Songbird 1.2 Beta 1 is now available for download!
Here are the most noteworthy and complete features we’d like to call out in this Beta and get your feedback on:
- Automatically Organize Library Files:
Songbird can now automatically organize the files that are contained in your library. Once enabled, it will consolidate your media in one location. You can customize the structure of the folder and file names based on metadata contained in every track. - 10-band Equalizer
Now you can tweak the frequency response of the audio playback to match your room’s acoustics or your personal preferences. - Last.fm Radio:
Last.fm Radio supports artist, tag, and user stations, mapping station links on the Last.fm website to play internally in Songbird. It includes the Radio Directory allowing you to conveniently browse and explore the tag and artist relationships on Last.fm. Additionally, the Radio directory includes quick links for playing stations based on your Last.fm library, your Songbird library, and friends/neighbors’ libraries.
The Beta 1 release notes contain additional details about this build including a list of known issues.
As always, please file any issues, bugs, or crashes you find in Bugzilla so that we can address them before the final release.
Bloggers & Press: This release is not our final release and is not ready to be reviewed. Since we’re still landing code we suggest postponing any review of the Songbird Player until our final build. If you’re interested in reviewing the final build contact us at: press [at] songbirdnest [dot] com. We’ll be more than happy to give you access to it prior to its release. Thanks for the care and attention you’ve shown Songbird over the past year.
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67 Comments
SubscribeThis is gonna be my favorite release by far! Thank You!
Consolidate Media? Not sure how well that will work out considering that Songbird can be harmful to metadata.
Yay, finally the equalizer!
I’m taking the beta on a test-flight right now
Bootylicious
Please tell me the “can” in “can consolidate” can be disabled. This “feature” is one of the main reasons I severely dislike iTunes.
@Zack:
Not only can you disable it, it is disabled by default. Shipping things that can cause dataloss is always scary. Also, there is a preview (and please use that button and make sure it looks good!)
While I don’t think it will cause problems, being sure is still better.
@Zack & Omega:
Library Management isn’t on by default. So you don’t have to use it.. I’d personally only use it once it can be organised as Album Artist – Album (can’t currently, but hopefully next release). As someone appears to have made a patch to expose ID3 rating writing, it seems to replace my need to have a crud, awesome and other music folder.
@Omega
In terms of damaging metadata, there was a thread on get satisfaction that claimed that Songbird magically destroys metadata on MP3′s without doing anything. Whilst I haven’t replied to it yet, I haven’t been able to replicate it (tried with ID tags and such). I have a theory that maybe when the connection times out for the album exists on a server without art that metadata is changed incorrectly, but that would involve someone sweeping through the code (and I may be wrong, since I’m not a coder)..
That being said, I am posting a bug report to allow users to disable album writing directly to files if they want (and instead store the art directly in the library).
There was apparently a case where Ogg’s could get corrupted, but they have blocked metadata writing to Ogg’s for now to keep files safe.. Keep in mind though, I think many of the complaints seem to revolve around ID tags getting upgraded when album art is added.. But the bug I am writing should get around that..
I just wanted to report that the early problems i was having with rumblings and track skipping are GONE. Wonderful release!
Also my problems with playback randomly stopping have also been fixed!
Are there plans to add equaliser presets before release? I seems to me that the equaliser would be many times more useful with a few presets and it shouldn’t be too hard to get in before release.
Like Michael, this is absolutely my favorite release thus far. I am speechless. (well, not literally
)
@deOmega.. Yeah.. got fixed a few weeks ago (works perfectly in Windows 7 now)..
@Omega: You may wish to add yourself as CC of the following bug:
http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/show_bug.cgi?id=16659
It basically makes it easier for anyone to disable metadata writing of albumart
I’ve been running the 1.2-pre builds for a while and apart from a few smaller bugs (which I have reported) it’s pretty stable. My biggest gripe with Songbird is that the devs seem to focus too much on shiny stuff like web integration and social stuff, and give the most common/popular use cases low priority.
The most common use case I belive is that the user rips his/her CD-collection (or download albums from the net, legally or illegally) and wants to have it organized and easily accessible in Songbird. Even in 1.2, Songbird fail to properly support compilation albums, and it can’t sort the list by “album artist, album, disc#, track#”, or even just “disc#, track#” when only a single album is displayed, making multi-CD album support a mess. This is super basic usability stuff. I will continue to follow the progress, test betas and report bugs.
