As promised, we’ve just started pushing updates from 1.2.0 to the new 1.4.3 release!
If you’re impatient, or raring to grab the update, go to Help > Check for Updates in the Songbird menus to trigger an update; this will download 1.4.3 in all its purple glory!
We know some of you prefer the Gonzo Feather. Thankfully, we have an awesome community developer and Songbird Champ: boosh. He went ahead and made a Gonzo 2.0 Feather using all the UI enhancements we made in Purple Rain, but with the visual style of Gonzo.
So for those among our flock who find purple distracting, you can still have your Korn cake with Gonzo, too!
Enjoy!
(1.4.1 and 1.4.2 users will also get an update prompt to 1.4.3.)
67 Comments
Subscribeawesome! That new gonzo feather is a lot better than purple rain in my opinion. Plus – as you can see in the player control pane – the real “songbird” just came back! Tanks a lot! More of the same!! Cheers!!
I’m really disappointed with this redesign. If there was one thing where songbird really stood out from the rest of the players was the great look of the player and the website. Why redesign if you going to make it uglier ? :s
I was wondering if there was a way for it to automatically search and add lyrics to all my songs without playing them.
update to new version 90 % of the ad ons in compatible and library doesn’t exist any more. What the F is that? Do you ahve to re import lbbrary every f-ing there is an update? Really pissed with you guys Song Bird gets in the way o enjoying the music.
@Zak, there is an option in LyricMaster to search for lyrics for all your library.
I have complained at length in the past elsewhere about progress in Songbird, but since the release of version 1.4, I have been playing with it extensively. I have to say it looks pretty good now. I am a Linux user, so I could complain about the lack of support for some new features that are “not supported in Linux,” but it still looks good.
I have been using Jajuk as my music player, (in the distant past I was using Amarok.) I have tried many players and found them wanting. To get comfortable with Songbird 1.4.3, I am using the following add-ons: Details Pane, Focus Track, Grid View, Library Statistics, Lyric Master, mashTape, New Releases, NowPlayingArt, Smarty Pants and the Wikipedia Extension.
I scanned my 15,000 track music library and with the above add-ons, I am enjoying Songbird quite a bit … good work.
@Pedro:
The redesign really has been the “bike shed“-issue of this release; a lot of people love it, some people hate it. The great part about Songbird is you can grab the Gonzo 2.0 feather (and thank boosh!), and it’ll be just like old times.
@Bruce:
Many of the addons were made incompatible with this release; community-supported addons sometimes take a little while to be updated to the latest release, but this release changed a lot of UI elements, and that’s made it particularly difficult on developers to get their addons updated. We do know about it and are helping the community work on their addons.
As for reimporting your library, no: the upgrade process will update your library as necessary. A reimport is not required (although, we do rebuild library indexes at update; you may see some UI around that, but it’s not a reimport).
However, if you had an addon that modified the library directly, and it suddenly became incompatible (and thus disabled), it might have a hook that would require you to rebuild your library from scratch, so that the library is consistent. That _may_ be what you ran into.
What I do know about the new release is the fact that it had changed everything to WORSE. Thank you, I’m searching for another player because everything from moving playing control to top of the window to some stupid welcome window everytime I start songbird is usless.
Well thanks a lot guys. Songbird no longer recognises my Ipod. I was happy now I’m not. I understand it’s important to drop support of the Ipod because of the tiny market share ( oops I dripped sarcasm on my keyboard). Now I have to find a media player that’s willing to work under Linux and Supports Ipods thanks for the unnecessary extra work.
Yeah I think the purple rain feather is a step backward in my humble opinion. I think it will always be just be a taste thing though. All a bit too “cute”. Songbird is great in that it allows you to have feathers, but UI consistency is a good thing, especially in terms of usability.
I really like the idea of making Songbird have a default system feather as in this thread for example:
http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/topics/interface_redesign_ideas_from_firefox_3_7_and_4_mockups
It would be a more “neutral” default, then users are still free to change based on any number of other feather.
It has come a long way though. Though still for the life of me cant get album art to show on most of my songs, even though they are all tagged and embedded in mp3tag and work in foobar and every other player I have tried (many!). In fact less seem to show up now then before! Don’t know if I can be bothered trying to fix it any more!
I think there are quite a few other basic things like that, that need attention. Though sorry can’t be more specific at the moment.
Anyway keep up the good work! Look forward to following continued development.
cool now that you have finished the update maybe you can work on making it not crash as soon as i try to do anything, like say play music?
