus From the fact that there seem to be ALOT of people with the same issue, it’s obvious you didn’t test it enough
The bug itself is reported to be fixed, and it seems to be working after I installed the nightly tools, then installed the nightly build of the plugin.
Oh god, this sucks. I’m going to be forever shy of hitting the update button on songbird again.
Linux users… if you want to recover your files use “photorec” from the “testdisk” package. works really well, its busy getting all my files back right now.
I’m sure they’ll do some serious ipod testing in advance of future updates.
I just have to say, even with the little speedbump of the iPod add-on not working, I’m very happy with Songbird and the work you all do. Good job!
@Piers
Well, we have over 150,000 active users, 50 users or even 150 users is still not that many people running into the problem in the grand scheme of things. There are also some pretty specific steps involved in making it happen which were sadly not covered in our standard set of manual tests.
@rob
That’s one of the most condescending comments I think we have ever gotten. While I know you are trying to be helpful I don’t think you really know our internal development process. Otherwise you may not have said the things you did.
The Mozilla platform has it’s own suite of very robust tests so it’s not terribly useful for us to write our own testing suite for it. Instead we focused our efforts on writing unit-tests for our own APIs which are built on top of it. These unit-tests are kept up to date and are always run on check-in. We also have continuous integration build machines that always build on check-in and run the unit-test suite twice. There is also memory logging which is added to those tests runs which ensures that our code doesn’t leak objects.
On top of that, we have a suite of performance tests that are run daily to ensure that the performance never regresses in such a way that it would impact the user.
For device support we have a suite of automated tests that are also run daily to ensure that sync and manual management don’t break or change behaviors.
For 3 releases in a row we’ve also been focusing on fixing top crashers that show up on our crash report server. (This is where your crash reports for the crashes you encountered would show up). For your instance of Songbird to still crash, it would have to mean that the crash you encounter is pretty isolated and doesn’t happen to other people frequently enough for it to fall into the top crasher category. If you would care to file a bug and the crash report ID of the crash report you submit we would be more than happy to fix the crash you seem to keep running into.
After it crashes and you submit the report, start songbird again and type about:crashes, the crash report id will be displayed there.
so..ETA on my being able to use my ipod again?
The issue has been fixed but not officially published yet. If you need to use it right away, I suggest you head over to the nightly add-on builds page:
http://developer.songbirdnest.com/builds/trunk/latest/addons/
@Dave and everyone else: Keep in mind the reason we haven’t officially published it yet is because we haven’t finished QA’ing/testing it. Use it at your own risk until we have something official.
The link posted by @Dave, above, is not the build we released and is 100% untested. Soldier on with extreme caution, or just use the build we did test.
It’s up on the add-ons site now.
for all the people who don’t understand why some people didn’t have their music backed up, did any of you ever stop to think that maybe not everyone has the exact same set-up or music storing routine?
or how maybe some people’s computer hard drive had -just- failed and were temporarily stuck using a friends’ computer/ new laptop / no computer at all and their ipod as a back up.
losing data is fairly upsetting, especially years and years worth. i don’t see how being that condescending after the fact would be useful or even warranted at all.
To all the people criticizing people for not backing up their music — please, stop being condescending idiots. In any other industry, when you use a product and it causes damage to other products you own, the company refunds your money and possibly even helps you recover what you’ve lost. Insurance works this way, law works this way, cars work this way, bikes work this way, ad inf. Really? Everything else works this way except “cutting edge” software communities populated by condescending folks like yourselves. Please tell me one objective reason why everyone should already know as much about computers as you do. You can’t. Take your condescension elsewhere and fuck off. In the meantime, learn to use the social skills that the rest of society already uses.
@aus
I’m sorry if you find what I said condescending – but I am glad you also see I was only trying to be constructive, and not just bagging you guys out in rage or anything. I hope that you also can extend your judgement and not write me off as someone who would say something like that having only experienced it on one machine. I have 2 work machines (win, mac), a media center (win), a powerbook (mac) and have gotten around 5 people in the office to install songbird on their pc’s. And it’s not the crashes that bug me (at all), it’s how, at any point in time, there’s always SOMETHING that’s not working or in this case wipes ipods
it feels a lot more solid than it used to. I was just pointing out that there seems to be a push toward adding features than stability, judging by the releases to date (except 1.1 which seems a step ahead in terms of stability). If that’s not the case, then, sorry.
@ Ishan
I know this topic is dead, but I’d just like to counter:
Is your world-view really this childish? Have you ever read an EULA?
You need to grow up.
If I have woes with my ipod or any other problems, I use the iPod Repair Guide at http://www.ipod-repair-guide.com and download the guide to fix them.
I’m in complete panic mode at the moment…
I just recently had windows Vista crash on me big time…thought i’d lost everything! My son managed to rescue me by partitioning my hard drive and installing Ubuntu on the 2nd half…which then gave me access to my windows files which I’ve been slowly backing up.
Trouble is….
Today I thought i’d install Songbird so I could listen to some of my music (a lot of which I’ve bought off of itunes…others are cd backup) At first everything seemed fine but then all of a sudden 3/4 of my music (0ver 3000 songs) disappeared!!!! I can’t find them anywhere!…and to make matters worse they were pretty much the only files I hadn’t got around to backing up yet!
Some of them are from my cd’s…but the vast majority are songs I bought from itunes!
Please please tell me there is some way I can get my music back. I don’t even use an ipod…I was just installing the ipod app so my hubby could test his ipod on my computer.
I don’t know what to do to fix this…..can anyone help?…please…..
I feel sick…..
regards
Shirley
How could Songbird not test the bad add-on before unloading it on the public? And people who downloaded the software had to pick up the tab, their music is gone. I have seen tons of people who posted about this on other sites.
Ishan, agreed. Not everyone knows how to back up music by pulling it off of the Ipod. I do, but many other people I know don’t know how or have the time to.
The Doctor and Joren-Nice of you to harass people who have lost their whole music collections. And you’re implying it was the user’s fault for using Songbird!? Well they’ve learned now and won’t use it again I’m sure.
Also Joren, Songbird does not “have to” offer anything. But where is the page when you install it that says “Hey this may wipe ALL of your Ipod music when you use it.” I didn’t know there was a disclaimer? I doubt there was, or no one would have installed it.
The developers can argue with me all they want. I have seen a ton of people’s comments on other sites who have lost their collections, and thought I would share my opinion.
@G.
1) In all fairness, its difficult for Songbird to officially support the iPod’s. That’s probably one reason why the iPod support plugin is now longer officially supported. Apple doesn’t exactly post a developers guide on-line.
2) The iPod’s aren’t easy to test. In the past, they were often jamming up, crashing, and getting corrupt. When Apple switched OS on them, things got better, but even for Apple, I’d imagine that even they considered the previous generations to be nightmares (not really their fault, because at the time, they simply didn’t have decent processors).
3) Having worked in an Applecentre, I saw plenty of people accidentally wipe their music off their iPod in my time (In the past, the warning Apple provided wasn’t that great when it was linked to another itunes collection).
4) I STILL find it incredibly hard to believe that people are deleting music they legally own off their computer. It shouldn’t have happened, but I can’t imagine any legal situation it would matter.
5) Testing iPod’s I’d imagine would be a nightmare. Furthermore, POTI revoked the extension pretty quickly when a problem was discovered, AND ACKNOWLEDGED IT! I’ve seen plenty of major companies sit on plenty of major problems pretending they don’t exist (such as with the battery recalls).
Anyway, as mentioned, its not a problem any more. iTunes two way syncing is the recommended method now. Furthermore, they open sourced the plugin now, so you may test it properly and improve it if you wish