thank u for all your work
i also appreciate your informations about the state of the bird

about the feather, i prefer the current one

Thank you for the release update and the screenshot!
Purple Rain looks polished and original, and I am greatly looking forward to seeing the full release.
Thank you to the entire team for their work, and I hope that POTI will continue to keep us up to date.

Thanks for the info and your work on the feather. I’m loving the Purple Rain feather! Especially how the display panes work now. Its turning out amazing!!

I’m pretty sure you got 100+ stevel bonus points from me this week. lol. kickin butt.

Ditto all the above. The flock seems to be flying in a new direction – UP….

Thanks for your update and keeping all us informed with no lunch updates…

I 2nd King of Budgies comment; this is a really great, transparent, and informative bird bath post. Thank you stevel for reaching out to us testy bird watchers.

I must also say, I thought there was really no reason for yet another feather, but that is a truly gorgeous looking feather; bonus points for a photo featuring a chiptunes artist.

Love the graphical design for purple rain, also it’s nice to see some new photos from the nest on flickr.

love the new feather! It seems like you guys are starting to move away from iTunes more, which is good.

I love the colors. I’m so tired of generic colors, this is so refreshing!

Thanks for the update, it’s really helpful for the community to have at least a general idea of what’s going on.

Regarding your comment about phased releases: that’s all fine and good, release it when it’s ready. But I really think we should be seeing some bug fix branch updates. For instance, the poor documentation of managed mode in 1.2 has been known for months and has cost several people many hours of work restoring their music collections. It would be trivial to at least make the description clearer, yet nearly half a year later it’s still the same and is still hurting Songbird’s image.

Thanks for the info, don’t like the new feather though. (maybe purple’s just not my color).

Thanks for the update!

@Stevel: it’s true a lot of other features are in development, but Balazs is talking about performance work. And let’s be honest, the last iterations haven’t seen much work on performance (if any, except from some smaller things Palant worked on).

And as a matter of fact, that’s the first thing a new user will see.
Most people I adviced Songbird too, have given up before even seeing wonderful features like library management, CD ripping, MSC support, lyricmaster and other extensions. Just because it hangs on the first search they do, or the whole application just doesn’t feel snappy enough.

Thank you for the update and information, songbird is an awesome product that you folks are putting out, keep up the great work. We all need to keep in mind that is a free product and that the company isn’t probably making a ton of profit on this project, so we should really be happy and patient with what we have.

Excellent post! Informative, accessible, friendly, optimistic, realistic.

You guys are doing awesome work, and it shows in the bird!

@Rez, CD ripping for Windows 7 works here. Perhaps try a later version..

Yes Full Windows 7 support isn’t planned until Nirvana, check the Releases section.

I agree. First improve performance and stability, and the second work on aesthetics.

Songbird lacks of a really fluid performance. Usually takes 2 or 3 mins to startup, very sloooow searching for a song, frequently crashes, and many drawbacks.
I got a high end machine Quad core 8 GB Ram, so machine is not the problem. Some of my friends (with a less powerful pc) consider songbird as an unusable piece of software.

Anyway, The new Purple Rain Feather looks amazing!

windows 7 compatibility…?

um … my bad iv been thinking , and maybe it was copy trans that screwed with my playlist order … ill have to give songbird a try again ..

h4xor you really should have checked the compatibility before trying it.

Just to say that the new Purple Rain feathers are beautiful in the latest Korn nightlies… What a jump from the good ol’ Gonzo ones:)
Also, all warning messages implemented in various places are now shown in a very obvious way, simply by changing colour.
Looking forward to seing that version released.
Thanks to all Songbird guys…

Oh, and the new feather is looking great, btw! (I might stop developing my feather after this release:-)

The only thing I’m concerned with is that I’ve been stuck at 1.4.0b3 for quite a while, and the add ons still haven’t been updated past it.

WORD!

Perhaps I’m being too picky, but the purple selection gradient is just one color. Is there a chance that a nice, 3d-ish look? Kind of like this:

http://www.box.net/shared/vxr1v59kci

Excuse the crudity, please.

What FizzyFalcon said. If “Kanye was busted,” then don’t move on to something else, stick with it until it’s not busted. What sense does it make to have people working on video features or whatever when all the basic functionality you’ve added since 1.2.0 doesn’t work for anyone?

It’s like you guys realized that one of the big drivers to Ubuntu’s success was having timely, scheduled releases on a regular basis, but didn’t realize that this meant having the discipline to make high-quality releases on a regular basis.