CD Ripper crashes my Huwaei mobile internet connection and none of my Greasemonkey scripts for Last.fm are working
@Piglet – Right-click on the playback bar, it presents you with a choice of top or bottom. If you hate the welcome window so much it’s trivial to remove – there’s even a plug-in to do so.
I hope the FoxyTunes plugin link gets fixed, it was actually killing my HTTP connection, trying to link up, for some reason. Very weird.
besides everything crashing at first the most annoying thing is i can change songbirds vertical size. it locks it at a tiny sliver but i can make it as wide as i want. i was pumped at first for this update now i just want to take a step back. is there a newer version coming out soon 1.4.4???
oh… and still no leading zeros for tracks under 10. really
I was really excited to update Songbird in hopes of continually improving a pretty awesome project. Unfortunately, after installing the update and restarting the program, it constantly crashes on the initial “Rebuilding Library sorting data…” =|
I’ll try restarting my computer later, but so far this isn’t looking good. Bummer.
(Windows 7, x64)
Wow, there’s a LOT of hate here. I think the Purple Rain feather looks great; in fact, I think it’s far superior to Gonzo. And, while I think there’s still a lot of work to be done on certain things, this version is definitely the best version yet (and, imo, the first really usable version yet). You guys rule. Keep it up.
Well, I for one am sticking with Songbird 1.2, until the iPod Device Support add-on
is updated to work with the newest versions of the player … if that ever happens!
Dropping iPod support was the biggest mistake you guys could’ve possibly made,
and I can now no longer recommend Songbird as an alternative to bloaty iTunes.
Question: Why does songbird always detect changes in my playlists from iTunes though there have been none?
Seems as though the new update broke Songbird for me. Whenever I attempt to load Songbird, it hangs…even in Safe Mode. All it does is display the “Songbird Media Player” startup image, and then it just hangs. Ideas?
Sir, I’m angry, where is the plug in for ipod in the latest version of Songbird. How am i suppose to sync my ipod now, THIS is important you know, you guys are suppose to be iTune killers – Argh~
And where is the link to download the older version, Old V works fine, i can sync my ipod- it’s makes me happy – so please post the link to download the old V. And what the hell with Nokia??? $$$$ in pocket?
@Stephanie
I do also have that kind of issue from time to time. I have to kill and restart Songbird’s process, sometimes more than once, until it works again fine.
You all are a whiny bunch of bitches. The new player design looks awesome, keep up the great work, SB!
When a fundamentally stupid decision is taken, such as removing iPod support
form Songbird, then I think we have every right to be “whiny bitches” about it.
As for the issue over the new default Purple Rain feather, at least those people
that don’t like it, can easily switch back to a version of the old Gonzo feather.
@Bruce, Piglet, Dave, Greg
It’s impressive that Songbird can elicit such powerful negative responses after being out for so short a time. Must mean the Songbird team is doing something right.
Although if it was up to me, I would be happier if people with entitlement issues weren’t part of the community in the first place
I don’t think Songbird is perfect. I’ve tried quite a few media players/managers, and none of them fully meet my needs. So for now I stay with Songbird because it is free, open-source, and cross-platform enough to work for me. If that ever changed, I don’t plan on feeling like I lost something I was somehow entitled to. Maybe I’ll actually contribute to the project in a positive way so it better meets my needs. That’s why I stick with more open players that don’t encourage DRM and walled gardens.
One thing which instantly turned me off Songbird, was the way it automatically wrote all tags in both ID3v1 and ID3v2.4. I prefer to have no ID3v1 tags and only use ID3v2.3.
Maybe an option to write in only specific tags?
Feedback: A growler with the new track info in would be good for when I’m skipping through tracks (I’ve installed this recently to add Apple media key support http://addons.songbirdnest.com/addon/1408) outside of the player window.
Keep up the great work guys. iTunes SUX! So you’ve saved my Mac music experience.
Yes, lots of anger here. Anger comes from fear, and if you look at what people are angry about it’s easy to see the fears.
Anger about splash screen = fear that SB developers have given up and startup will take 120 seconds forever.
Anger about lack of Linux support = fear that Linux is going to be abandoned yet again, and nobody will ever use Linux.
Anger about ipod support = hmmm, what other media player COULD an ipod owner use, and how could that cause fear?
These people are just trying to create fear in YOU the developers in the hope you will do what they want. I suppose that’s because they are primarily motivated be fear themselves, which is sad. But allow me to make some points from a place of logic.
I use songbird and so obviously any critiques I have are not enough to make me leave, but I DID switch from another player to songbird and I will again if I find something better.
Songbird start up is too slow. Yes, it is. I’m not a programmer, and I don’t have the faintest what to do about it, but it’s too slow, and it’s going to be a problem for you as soon as the next open source music player comes along.
