Some of our astute ornithologists have noticed us busily working on the Songbird1.7 (known as the “Nirvana”1) release and have asked where the builds are.
Starting with this release, we’ve made a slight change to how we deliver release-branch builds: we’ll be calling out specific builds off of the release branch to focus attention on, instead of having every nightly build published.
We’re making this change for a couple of reasons:
- Reduce churn on incoming issues that are known, but which need to then be triaged and percolate through the development process.
- To point developers and users to builds we know are worth looking at; we want to help focus the precious testing time our development and end-user community donates to looking at bits that are more “known quantities,” so they’re not frustrated with issues that are both known and which we’re actively working on fixing during release cycle.
This change will not affect source code availability via publicsvn; developers will still be able to pull release branches and build from source.
Additionally, builds from trunk and project branches2 will also continue to be provided nightly3.
When we do have release builds that you’ll want to look at, we’ll publish betas via the Nightly Builds page, just as we always have.4
Enjoy the (clearer) birdwatching!
________________________
1 The release may—or may not—smell like Teen Spirit.
2 Such as the GStreamer Integration branch
3 At least, as long as there’s a check-in for that day
4 For those who have birdwatched forever, we may even bring back “blessed builds” when it makes sense to do so!
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SubscribeAt last your nightly build page got updated. Wooh..!! And even roadmap seems updated. Podcast support is anywhere round the corner ?
Has development for 1.6 ended?
What is the NOFX release on tracker? Is this going to be like Hootie for Nirvana?
@Jigar: The Roapmap still needs a couple of updates; I’ll ping people about that.
@IceArdor: Yes, 1.6.0 development has been completed.
@Forest: Yes, NOFX is, in theory, to Nirvana as Hootie was to Hendrix and Korn was to Kanye.
As I move forward with my change-over to Ubuntu, I’m definitely looking forward to greater Linux support. Sure would love to see you guys included as one of the included-by-default players.
XP remains my default OS for now, though, so I’m looking forward to seeing the new portable build soon.
Still petitioning for the ability to change where the data files live, so I don’t have to wait for the portableapps version to fully utilize my portable music drive!
as i have trouble finding any kind of announcments on the website or just these blogs bout it…
what s with all the releases being pushed back?
I assume you guys want the first major release with video support be all extra shiny and have all those nifty features completed?
Oh ya.. whatever it s called now.. you ll call it 2.0, right?
Even if this is a dumb question, and maybe asked for about 100 times,
will this build be compatible to Windows 7?
Because I really, really, REALLY want to get as much good software onto this crappy system :/ (that is, Microsoft &stuff) ..
relevantthis:
From what i read at http://wiki.songbirdnest.com/Releases/Nirvana the answer is yes…
Thank you jm,
Sorry, I didn’t know where to look for such informations so I thought I could ask in the blog.
Waiting impatiencly for it.
we do not have a visible link to the roadmap
the url is http://wiki.songbirdnest.com/Roadmap
@ Gryphon
I’ll second the move to ubuntu – I killed Windows 7 the other day, now I actively moved over to Ubuntu and then Kubuntu, the Plasmids are beautiful and songbird runs champ on Kubuntu x64.
+ The plasmid “Smooth Tasks” emulates a similar Windows 7 taskbar, praise to the Songbird Linux Devs
According to the roadmap, today’s the day. Will it come out on time? I’m pumped.
Oh. It’s another internal milestone… Nvm.
Looking at the bug tracker it looks like we’ve still got a bit of a wait.
Songbird seriously needs to add support for Windows 7. How long has it been since Windows 7 was released? 6 months? Almost every other app on the net has support for Windows 7 already =.=
Are there any 1.7 betas? I can only find 1.8 nightly builds.
I don’t understand, why is the development of Songbird so much closed. Since 1.4 we no already have 1.7 without even a public beta release. I would expect a release with every 1.x version.
I think this way the development is running without any feedback from users.
1.7 is already out; it was an internal release. I am with you JeCh, I really don’t like this new system of releases. Why the internal releases? Is this just a way to boost release numbers? I feel disconnected. I understand that all the info is there somewhere, but I really don’t have the time or energy to search through all the nightly build pages, wiki pages, and google communities to figure out what’s going on. I really believe that the dev team is working hard and that they are getting some significant work done, but it doesn’t make sense not to include the users/community…
@JeCh, @katana346,
SteveL touched on why we have internal releases in an earlier blog post:
http://blog.songbirdnest.com/2010/01/08/philips-songbird/
This post, of course, explains why those release deliverables are now “internal”; they just bring the intent of the release into line with the availability of the release deliverables. As I said, we want our community looking at builds that are relevant to them, so feel free to download a trunk build and try it out.
Internal releases are not to boost release numbers, because we like making our community wait, or for any other nefarious reason. We do internal releases to support partners and their requirements; those partners help the development of the media player, so releases targeted for them are a necessity.
And we do listen to our community’s feedback, even if we can’t always make an (explicit) change or respond (directly) to it. It does have an impact.
We’re working towards moving back more frequent public-releases, but that will take some time; we appreciate you bearing with us.
@Preed
The problem is that these internal builds ARE relevant to the community. They help give us picture of Songbird and where it’s heading and allow us to give input on new features before everything is finalized.
For example, I’m on Linux. Looking through the bugs on Tracker/Bugzilla, it looks like the new releases don’t support video playback on Linux, but honestly, it’s kind of difficult to tell from the bugs alone. That’s something I would like to know, and having some public releases of even the internal milestones would help the rest of us give you feedback and set our expectations for the final release.
