welcome to my post-1.4.1 1.4.2 1.4.3 post… where i talk about things you talked about after we talked about launching 1.4.3 (after our couple of respins) last week.
we’ve been following the blog comments, reading the bug reports, and getting the feedback from GetSatisfaction bubbled up to us via our intrepid Songbird Champs. there have been a few recurring issues worth mentioning/recapping, so here we go in no particular order:
- Windows 7 Support
- Yes, we throw a warning message up when you’re installing Songbird regarding it being unsupported on Windows 7. This is mostly a “caveat emptor” warning, we haven’t done full and proper QA test runs to ensure things work on Windows 7. That being said, we have plenty of users who run it just fine on Windows 7. If you do continue to install and run it on Windows 7, you may experience bugs. We’re working on full and proper Windows 7 support for the next release if you want to wait.
- iPod Support
- As mentioned previously, we are no longer maintaining the iPod Extension. Continually playing an unsupported game of catchup with Apple sucked, and we’ve opted to go with iTunes Import/Export Syncing as our supported way of having users sync their music libraries with Songbird. As mentioned in that blog post, we’ve open sourced the iPod Extension (which is built on libgpod), and would happily welcome any community patches to it.
- Splash Screen
- Yeah, we get it. Some of you don’t like the splash screen. Unfortunately it does, believe it or not, serve a purpose. Not everyone has the super-latest-OMFG-ITS-1BILLION-TERAHERTZ machine… and especially on some platforms (Windows XP for instance), there was no feedback as to when the application was starting. If you really really really hate the splash screen that much, then go grab Simon’s splish splosh extension to easily change or disable the splash screen.
- Bookmarks
- Over the next few releases you’ll see us phase out some of the more web browser specific features. This is a conscious design decision to differentiate Songbird as more of a media player than a web browser. Let’s face it, we’ll never be a better web browser than Firefox, Safari, or Chrome. We’ve never intended for Songbird to replace your daily web browser. Don’t take this to mean we’re removing the web browser component entirely… we can’t, and we won’t since we use this for rendering things like the Last.fm Radio Directory, the 7Digital Music Store, the Concerts Listings page, etc. It just means we’d prefer for add-ons to take a more integrated approach along the lines of the 7Digital, Concerts, SHOUTcast, & Last.fm add-ons where servicepane nodes are displayed that link to custom chrome (or heck even to webpages tailored specifically for Songbird, such as the 7Digital store).
- That being said, if you really really really want your bookmarks back, I’ve made a Songbird Bookmarks extension that re-enables the bookmarks servicepane node so you can get your old bookmarks back.
- Automatic Album Art Fetching
- One of the new features in Songbird 1.4.3 is automatic album art fetching. Depending on what mode you have album art in (either “Now Playing” or “Now Selected”), album art will be automatically fetched for the currently playing or selected track. If you’re on a slow or high latency connection (and this can vary depending on your album art fetcher add-ons and priorities, set via the Album Art preferences), you may experience a lag when selecting or playing tracks as Songbird goes to fetch the album art. We’ll work on improving the performance of this in the future, but for now – I’ve made an extension to allow you disable or enable this automatic fetching behaviour.