Cross platform users are few, but they are almost by definition power users and early adopters. These are the people that make recommendations to friends and family and are probably worth a million or two in advertising, don’t ignore them too much, and be fairly apologetic about supporting windows first and foremost and clear about when new features are going to go into other platforms. Everybody understands why you do that, but a little sugar helps the medicine go down.
ipods, yes, Apple is the new Microsoft, and is using dirty tricks with propitiatory firmware to keep competitors out of the market, but you CAN’T not have some kind of ipod support in the year 2010. You HAVE to have something. By all means put big waring UI windows in to explain that Apple doesn’t support open standards, and you can’t guarantee that songbird will work with an ipod, and ipod users are taking a risk, and look at all the great features you’d have access to if only you bought a better player, but you CAN’T have ipod support as a community supported addon, I’m sorry it has to be core.
Also, on that topic, U2 as the band you see on the splash screen? Really? I like U2 alright, but I seem to recall an add campaign a few years ago where Bono was gyrating around to convince me to buy an ipod. every time I see U2 and music player together I think it’s an add for Apple. Or at least an add for something. I think it would be wise to get a graphics designer in to come up with a nice, clean logo that will last for all time, like a rainbow colored half eaten piece of fruit.
Anyway, I think things are coming along well, and I’m happy to keep using songbird, and please ignore the haters, but look at the places where the hate is coming from.
hi, new to songbird and really enjoying it. the default look is quite pretty, a nice break from all the mac greyness I’m used to. even so, I wish users would do a lot less whining and a little more skin designing, but I’m sure it’ll come with time.
I hope the next version runs a little faster and more smoothly, but I haven’t had any crashes (winXP sp3) and songbird can already do more than itunes ever dreamed of, so I’m a believer. thanks for the hard work.
Come on, why push an unstable release?? My songbird is dead now.
About the ever changing UI and users that like a neutral theme that does not resemble what ever fancy contemporary mainstream trends:
1) Install new songbird version (Yes / No)
2) Choose skin (Keep current / Change to fancy stuff)
That means all future versions should have a default neutral theme AND some fancy theme for fancy users
But back to main point: Why release such an unstable version? My update dies during library update. Thats simply not good enough for a product like this!
I’m totally happy with the 1.4 update. Those who hate it are probably wrong =|
It is actually faster, looks better and is as good as previous releases.
However, I think that one thing is a disadvantage in this release. I actively used the rating option in the mini player view, now I can’t. Or maybe I’m dumb and it can be set somewhere?
I had been quite the Songbird advocate when discussing iTunes alternatives, but that is not an option anymore. Like most people that found their way to Songbird, it was a result of dissatisfaction with WMP (i.e. the typical default player on a Windows system) and with iTunes. Now that Songbird no longer attempts to support the most popular PMP in the world, it is no longer a viable alternative.
Despite all this, I really wanted to continue to use Songbird as I had invested years of track ratings and finely tuned playlists, but now the 1.4x updates broke or corrupted my library and I have to start from scratch anyway. So it’s an easy choice for me to now move to a media player that does make an effort to support iPods (or at least continue to support older iPod models) and has less stability issues.
So long Songbird. I really enjoyed the time we had together.
Your latest “update” makes users download a new feather so that their GUI interface stays the same as it was before the “update?” I guess I could come up with a more annoying, infantile, neo-hipster mickey to slip into an unsuspecting user’s drink… but not at the moment.
Thanks for wasting my time! I still love Songbird, but handing control to a crew who enjoy being hip more than being user-friendly is a bad idea.
@everyone who’s whining like schoolkids about the lack of iPod support:
In case you haven’t heard, Apple sucks. They use tons of proprietary crap on their iPods, which means you shouldn’t expect them to work with anything but iTunes. After all, Apple is trying desperately to make sure that’s all you CAN use. Sure, some software developers devote their whole lives and careers to creating third-party, iPod-compatible software. But POTI decided not to do that. It just happens that they care more about discovering/managing/playing music than they do about hacking Apple’s insane API. So don’t bring your childish little “Gimme what I want or I won’t be your friend anymore!” attitudes in here. Nobody forced you to buy an iPod, so don’t expect anybody to jump through hoops for you just so you can use your iPod with something other than iTunes. That’s a responsibility you took on yourself when you bought Apple’s little electronic box of evil.
@everyone who’s complaining about the software being unstable:
Just saying “Songbird keeps crashing” isn’t going to solve anything. If you have a specific problem, file a big report for crying out loud! (http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/) Nobody is forcing you to use Songbird, so either contribute meaningfully or quit yer yappin. That’s how open-source projects are meant to work.
