First things first, lunch was not pizza, holla! We went Mediterranean for eats complete with Schwarma and Falafel, yum.
I am so excited to announce the completion of our Getting Started with Songbird wiki pages. We know you’re a power user, but we also know it can be a pain to spread the bird word if you get your fitness trainer and your dog groomer all excited about us and 30 minutes later they’re bombing you with questions about what an add on is and how to transfer a library. We hope this will help you to troubleshoot your basic issues, find lots of answers all in one place and keep all your green bird friends at bay. What we dig most about these information rich pages is that they were written by you for you. Lots of people lent a hand but we want to give a super special shout out to Clamm for the great idea and original outline, boosh for driving the process to completion and for his rich content contributions and to Antii Saari and Eero Helenius who offered up their school project which populated almost half of the pages. Woot!
SteveL is home sweet home and seems content to stick for awhile, but if he goes continent hopping again our Where’s Waldo SteveL search will resume.
The hottest Get Satisfaction topic going right now is to core or not to core CD rip/burn functionality. Check it out and add your thoughts to the discussion if you haven’t already. On a similar note, you may have noticed the bummer news that several big projects got bumped from Isan. Keep in mind this doesn’t mean they are going away, we just need more time and Oreos to make it all happen. Not to fear though, two of the most requested bumped features (Podcast and CD Rip) are moving into Kanye, not too much further down the yellow brick road.
We have great news for those of you still thinking about last week’s hot topic in Get Satisfaction. Moshy just released an updated version of the Now Playing add on that addresses many of the issues discussed in the thread. Woot woot! Thanks Moshy, you rule!
As atreiu gleaned with his eagle eyes, we have had an aviary change of address indeed. We were scoping out locations for a new office and as it turned out Technorati had some space for roomies so here we are.
The Kreeger McFlurry count is at a standstill thanks to the introduction of Oreo Ice Cream Sandwiches to the freezer. Rally here if you want the count to continue.
We have a lot of fun with our release names. As you can imagine there are some pretty serious scuffles for naming rights around here as Ali alluded to last week. But there’s no need to hog the fun all to ourselves. This is my favorite thread of the week. Go have a ball and take your best shot at picking names for our upcoming releases!
22 Comments
Subscribe“Getting started”-Guide is great! Good work!
Woo! Thursdays are gonna be the best days ever now! Another perfect post from Laura!
And thanks for all your work on the Getting Started Doc
I <3 you!
Are there any plans for translating the Getting Started Guide to other languages? I’m sure there would be a lot of support.
Many parts of the wiki seem protected for “ordinary” users. Shall I (or someone else) just set up a translated version in their user space and you’ll move it once it’s worth it?
Wow the “getting started” pages look fantastic. I hadn’t visited the wiki for a while now so was amazed at how much has been done these last few days. Great resource for everyone as it covers basics right up to the power user prefs ( http://wiki.songbirdnest.com/Docs/Power_User_Preferences ).
@ joux, that would be fantastic! Setting it up in your user space and having us move it over would probably be the best idea for now though we’ll think about other ways to go about it since that pretty much leaves you out there on your own for now.
I’m incubating…
OK, here we go. I started a German translation in my user wiki space:
http://wiki.songbirdnest.com/User:Joux/Einstieg_in_Songbird
Everyone is invited to contribute there. (I hope pages are editable for other people than me by default).
Let’s see if there are enough German speaking Songbird fans around.
Nice work, the new version is almost ready to be my default player! However, on OS X 10.5.6 ‘quick look server’ (ie spotlight) goes to 100% cpu usage when songbird 1.1.2 is opened, so still unusable, but close. (setup: 30k songs added via a smb network share)
I just installed Win7 64bit, and I still have the terrible library performance issue that I had with Vista 64. Actually, the whole program is very sluggish. Are there any updates regarding these issues?
Also, will we ever be able to organize our ipod playlists alphabetically or in any other order?