@Per I *totally* agree with you. Songbird has great ideas and cool feature, but there are still go many lacks of everyday-use-features. That’s the main reason I still don’t recommend songbird to any of my friends. The other is the low performance while using a lot of resources…
@Le Torbi.. Performance will likely increase dramatically after shifting to the firefox 3.5 codebase, which introduces enormous speedups for Javascript/HTML and XUL (Xul is the language used for the Gui and such).
http://www.tuxradar.com/content/benchmarked-firefox-35-beta-4
And a major change to make the Songbird library asynchronous looks like its about to land on trunk, but miss Isan: http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/show_bug.cgi?id=11831 . This sounds like it will help Songbird “freeze up” less. Not sure about the details, but I’d imagine it will really help on larger libraries. And it would be good to hear from a developer if it helps search (because search freezes up for a second or so). It will definitely help increase the perceived performance of songbird though.
I do agree some areas of usability aren’t fantastic yet, but I think the back-end is good enough to support them already (its just a matter of making small code changes or GUI changes in many cases). I’m pretty confident that by the end of the year, Songbird will get quite popular.
In fact, Jackson 5 will probably REALLY take off anyway, because they are adding device firmware updating, which would likely encourage a lot of device manufacturers to bundle Songbird with their devices.
http://wiki.songbirdnest.com/Releases/Jackson_5/Device_Firmware_Updates
@Andrew
Why do you say that the library can be auto-organized as Album Artist-Album? It seems it already can, according to the new Manage Music options panel.
Or maybe I miss something
Klint.. I mean have:
Artist – Album name /CD1/ files
Not “Artist / Album”
An example is:
/MOS – Sessions 6/
/Tom Cruise – Classic love songs/
I do this because I want to see ALL music in one go.. It also makes copying specific albums a lot easier.
I’m continuing to use songbird because it’s definitely improving all the time, and I appreciate all the work that’s going into it, but more and more I get the the feeling that the priorties at Songbird HQ are a bit backwards. Until the basic media player functions, sorting, queueing, compilations, etc get properly sorted, you’re polishing a turd. These new features are all very nice, but there’s a whole pile of features and addons that remain useless until more basic functions work properly.
For example, without compilations support, automatic organization will make a mess of my library, my artists list is about a mile long and practically unnavigable, and MediaFlow is an ugly mess which I can’t use to find anything.
Similarly it’s still impossible to view my library by artist then album by year. Winamp has had customisable sort schemes since as far back as I can remember it, and even itunes has the ability to do this particular common sort scheme.
That said, I can’t wait to have my library auto-organized to my scheme. I’m not aware of another windows player that can do that. It’s a great feature, but just a shame I can’t use it til the next release when compilations comes along, assuming the auto-organization will be modified to accomodate them.
Personally I’d like to have this structure:
1-disc album: Artist/2005 – Album/01 – Title.mp3
multi-disc album: Artist/1996 – Album/2-03 – Title.mp3
compilation: Album Artist/Album (1985)/05 – Artist – Title.mp3
I know that it’s hard to design a user friendly UI that can cover all the special cases, therefore an intermediate solution that could work for advanced users could be to let the user put a hook script in her config directory implementing a Javascript function that takes a metadata object as argument and returns a string with the wanted path.
Excellent. I’ve been waiting for the organsation stuff. I hadn’t even realised you were working on it!
Time to start recommending it to all. (Well, once it’s out of beta anyway ;0)
The seeking in tracks is much better in this release, but it is still inaccurate.
The good: It now continues playing instantly after I dropped the Seekbar-Node. And there is no noise anymore.
The bad: It still doesn’t always play from the point, where I dropped it. The node usually jump forward instead, about 5 – 35sec. That’s quite inaccurate
Library Consolidation looks great, my music folder has been rather…unattractive for some time. Is this release going to have a metadata fetcher? I have about 1000 or so tracks that have no data beyond the song title, one of these would be nice. If not, can someone recommend me a player that does have one of these (just so I can use it to fix the data).
@Ash: You can use EasyTag and/or PicardTagger for that. EasyTag can set tags from filename/path patterns or fetch tags from FreeDB if you have the tracks in a directory with the same order as the album. (type in gnudb.gnudb.org as the first freedb server for best results – the default one is very unstable nowadays). If you aren’t an album junkie, PicardTagger might be better as it can identify tracks via audio fingerprints.
This rox, i got a farly big and fast growing music library wich is now finally well sorted. the combo mediamonkey for tagging and songbird for sorting rix! Also the equalizer is finally there!! WOOYA!! Now just update the lyricsmaster to wirk with the new release and sognbird is the best musicprogram of alltime
@Per Wigren
Thanks! You’re fantastic. Picard is looking great, and has a native Linux version.