Yeah, I’m a little ticked. For the record, I don’t represent Songbird or POTI. I’m just a *reasonably* satisfied Songbird user who hates to see ignorant bitchers ruin the experience for everyone else.
Will the latest version of Songbird play AIFF files?
Steve
@foolishgrunt: Yes, that.
Specifically, the bits regarding Apple – the more I read about their efforts of the last couple of years to SPECIFICALLY PREVENT programs like Songbird from working with their hardware, the happier I am that I stayed out of that from the start.
Why on earth should the devs of our flappy feathery li’l player have to play an endless game of catch-up with a mammoth organization who actively attempts to thwart their efforts?
If you hate the fact that Songbird can’t synch with the iThing, then… quit whining and HELP OUT! Donate money, time, or energy to the people who ARE trying to make a plug-in that supports Apple’s closed, proprietary, anti-competitive systems.
If you can’t be arsed to do any of that, then use iTunes, like Apple wants you to, and use Songbird’s very fast, clean, transparent iTunes-synch for playback.
On Another Note – it does often take a LONG TIME to do the library conversion, especially with big libraries. Be patient. If it dies, restart and try again. It took 3 or 4 attempts to get fully through my ~19,000 files.
No, I’m not completely happy with Songbird… but for my purposes it’s way better than anything since MMJB.
Why isn’t there a .deb version?
You may want to take a look at: http://whacked.net/2008/12/11/ubuntu-songbird-sitting-in-a-tree/ Tom
It explains more about the situation with getting into the apt tree.
In regards to a .deb, I personally am not a fan of apt. Its underpowered and doesn’t support basic functionality like user-only installs (rather than systemwide).
I’d prefer a full blown .sh installation system personally..
Ooh, I fixed my original issue where Songbird wouldn’t get past the “Rebuilding Library sorting data…” message.
I went in and created a new profile for Songbird and it worked.
In windows XP…
Start > All Programs > Songbird (Profile Manager) > Create Profile > Next > > Finish
That fixed the issue for me.
I’m having that Rebuilding Library sorting data… issue on Linux, and I’ve launched it through the terminal, and have seen the resulting error message, but still can’t see from that site how I’m supposed to fix the issue. It just says to set an environment variable to 1 to hide the message, but it still stalls… so what has that achieved? I really like Songbird, and wish to continue to use it.
Scratch that, on removing the .songbird2 folder from my home directory it works fine. Found the answer when searching the bug site. Phew. It’s definitely quicker.
If you’re going to focus support on Windows, at least focus it on the current release of Windows. Try to be a little more forward-thinking: who’s buying new computers with WinXP installed on them?
i actually really like Songbird for a lot of reasons. But it’s bittersweet. In a way, you’re leaving Windows AND Linux users in the cold, because you’re not keeping up with either platform.
@joe t
And who’s buying new PC anyway? Those who already have Windows XP don’t need any
Be patient, next version will support windows 7
@joe t. – Heh. My new netbook came with XP… and songbird is definitely my player of choice on it. And yeah, XP is also my OS on most of my desktops.
I do plan on moving to a mix of 7 and Ubuntu, though, so I’m very eager to see more support for them in the future. Just sayin’… XP is still the single largest windows installed version.
Since I updated to SB 1.4.3, my playlist disappeared and I am unable to import playlist from itunes…
what I am doing wrong ? 
Maybe someone should port the Add-on Compatibility add-on from Firefox onto Songbird: It might quicken the down time of add-ons from release.
Nice, fast new release and big-up to boosh for Gonzo 2.0. I also dig the new bird icon. Here’s some criticism though.
- I do not understand why the iPod add-on is left unsupported.
- the add-on dragging bars are so big that they take a lot of space from my fairly small screen (and perhaps other people’s small screens, too).
Nobody here really likes iTunes, I just considered switching back, but I simply don’t have the heart to do it. That’s why I hope voicing my concerns does a little help to improve future releases. Talking future releases, these are two bonus-wishes for future versions:
- importing and burning tools
- a radio that allows adding any radio stream (Rhythm box has that already).
One issue on Mac with the Gonzo feather, and all other non-default feathers I’ve tried: they don’t respect the Graphite appearance.
Close/minimize/zoom buttons are red/orange/green instead of graphite.
The purple rain feather does get it right.
Oh, and the same goes for the Gonzo 2.0 highlight color.
Hope you all are working on the ability for this version to playback my ipod. I am extremely disappointed after updated my songbird and finding that it doesn’t read my ipod. WHY? Why would you release a new version that didn’t have full support for all add-ons? Very disappointed fan right now.