Thanks
Loving these birdbaths, keep them up!
A great read and some good links to checkout. Thanks!
@Carlos We’re still not ready to support WIndows 7 yet. Sorry about that.
You shouldn’t be experiencing sluggish performance on Vista though. What’s going on? Where is it sluggish and how is it sluggish?
Regarding the playlists, I had no idea that we weren’t organizing them alphabetically. We’re supposed to. Do you have a mixture of playlists from iTunes and playlists from Songbird, by chance?
@Carlos
@Ali
Songbird 1.1.2 is running good on my Windows 7 RC (build 7100) no issues relevant to the OS.
@Laura
Good Birdbath post ! We are planning to open a french blog about Songbird soon with Yves (NeX) and thain (who work on birdquizz)
We may translate Getting started…
@ali
@GeekShadow
Thanks for the replies.
I posted this in the help forum.
“performance has deteriorated so far that it is almost unusable. I am not sure happened after 1.0 was released. 1.0 was just about perfect in regards to searching and playing content quickly. Now, it takes about 15 seconds to start and about 15 to close, sometimes longer. Searching through the library can take minutes if the search term is longer than 3 characters. Hope it is resolved soon.
Vista Business 64 [Windows 7 64]
q6700
4GB Ram
24,000 tracks”
Another Post
“1. I suppose it is hanging, as opposed to crashing. It becomes unresponsive.
2. My library has 23,857 files.
3. I typed in Hombres G. It hangs at ‘hom’, then returns after about 5 seconds. I complete it with ‘bres’ which hangs it again. I then add the ‘g’ and hangs again, for about 5 seconds. If I sort by album (this seems to be the way to make it hang 80% of the time), it hangs for about 3+ minutes. CPU goes up to 25%, and adds about 300K in memory.”
“if I have Songbird minimized, when the next track comes in, it maximizes itself. ”
I am having the exact same problems as before.
As for the ipod playlists, I don’t have any iTunes playlists anymore. However I did lose them when the iPod plugin had that bug. I try to arrange them manually, but after remounting or going through playlists on the iPod, it goes back to displaying newest playlist at the bottom.
@ joux @GeekShadow So excited about the translation projects. We think we might have an idea to make it easier. SteveL is on it. :0)
@Laura
I guess the Wiki is a good place to translate the Docs, but maybe you could give it some official place and link it from translate.songbirdnest.com, because that’s where translators are around.
The only thing i hate bout songbird is the corners of the programs window, it would look so much better if it were round.
Keep up these great blog posts. They are really nice to keep an idea of what is going on behind the scenes. It is good to see you are concentrating on important core features.
I have to say I LOVE all the work you have been doing. I still think that you needed transcoding an ripping pre 1.0, but that ship has sailed. I’m glad to see transcoding and cd ripping get center spotlight in sections of your roadmap because it means you are really looking at how to implement their completion.
I do have one small request though. Would it be possible to move the prior roadmap to a different file? The amount you have to scroll to get to the stuff that is upcoming is a bit overwhelming, and the upcoming stuff is what most people want to see. It just seems like it makes more sense that way.
@ Victor, I think that’s a good point. I’ll bring it up at our meeting this week. Thanks for the suggestion.
@GeekShadow
Thanks a lot for the new blog in French.
Currently I feel that Songbird lacks some visibility in France, due to popular software rating websites like Clubic.com having a very obsolete description and version of Songbird!!
Your blog will help a lot.
Thanks
Olivier
@Carlos
Good news: the latest nightlies of 1.2 have shown drastic improvements on the search issue.
I thought those features were bumped before the previous post. Anyway, I’m one of the people disappointed, but perhaps in a different way. I think the features currently scoped for Isan are fine where they are. However, I would have liked transcoding to be delayed to Kanye and podcast support replace it in Jackson 5. There are plenty of good (and probably better) transcoders out there, but podcast support would be so helpful and truer to what the application is.