I like Dark-ish themes, really, but i think that a user wants to see somethink really, really SHINY and COLORFUL.
The maximum demonstration of that is -> All the most important websites uses SHINY COLURS (ok, Windows Media player is not so shiny, but in Vista and Seven it looks _GLASSY_ ).

I know, it’s useless, but the better theme you can make is a Transparent Theme supported for Windows 7, Vista, and obviously Compiz Fusion (maybe a plugin for now?). MacosX is grayed so i think the older theme will be good enough for Mac-ers!!!

Okay, but look, if you’re finishing up a release, that means that at some point in the past you froze the release for testing, and you did triage on all your bugs so that the only changes checked in were ones that fixed showstopper bugs. It doesn’t sound like you did that, and it doesn’t sound like you’re doing that now with your 1.4.1 release — you’re still adding new features in what’s supposed to be a cleanup release!

The thing that mainly concerns me, though, is how this lack of finishing tends to feed on itself. You never finished 1.3.0, which means that when you gave up on it and started on 1.4.0, you were already working from a baseline of non-production-quality code. When you gave up on 1.4.0 and moved onto 1.5.0, you’re now working from a baseline of two non-releases worth of non-production-quality code. When you give up on 1.5.0 and move on to 1.6.0, you’ll now have three non-releases worth of buggy, incomplete code. (Hopefully you’d merge your 1.4.1 fixes in there, but you know as well as I do that merging two code branches under active development is non-trivial.)

At that point, 1.6.0 is pretty much going to just have to be the combined QA/bugfixing cycle that never happened with 1.3-1.5, and that’s a huge technical debt to have incurred.

And I mean, I’m not involved in Songbird development, so obviously you can feel free to ignore me, but from my perspective, release discipline and timeboxed releases are some of the biggest process improvements to come to open source over the last few years, and it’s unfortunate to see Songbird ignoring them.

I Think Mike Scared The Developers,They’re Afraid To Post A New BirdBath.Nice Going Mike,lol.

@Mike.

Actually, I haven’t seen any “bug fixes” applied to the Korn tree for ages, and if you check the release docs, the changes are primarily visual: http://wiki.songbirdnest.com/Releases/Korn.

The main reason 1.3 wasn’t released was apparently because of broken device support. A link to 1.3.0 was released in the blog, but it never seemed to be the recommended build, probably because every device owner would have flooded get satisfaction with complaints their players weren’t working. The only objection I had against the delay of release, was that 1.2 didn’t clearly state what Media Management did, so some people enabled it without thinking. However, 1.4 redesigned the entire dialog, and I guess they didn’t want to change things in 1.2 and be required to completely retest the release to add additional text .

Anyway, the only real concern I saw at the time was lack of communication. Even us Songbird champs were kept in the dark and none of us knew what was going on. However, the communication problems now mostly seem to have been fixed. There is a better understanding of what is happening now.

In terms of the technical debt, 1.5 wont be released (as per the roadmap). So technically, there are only 2 active trees, 1.4.x/Korn, and 1.6.x/Trunk.

As all recent changes to 1.4 appear to be by Stevel, the rest of the team appear to be working on Trunk. Clearly, it’s a bad idea for a team of developers to work on a theme together (unless they want a catastrophe). It makes sense that they work on 1.5/1.6 instead for that reason. Therefore, its only QA work that will need to be done on 1.4, and the eventual port of Purple rain from 1.4 to 1.6. As Purple rain is written in XUL though, hopefully, the process of doing so isn’t too difficult. Forward porting purple rain logically seems to be better then having a development team sit back doing nothing watching Steve work over his shoulder I guess.

That being said, I’ve been using 1.4 for AGES now, and its damned stable (even 1.3.x was stable). In fact, I don’t remember 1.4 crashing at all, even during the beta development cycle

There have been times I was concerned with some releases in the past. However at this time, I can say that as someone who hangs out on Get Satisfaction WAYY too much, that I feel pretty good about the current releases, and believe that it fixes the majority of problems heard on Get Satisfaction. 1.6 will probably fix the last major complaints (other then the iPod problems, which Pioneers of the Inevitable can’t really fix in the long term).

In fact, I believe that if Linux distributions start repackaging Songbird officially (they don’t work together, so its really their responsibility), then most of the Linux problems would disappear too, as they could apply the environment variables they require to songbird directly within their package.