For those who have an iPod and want to sync it with Songbird, a solution has been found and is described here by Lito::
http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/topics/step_by_step_how_to_sync_your_apple_ipod_ipod_1g_through_5_5g_ipod_mini_and_ipod_nano_1g
PLEASE IMPROVE YOUR SUPPORT ON UBUNTU, definitely the most upcoming and sexy free operating system of the world!
As a matter of fact ubuntu slowly but steadily overtakes the microsoft dictatorship.
I really appreciate what you are doing and i hope that i will join your ranks trying to improve the ubuntu version of SONGBIRD.
Greetings!
VLC (the other magnificent media open source project) recently unleashed a new version of its program( 1.04) that :” is targetted at fixing bugs on the x11 platforms, fixing bugs especially for KDE, cairo-dock, XCB, v4l and FreeBSD compatibility. Binaries for Windows and Mac OS are not yet on the pipe.”
As you see they rightly prioritized the gnu/linux world as their project is a gnu project!
I hope that you guys will make the same thing and help boost the linux with a version of songbird that will be at least on par with the windows version and (why not!) even better!
Thanks in advance and i wish that those that really care for opensource and GNU/Linux will provide you the necessary help to make songbird the ultimate player in the Linux world.
KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK!
entirely agreed for u2 on the splash screen, a logo of bird would kick ass much more
I really appreciate all the hard work that went into this release, but changing the UI like that with no warning is really not a nice thing to do to existing users. The new skin and icon look really unprofessional and out of place on os x.
In my opinion the gonzo theme is a step backwards also – not to mention hard to find when you’re just trying to restore your program. On gonzo the top corners of songbird aren’t even rounded and the app doesn’t look anything like a native os x app.
Is there a place to still download songbird 1.2?
HEAVY – one word to describe songbird now
over 100mg of ram without any extension – can u do smthg about that?
i don’t want to go for another player but it crashes quite often on vista
and managing a huge library seems difficult (over 10.000 tracks)
A NICE FEATHER as a default
good luck
I gotta agree with mehdi on the splash screen – I was thrown off by it, I just downloaded songbird since the 1.0 and 0.4 release, the new version kicks ass – the lyrics feature is awsome too
Cheers ^_^
Are you guys working diligently with Phillips and can’t discuss anything? How’s Madonna going?
For those of you who are afraid of using Songbird on Win7: I’m using it nearly two months now and *never* had any issue.
Butdon’t sue me for that. There are probably things that don’t work. But i didn’t encounter them.
Hey guys… can you PLEASE fix the Mac OSX version?
iTunes library importing/exporting can be said as broken at best, and also, i dont like it how when the song changes to the next one, the player doesnt select it automatically, like other players, and with a plugin like mediaflow, it gets kinda annoying.
apart from that, awesome player… Certainly better than iTunes, which has shocking sound quality, and can be labelled crippleware. Best of all, its got an integrated browser so i dont ever need to leave Songbird lol. It’s frozen a couple of times tho, and had to restart the mac to get it running again.
Oh, to clarify ‘broken’, it just syncs as one massive mess, and doesnt differentiate between podcasts and songs. Also, it seems to show duplicates not visible in iTunes.
Why did you change the bright, clear yellow bird to this black icon that nearly disappears in my (OS X 10.5) dock??? Any way of getting the cute and easily-spotable bird back?
Still rebuilding library, so no comments on the rest…
the Purple Rain look is horrid, which is weird because it seems like Songbird has (had?) some good designers on hand. What happened? I understand that themes can be changed, but I’d think the default theme ought to be a bit more neutral…not some throwback to the year 2000 where everyone was skinning Winamp to look the most 1337.
You guys must be hiding from the blog, seriously.
For some reason I still check this blog everyday! I suppose I’m forever the optimist
For the record, I think the activity on the addons page is directly related to the activity on this blog. The less there is on the blog, the fewer new and creative addons are released by the community. One only needs to look at how little activity there has been on the blog over the last month and compare it to the addons page to see this. Thus, unless there really is very little going on behind the scenes in songbird (which I fear may be the case), it would probably be worth it to keep on blogging.
Just a thought, I still dig you guys!
Just heard about Songbird & downloaded it immediately…. seems great!
Now need to sync it with iTunes, 2 iPods, Audio.com (often listen to these) – Windows 7 still under dev. on this PC. Now for FM radio & videos – Wish me luck!
Stan Miller out of Windhoek, Namibia – unhappy with VERY expensive, slow & insecure Internet 3G connections.
Have a great day & bless you all! Stan