Where is Waldo 1.3?
We’ve been saying that 1.3 was on its way for a while now, and to be fair, we really thought it was. Sadly a funny thing happened on the way to MSC support…we broke MTP support. We’re all about new functionality, but certainly not at the expense of the old! We’re hard at work on a fix and will keep you up to date as we progress. If you’re all about MTP support stay right where you are. If you’re eager to take MSC support for a test flight you can grab this version. For now these two features have to fly solo but we’re working hard to guide them back to the flock where they belong!
Changing Gears
The other big news you may have noticed is that Podcast support was pushed back. Development on it has begun, but it’s shaping up to be a giant undertaking with well over 100 developer points. Yowza! Even more importantly, nearly 60% of you told us that video support is your number one new media desire, so we’re switching up the priority and focusing our energy on video, since you asked so nicely. We expect to have it complete for our Led Zeppelin release slated to drop around the end of January, but then, you already knew that.
In the end we know you want it all, and hey, we do too, but we have to build these things one line of code at a time. We’re working to dial up our development velocity more than ever over the course of the next year so you’ll probably see us moving things around on the Roadmap to meet your requests and needs as well as to to support folks we’re working with (or hope to work with!) on the partnership side. We move at the speed of the internets around here and we wouldn’t have it any other way.
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42 Comments
Subscribethat must suck. too bad i didnt really need mtp i only needed msc seeing as almost all music cellphones support msc. i found mtp to be a little flaky in the past.
It has been asked a lot, and it seems simple enough(though I’m sure it’s not because it hasn’t happened yet) but please, this needs to be brought to the attention of you guys.
We all want iPod album artwork support.
Please.
Songbird adding video?
Miro adding podcasts?
Seems like there’s a collision going on between these two XUL-based mediatools?
I think that Miro is a great video-player and I think that Songbird is a great music-player – why not help each other rather than duplicating each other?
@pelle:wow, I like the way it downloads videos from youtube. A combination of Miro and Songbird would be awesome.
I would prefer podcast support before video support… But… whatever, everything is good.
I personally find the recent changes to SB a little disappointing. I have never really been into the video support idea, since there are many other fine video players out there and SB should focus on music, in my opinion. Performance and stability, CD Rip/Burn, and Podcast support should be top priority in my opinion but maybe that’s just me.
@Kanata346: +1
Forget what some say. We need video! The best players have support for both and I dont to install one-app-for-each-task on my box. Thanks for bringing this to Led.
I personally don’t need MTP, MSC, podcast or video support in Songbird. So I don’t care
It should, however, not lead to an (even) worse performance.
Podcast support is far more important to me than video. That’s what VLC is for after all.
I don’t want video, I don’t need video but I do want Podcast support. Re-think the roadmap please.
To everyone who wants podcast support. Vote for it http://wiki.songbirdnest.com/Idea_Kitchen You can see there that, at the time of writing this comment, CD ripping has 69 more votes than podcast support, leaving it in 4th place. Although it may be too late to change the roadmap for 1.4, if you really want podcast support soon try to convince the developers and other users and vote for it.
That’s too bad about the podcast support. That’s been one of my top wants for a while. I have a good video player already and there are plenty of other good ones out there too, so I don’t see myself ever utilizing that feature.
Yeah forget video, I have other programs for that. Podcasts & CD rip & burn should be the priority. Until podcast & CD playback/ripping is support (as much as I hate to say it) itunes has to stay on my machine. If you try & do to much, you’ll end up with something that does everything; badly.
Cheers,
Richard.
Yeah.. Songbird nightly duplicated my library 4 time :[ what a mess that was.
Went into iTunes and tried to delete duplicates and whiped out almost my whole Library :/ Going to spend some time away from songbird.
Sorry, I don’t know exactly what happened enough to write a bug. It had to do with Importing music and turning on and off auto-import.
I agree with the others — don’t bother with video. Podcast support was something I was greatly looking forward to. I wouldn’t mind if it was being delayed, but now it’s nowhere on the roadmap while things of marginal importance are.
If only I could use Rhythmbox under Windows… but since I can’t, thanks to you for Songbird! It’s still a fine program.