Although, I still think it would be good to have such a automated checker within Songbird…I’m sure I remember hearing about it back when 1.0 was released or so.
Great looking release. At last I can search using short queries without freezing up the bird! Great work as always
@Andrew
Ok, I understand now.
Yes, being able to select the folder separator between the 2 options “\” or “-” in the Manage Music options (except the last separator of course) would be very nice indeed.
Maybe in a further release.
Have you filled in a request for that somewhere already?
@Andrew
“Tom Cruise – Classic love songs” ….hmmm, daring…
@Graham
I like my shiny turd!
@Klint.. Of course
http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/show_bug.cgi?id=16599
@Ash. Winamp also has auto-tagging you can try. I think it checks the file checksum against a musicbrainz database, so its not perfect.. It does work alright though, but sometimes the tags recommended are for Top 40 albums and such..
That’s another option to consider..
@Andrew: thanks, and I’ve added my proposal to it.
WHOA They did. Looks great guys.
Also.. when did SB get the ability to EXPORT to iTunes? That’s another feature I’ve been requesting.
Still a bunch of bugs that are pretty retarded, but this thing is still shaping up.
http://digg.com/software/Songbird_1_2_Beta_1_released
@atrieu
Are you seeking in really large files? There is a limit to the size of the file for which we will do accurate seeking for files with no seek table.
@aus: No, and I tried several different songs (all mp3, but differently coded). First I noticed it in a very small file (50sec mp3), where the gaps were really big. Then I did some more testing, and it doesn’t seem to depend on the file size or duration.
The first forward seekings seems to go pretty well, they are very accurate. But as soon as I do backward seeking once, the node starts to jump. And then it even jumps on forward seekings, until the next song.
Shall I try to capture a screen-video? (Not sure if my pc is fast enough, but I can try, if it might help)
Finally equalizer! Thank you guys!
Excellent release !!
Thanks a lot for this new great features. With this new release, songbird is now the best music player on linux !!
shouldn’t there be a button to start the manage music manager a’ managing
after you turn it on it starts….eventually, when IT feels ready I guess. It just needs a trigger or something. it would make me feel better cause I might want to change the library folder or preview more than once.
In other media players almost all, the feature from the right click menu includes the ability to delete a file from the computer through your library. This is cool to go through and delete a feature without searching for it through your Windows or File Managers. I thought this feature would be included in this release. is it available? Anyways could anyone tell me if its going to be available and i don’t need the Media View options cuz they don’t delete files only remove them from the library which is kinda pointless when the files will only return upon the next library scan.
@Computer Wizard: They get deleted if you have enabled library management, not otherwise.
the equalizer is in my opinion too slow
ich is right, the latency of the equalizer is pretty high, about 3-4sec? It’s very inconvenient. I’m of course happy to have it at all, but it can be improved. It would be nice to have a faster one in the 1.2 final.
OT: Does songbird sync playcount with plays on your ipod? Also, does it scrobble those plays?
@ich, Matt
The equalizer has a latency of 2000ms because of the size of the output buffer. The only way to reduce latency is to create an equalizer that would use the hardware itself or reduce the size of the output buffer. The hardware EQ isn’t something we can do before 1.2 is released. You can, however, change the size of the output buffer if you go into Options->Playback. Be warned though that changing that value may cause skipping.
@Grazfather
Yes it syncs play counts, no it does not scrobble them.
Yo!
I want to know when you’ll implement the ‘minimize to tray’ feature xd
Also, it’s consuming excessive RAM on my pc (windows vista), around 80mb, while winamp uses like 30mb d:
I really liked the Songbird, and I plan on using it after you guys correct some things!
@ henriquef
There’s an add-on for minimise to tray: http://addons.songbirdnest.com/addon/1
Whoa, didn’t realise it was addon number 1
Podcasts Please !!!
I’m wondering if this will be possible structure for songbird to manage
Artist \ [Year] Album Title \ Track# – Artist – Title.mp3
or even
Artist \ [Year] Album Title \ CD2 \ Track# – Artist – Title.mp3
and how does it manage that? Will it only work by moving the files to a different folder / drive?
Can songbird, or will it soon, be able to use the Media Libraries in Windows 7 to automaticaaly keep up to do date what music you have?
I know you can set it to watch folders, but I like the way in Windows 7 you can tell it where all your music is strored, and it will constantly check to see if any new stuff is added, and automatically add it to Media Player when you next open it.
