By now you’ve seen the news about our partnership with Philips. Big chunks of the team have been cranking pretty hard on this partner release and we’re super excited to ship some things we’ve been working on for a while, and to get Songbird into the hands of even more users. The feedback has already been tremendous; thanks to everyone for your support!
As you know we’re big believers in openness and as such we try to share our development plans and progress with you as regularly and freely as we can. This isn’t as straightforward when other companies are involved — especially large, global, public companies like Philips. So we apologise for not being able to talk openly, sooner, about this new relationship but we hope, even as a bit of a surprise, you can appreciate why this is a good thing for the company, the products, the platform, and all of our users. As always we’ll strive to give you an early heads up whenever we can.
While there’s obviously some special work we’ll do for Philips, we don’t think about this as one-off work. Much of what we do for them, is work we’ve been planning to do for all Songbird consumers. For Philips, there’s certainly a custom feather and the add-ons that are important to them and their customers. We’re working to make sure that all of what we build is valueable for you and for partners … with as few exceptions as possible.
Our partnership with Philips is a great step for us — it drives distribution, revenue, and an even tighter connection to the CE side of the world. Of course the partnership means more features to consider and tradeoffs to balance – but in this case, that’s a great problem to have. There is lots of overlap in desired features from both sides, so this probably means you’ll see some things accelerated, which is good news for all Songbird consumers. We know that users around the globe using the software and sending us their ideas ultimately results in a better experience for everyone. So keep your suggestions coming.
There’s no resting on this week’s milestone achievement, we’re working fast and furiously on the next release, which will hit early this year. Stay tuned for more as we move continue evolving plans and working through development.
Thanks again for all of your support!
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18 Comments
SubscribeSuggestions :
- Make Songbird experience the same at each release for Windows, Linux, Mac
- Open the code of some addons which are closed source
I 2nd both of GeekShadow’s suggestions.
I said it already elsewhere, but I say it again: performance must have higher priority exactly because of this deal.
People who buy the Philips devices will now be kind of obligated to use songbird, and if performance is bad (especially search), they will all soon hate songbird as there will be no alternative for them. Kind of like how some people hate iTunes.
Agreed, Songbird is becoming great. I look forward to future releases, and hopefully the Philip’s partnership will increase the focus on basic functionality; speed, stability.
1.4 brought a usable Songbird for me, and I’m now switched. Sort out the annoying pausing when looking for artwork, and I’ll start recommending it to friends.
Have Philips taken the bird with “the cloud behind”?
Very corporate!
so is philips dropping support for MTP & using MSC instead?
Congratulations guys!
It’s so fun watching a small company grow into a real competitor to the bigger guys!
And stevel, your writing skills are so damn good! Thanks for all the blog posts you’ve made recently!
Have the Songbird partner relationship team been talking to Google yet? The out-of-box Android music experience is crying out for some TLC. Songbird seems well positioned both technically and politically to align with Google to offer tightly integrated management, commerce and sync functionality in future versions of the Android O/S.
Unless there’s some Songbird mobile plan that I’m unaware of, I suspect Google or a third-party would have to do the bulk of the mobile device media playback work but I can’t see that being a massive problem – a partnership with Songbird doesn’t necessarilly mean that the existing Android media software has to be re-written from scratch.
Was so excited to read the official announcement, I’m with Michael Purses on both counts and my office is full of love for 1.4.
Really glad to hear about this, it’s a very exciting set of possibilities.
I also want to emphasize performance, particularly on startup. It’s pretty painful sometimes. I tried to show Songbird off to a cow orker a few days ago, and he almost gave up and walked off before it actually started up.
You guys should make a wireless music sync standard and try to put compatible code into android since it’s open source. I doubt google will mind. Or just add compatibility for syncing into the songbird android app, something like a server/client sync model.
When will the Phillips feather be up for download?
Well, this explains much. Wouldn’t do to have 1st class Ipod support if you’re in bed with Philips, ditto Linux and Mac support.
It’s kind of a shame, I’ve downloaded my last Songbird for the forseeable future – Linux and yes, Ipod are the way I roll, and you guys went a different direction.
according yahoo now also Philips made an official announcement
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Philips-Adds-Songbird-Media-prnews-1175820724.html?x=0&.v=1
I hope that the coming compatible devices will support statistics/play counts.
I’m really wondering why Philips is not able to improve support for current MSC/MTP.
Seems like all the redesign of player and website has been done for Royal Philips. Checked the link from above: it is even called “Philips Songbird”. Interesting.
Hopefully this means that we’ll be able to sync playlists to the MSC-only versions of GoGear players some day?
Any idea when we are going to see some of these devices?
It looks like you peeps at mozilla are slowly getting there with Songbird however one of the main reasons I stopped using Songbird was of the amount of resources it was using and crashing occassionally, although a quick start and stop of the processes resolved this. Love the feature that tells you about the artist, group etc. However I think you should rethink the asethics and give us something that doesent look so iTunes. I personally like the way WMP organises things and really hate the way iTunes organises things but prefer the look of iTunes etc. Anyway your all doing a great job at Songbird. R