Same as above, please focus on the music, VLC is my videoplayer and Songbird my audioplayer, please keep it that way!
Hey guys, in the Idea Kitchen, Video has only 39 votes while Podcast has 118… So why is Podcast not planned *before* Video?
Wasn’t the vote the reason why CD Ripping (186 votes) was developed before Podcast (118 votes)?
Video support is nice to have if you want to watch the video version of a song but is anybody going to use Songbird as his main video player? I doubt it. There are also a lot of good video players that Songbird could never beat. Programs with good podcast support on the other hand are very rare. The only ones that I know of that are good are iTunes(hate it with a passion) and Miro(good but sometimes totally breaks).
So the main feature that would make Songbird better is podcast support. (the other feature was a portable apps version but that was just completed)
And CD ripping/burning? There are a lot of programs that can do that so it would me a nice feature to have but not nearly as important as podcast support.
I am less concerned with CD burning, but playback & ripping would be handy.
Cheers,
Richard.
About the CD ripping/burning part: it’s important for the random audience, if I want my mom/dad, uncle/aunt, etcetera to use Songbird the player needs a CD rip/burn option. And those don’t even know whats pod-casting. So for world domination, CD ripping/burning is far more important.
Nobody wants video. Please, please, please develop support for podcasts. It broke my heart to see it indefinitely delayed. Please?
Hey All,
This is a great discussion and we love hearing your feedback. Thanks so much.
@Toto, the Idea Kitchen tallies the “me too” votes on popular Get Satisfaction threads. It is indeed a factor when the team decides what’s next, but certainly not the only one. We also look at me too’s in Bugzilla and for this decision relied on information pulled from the user survey that I’m sure many of you have seen pop up in the player.
There are tons of video players, audio players, cd ripping and podcast tools out there. I really don’t understand how can some features be more important than others. That depends of course on the eye of the beholder.
Being the next big feature podcast, video, cd ripping or whatever, in the end who will win will be us. And I really don’t mind what the order is (and I also have some apps that would like to uninstall). So what i want is to have a fully featured multimedia player cos I don’t want to have 20 apps installed on my machine, each for one purpose.
About being the best video or audio player: most of the open source apps are written using open source libraries. Miro for example uses gstreamer (as SB) for audio and libxine (for video). So, in the end, with multiple apps running over the same code we get similar performance.
@bruno: I don’t agree, I think Songbird should stick to audio make it the best audio-player in the game. There are several teams in the race making top notch video-players and have enough work on only the video part. It doesn’t matter how good the people at Songbird are, I don’t think they have enough time, or enough developers to make Songbird the best video AND audio player in one. While Songbird is the favorite audioplayer for me, I think they still have a long road ahead and I don’t want to see “my” player get out of track, so please stick to audio for at least a while.
There are open source video players, right? Songbird is built on open source, right? It’s built off of another open source platform right? Would integrating an open source video player not seem like a much quicker and simpler way to add video (same for other features if there is a good quality open source app)?
This way, POTI can add the features quickly and when the other projects update, Songbird could benefit and integrate the updates.
Am I missing something here?
If it’s only grabbing an open source application and implementing it, than why not use that application? I just don’t see the benefit of video implementation in Songbird.
It is very likely/obvious that Songbird will be using other opensource software to render video. But the interest of having video support in Songbird is the library side of it, in my opinion. At the moment, my music library is well organized thanks to songbird, but my video library is a mess. VLC, my current player, is perfect to render video, but I’m not sure it’s capable of managing a library.
Also mixing audio and video in podcasts will be made easier.
Klint, if you want a video organizer, use Miro. I agree with most above. Video might be fine.. sometime in the future, but you should focus more on audio at the moment. Podcasts, cd ripping/burning etc.
O I forgot to mention, transcoding support is useful, along with supporting meta data editing with more audio formats.
I agree with the rest, please complete podcasts before adding video! 1.4 will be the 3rd release in a row with nothing for me. Please don’t make 1.5 the 4th.
Please concentrate on the music playing/ripping abilities before complicating life with video support. The only reason I haven’t canned my other music players is Songbird does rip or play CDs. As others have stated their are plenty of video players out there and VLC is doing a great job in that sector.