I had written off Songbird for awhile because of several issues I was having with it. In trying this beta its come a long way towards fixing those issues. I can’t say for sure I’ll use it again full time, having gotten used to Winamp but it at least has my attention.
The equalizer definitely improves the sound, though presets are sorely needed as already mentioned in this thread. I opened up Winamp and tried to copy those settings as near as possible to get the sound I like.
Nice work.
It’s Working on Ubuntu 9.04 64x??????
I downloaded this beta but doesn’t start…. :S help mee please… i try to run the last offical release 1.2 and it starts normally. anyone with ubuntu 9.04 and 64x running this beta?????
@Kev
Hmm, well, that’s exactly what the Watch Folders do in Songbird. It will detect when new stuff is available in the folder you are watching regardless of whether Songbird is running or not and it will get added to your library when Songbird is started. Unless I’m missing something…
The same search issue still persists. It really is too bad that it still shows no improvement, on my end at least. It took about 10 minutes to find 76 iron maiden tracks in a library of 23,000 tracks. I will continue to mention that 1.0 did not have this issue. How much longer until this issue is addressed?
Please add customizable presets for the equalizer to the 1.2 final. An equalizer without this basic (and simple to do) feature would be very anachronistic and just cause mockery…
Can I ask why people want presets so bad? How many people change equaliser settings that often? I’ve had it on my stereo, and in reality there is no reason why I would want to change it once set.
Furthermore, presets are absolutely useless since the Songbird developers don’t know how accurate your speakers are (which is the point of an equaliser generally, to compensate for speakers which don’t sound right).
Just wondering
@aus
This is what Kev is referring to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_7#Windows_Explorer
@CoreyB.
Ah! Ok, yes, that’s probably something we could support in the future. Alas, most of our users are still using Windows XP, so a Windows 7 specific feature isn’t likely to show up in the short term.
@Carlos
We’re working on a permanent solution to that problem but it’s actually quite a bit more complex than just the search functionality itself. I’ll spare you the boring details but we’re hoping to land a fix for this that will land in 1.3 hopefully.
I’m pretty sure that most people’s search woes are due to LyricMaster saving the lyrics to the comments field in the MP3 tag, and Songbird searching through said comments field.
I didn’t discover this until recently, and it really is quite cool as it means that Songbird can search through lyrics to find the song you want, but it slows it down significantly.
very thankful for equalizer. custom presets would be fantastic, i use the equalizer all the time when i want to say hear more drums/less vocals/more bass/whatever on a particular song.
First, thanks for the equalizer. Second, I was wondering if there a way to integrate amazon.com mp3 store to songbird
Ugh seriously, still no compilation support? Is there any particular reason why this wasn’t a basic feature w/ the first release, and still hasn’t been included? As spectacular as almost everything else on Songbird is, I use it maybe once every three months because of the lack of comp support, and I know that I’m a part of a pretty sizable minority.
Songbird is light-years ahead of other music players in so many respects, but until you Pioneers fix the compilation problem, yes, it really is a polished turd. I think you all might be fundamentally misunderstanding how people browse their music. If you could PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE prioritize and fix this, I’d bet that you’d see an exponential jump in users (and user happiness).
I really want to use Songbird– HALP PLEASE!
* And with that whining out of the way, you all are doing a fabulous job otherwise!
@TRS: I am able to handle compilations easily with Songbird by using the Album Artist tag which is available. A lot of extensions already make use of this tag as well.
Hope this helps.
Anyone else having problems with activating the “manage music” feature? Whenever I try to activate the feature and tell it where my music library is, I click “Browse” but get nothing. No folder selection dialogue…nothing. I can’t even type the path into the box either. Strange….
(i’m using a portable HD for my library, if that matters, but I’m not even getting far enough into the dialog for that to factor in)
“Automatically Organize Library Files” Great !
Weird with artist names like “X featuring Y”, though. :/
Hi!
This, of course, all well and good, even excellent, you just Well done.
But a small but why in the metadata editor and the player has no information about the type of playing the file to me this is very much lacking please add this feature as soon as possible.
Believe me I think it is interesting not only to me.
I really love Songbird, currently I’m using 1.1.2. I’m running Ubuntu Linux and I’ve tried to get both the tar.gz & the .deb file to install, Once installed, I go to click on Songbird, it states that it’s starting but nothing happens, I’ve had to revert back to 1.1.2, can anyone suggest a fix?