Just my opinion though (I’m community too). Its become obvious that projects such as Winamp are now taking Songbird VERY seriously (many of their actions seem to relate to Songbird’s movements), and that Madonna in particular I think may shun the non-believers and make some people think twice about Songbird.

Andrew,

Thanks for the long response. I’m not paying as much attention as you, obviously — I just check this blog out every few weeks to see if there’s a new release (since I want both MSC syncing with my Fuze and cover art on my FLAC) — so I’m just going by what this post says, in terms of adding extra features to 1.4.1.

I’m glad to hear that 1.4 works well for you, but I don’t know how to square that with the “Kanye is broken” claim upthread…

I personally think that win7 support should be a bigger concern. Alot of people will be upgrading soon and with that will come inevitable WMP issues. It would be a good idea to have the bird ready for these people. I am currently running the latest beta of 1.4 in win7 32bit and it functions correctly, but there are (reported) issues with album art and cd ripping that I hope are being addressed.

I think we need to cool our jets. Sure, they could have been a lot clearer as to what’s going on, and sure, things are a bit funky right now, but it’s not like they are actively trying their best to make us all miserable. It’ll work out.

Just watch the following bugzilla link until it hits “zarro boogs” and then you’ll know when your RC will be out.

http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/buglist.cgi?query_format=advanced&short_desc_type=allwordssubstr&short_desc=&target_milestone=Ko%D0%AFn&long_desc_type=substring&long_desc=&bug_file_loc_type=allwordssubstr&bug_file_loc=&status_whiteboard_type=allwordssubstr&status_whiteboard=&keywords_type=allwords&keywords=&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&emailassigned_to1=1&emailtype1=substring&email1=&emailassigned_to2=1&emailreporter2=1&emailqa_contact2=1&emailcc2=1&emailtype2=substring&email2=&bugidtype=include&bug_id=&votes=&chfieldfrom=&chfieldto=Now&chfieldvalue=&cmdtype=doit&order=Reuse+same+sort+as+last+time&field0-0-0=noop&type0-0-0=noop&value0-0-0=

So where are the updates?
I really love songbird but the Media Management Error is getting so tiresome. I know it is fixed, because the get satisfaction site said so. Could you please please please release an updated version with this bug fixed?

Devs, please note, most users don’t give a flip for added features right now, cd-ripping? who does that anyway, this is the digital age. I don’t want more support for devices I don’t own, I just want the basic stuff to work and work speedy at that!

Please for the love of songbird, re-haul your roadmaps and get your priorities straight.

Ok, what is going over at POTI headquarters? No releases for months, people leaving the team, and roadmaps that are only interested in adding new features rather than FIXING existing ones. Like the other posters said, I don’t really care about video playing, cd ripping, or new features if the core songbird player is a piece of garbage.

Seriously guys. For as long as songbird has been in development it should be much farther along resource-wise. The thing is a slow bloated hog that is piggy in it’s functionality of a good day, and down right terrible the rest of the time.

Please spend a few releases streamlining the core product and stop adding new features that just add to the broken end product. Songbird is quickly becoming bloatware. I’m all for a nice, multi-function final product, but that’s stuff you should be worrying about for the 2.0 release, instead of trying to cram it all into 1.* releases that never come out because all the new features are busted.

/frustrated

I agree with Pr1me. It’s called SONGbird, not video bird. Plus VLC plays video just fine, and there’s performance issues and other MUSIC related functionality that would be much preferred to video support.

I think you guys are missing the BIG picture.

1) POTI is/wants to work with hardware manufacturers, and most portable media players these days supports video’s. Songbird 1.4 already technically supports firmware updating (which is a nice feature for hardware manufacturers).
2) Technologies such as visualisations are best implemented when video support exists. They can then utilise the video functionality to display visualisations
3) There is an abundance of Podcasts which now utilise both videos and audio these days, so once podcast support is properly implemented, video will be a prequisite for many podcast users anyway.
4) Technically, there is probably unlikely to be any slowdown occurred due to anything except larger library size (because of the extra media items in the library, which means larger database).
5) As mentioned, this would allow music video’s to be sold on supported music stores.

So, theres potentially plenty of benefits. Remember, internet browsers were never intended to stream video’s, act as the primary GUI for an operating system (chromeOS), render 3D graphics or act as online music players. Yet, they are doing all those things (they are basically secure on-the-fly compilers these days). And music/video are so similar, that I believe the benefits will be quite significant.