I honestly don’t see why people are complaining about Video support.
It opens up the possibility of including access to video stores (increasing income), means that portable devices which play video can potentially be supported, allows the possibility of video podcasts, etc.
Either way, both will be supported overall. But I personally think that the people who think video is useless need to look at the bigger picture. Either way, its a difference of one release only.
I see both podcasting and video support as important, but getting video support allows a lot more efficient use of developers time. I also dread GS being full of people complaining half of their podcasts are missing (because they turn out to be video based entries).
Just my opinion though…
Can’t wait for a new beta to be releases (a).
Podcast support is the important one i think.
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Argh! It’s starting to feel like Songbird podcast support is destined to always be floating “just around the corner”. This is ridiculous. I appreciate there are various features you want to get to, but *please*, next time you slate podcast support for a particular release (it doesn’t seem to be on the roadmap at all at the moment?), stick to it. It’s not so much the decisions about priorities that are really grating, although personally I would much rather have podcast support before video, it’s the constant slippage.
I agree with Andy here, it seems that songbird is not sticking to a plan very well at the moment. It’s cool if you can squeeze in an extra thing ahead of time, but when you decide that, well, this was too hard just now, and we are going with that instead, you really erode the faith people have in the road map. And then guess what they do? They get on the boards and scream themselves blue for whatever feature they want, because that seems to be the only way it’s going to happen. I can see a lot of points for and against putting in video before podcasts, but the developers need to make a decision, explain to people why they made that decision, and then stick to it. If you say SB 1.4 is going to have podcasts, and 1.5 is video, then don’t put in CD ripping and release it as 1.4 without podcasts, call it 1.39999 or whatever. Also, if you get video done first, don’t SAY you decided to focus on video first, (even if you did) just say “we were lucky that [programmer team] was so good at getting this done ahead of schedule, podcasts are still on track for 1.4 release at the end of december.” I think you’ll find this will go a LONG way to calming people down, as they will then begin to trust the roadmap again. Of course this means making a strategic decision as to which features come online first, which I grant is difficult, as they all seem important, but hey, that’s the way it is!
Musepack!
.mpc support please!
People wonder why people like me complain about video support being added to Songbird sooner rather than after other things have been done. It is because I came here hoping for a kick-ass audio program that I can run on my Linux machines. I use VLC and XBMC for video. The idea that somehow Songbird is going to take down those two applications any time soon is nonsense.
This is so annoying. The Banshee team thought they could do the same thing – add video … and all that.
Look, make Songbird a first-in-class audio program, or don’t call it “Song”-bird. Don’t make it another jack-of-all-trades, but not supreme at doing any of them.
-Ron
Why pushing back podcast support for video integration?! I don’t need video support in Songbird! It’s called SONGbird and not MULTIMEDIAbird. There are a lot of other good video players, IMHO Miro is one of the best. So please integrate podcast support in the next release.
To those complaining about podcast delays… I have been waiting for video support in songbird patiently ever since they removed it from the beta versions for quality concerns.
Podcast support will come eventually. I as well look forward to the day I can have my podcasts in Songbird and get rid of (buggy/non-extensible) Miro, but please stop demanding that video support should be pushed back for it… Not everyone shares your opinion. Some of us have been waiting longer than you have for ‘XYZ’ feature.
I personally like Songbird very much, because of the look&feel, but there’s one thing, that makes me worry, and discomfort me. It’s the “CPU-Power Consumption” that comes with playing. I’m using Songbird on a compaq 6715s with 2GiB RAM, and a Turion X2.
But if I compare Songbird with Winamp, then Winamp is the winner, because of it’s reduced hunger for CPU-Time.
Maybe you could focus a littlebit on that, so that songbird becomes even better. Esp. on Systems that run on battery every saved minute is better, therefore I would recommend this.
To give you some figures:
Winamp power consumption:
Window max: 8 – 12% CPU Time / Power
minimized: 2 – 6% CPU Time / Power
Songbird:
Window max: 10 – 30% CPU Time / Power
minimized: ~10% CPU Time / Power