@Forest:
Due to our current style of development, builds off of branches that are for internal releases do not tend to differ in significantly meaningful ways from the builds on trunk.
In fact, if your goal is to see where Songbird is headed, then trunk builds are a better source of that information, as they’re often slightly ahead of internal release branches.
Trunk builds are can be download here:
http://developer.songbirdnest.com/builds/trunk/
@Preed
Ok, I downloaded the latest build off branch and it’s not playing video for me. Well, it plays the audio from the video file but no video. This is exactly what I mean; is this a bug? Should I be filing a bug on bugzilla or does POTI just not intend to support video on Linux? It’s frustrating when you wait months for a new release of Songbird and the wiki says it’s going to support video playback, and then the release comes out and it doesn’t. More regular releases would help set our expectations better. My suspicion is that POTI just doesn’t give a rats ass about Linux users (there hasn’t been a single new feature for Linux users since 1.2) and the goal of the internal milestones and vague release objectives is to brush off angry users so POTI can focus on the stuff *they* think is important. But again, maybe my suspicions are misguided; it would really just help if there was a little more communication on these things.
We have been making regular releases. Again, some of them are for partners, but our schedule for making them has been extremely regular over the past 2 years.
Every 2 to 3 months without fail.
Uhm.. no CD rip on mac os x is in the roadmap?
@aus
True enough, and again, it’s not that I don’t think you are doing anything… the roadmap page just makes it look like the “internal releases” are releases that we, as users, would be interested in being included in. Win7 support, video playback, etc… these seem like things that we could provide feedback on and test. I mean, why could these not be public releases? What is the advantage to making them internal?
@Manu_F: OSX CD ripping isn’t on the Roadmap, but its done. Not everything which gets added is shown on the roadmap..
@Andrew Luecke
Does that mean Linux CD Rip is not on the roadmap but also done?
Is there already crossfading included?
Thx
@Forest.. From what I can see, Linux CD ripping isn’t done yet.. But if you look in http://developer.songbirdnest.com/builds/trunk/latest/ and check out the addons, you’ll notice a OSX CD ripping addon (it was finished a short time after 1.4 final).
It may have been done in OSX first because Phillips might want it. Also, OSX is a lot easier to deal with than Linux (the problem I’d imagine is the testing, not the implementation because each distro needs to be treated as its own OS for testing).
But meh, as mentioned, I’m a community member, so that is only a theory.. You could always join the IRC channel and ask officially…
Thank you, great news for me ^_^
My cd collection is waiting for a flac conversion!
hello all,
im new to songbird, after my last computer struggled with iTunes for so long, i was really looking forward to using a nice clean open source program on my new pc. I was extremely disappointed that the latest version of SB made availiable (1.4) is not windows 7 compatible. It looks like some great work has gone into this and its frusterating that as a casual user, i am forced to seek an alternative program indefinatly when the hard yards seem to have been done. in any case, looking forward to future developements.
@Travesty
1.4.3 is not *officially* Win7 compatible. That said, I have been running Songbird on Win7 since the RC, and have never had issues. The reason it isn’t officially supported is that 1.4.3 SB hadn’t been tested extensively enough by the dev for them to truly say that it was compatible, so it is a quality assurance kind of thing, kind of nice actually, and also jumplist support and all that fancy stuff isn’t implemented.
Another thing, have the cd ripper a paranoia settings for error correction? Or a comparison ripper?
@katana346
The advantage of having them be internal is that we do not have to complete QA on all supported platforms. We can focus on the platforms that are receiving the bulk of the work. This enables us to complete a lot more feature work on more platforms. We then plan a QA intensive release where we spend most of the time in QA testing on all platforms so that we can do an official release to our community.
I know what you’re going to say next, so let me answer it right now: Yes, we could release those as official releases anyway but we would not be respecting our own official release guidelines which include testing on all officially supported platforms. Our guidelines are extremely important to us.
@aus
I guess that makes sense. Thanks for the answers.
Off topic, but are there any plans for full Win7 feature support (jumplists, snap, etc…)? Not a must, but it would be nice.
@aus The problem for us users with your current release cycle is Purple Rain – you took several features away from the UI only to add them back later – only, we have to wait months to get to where we already were.
How many more months of internal builds do we still have to wait for the ability to minimize the library pane?
Electing not to address these glaring omissions with a small, incremental bug fix patch comes off to us end-users as refusing to acknowledge the mistakes made with the feather – especially, since most of your attention seems decidedly pointed towards your business partners right.
As for the nightly builds, I sampled two nightlies a week ago; the first one crashed at startup, and the following build would not minimize. I guess you can theoretically sample the nightlies to take a look at the new features, but in practice it’s not really viable, let alone being able to use them right now.
A final note to the devs – have you noticed how add-on updates have dropped down to zero thanks to the internal releases? Practically none of my twenty-one add-ons have been updated during the last month and a half.
just to let you know i installed songbird to see what it was like only to find it had corruptrd my 350 GB music library so NOT IMPRESSED
I would like to comment on your recent decision to drop Linux support. I am very saddened by this as Songbird was shaping up to be an excellent player for Linux. In you other posts you compare the level of user feedback between Windows, Mac & linux versions indicating that the Linux userbase is very small. However, you havn’t exactly made it easy for the linux community (especially the non technical) to use Songbird and then leave feedback about it. When downloading Songbird, I couldn’t find any DEB installation packages and could find no help on how to actually install Songbird. In the end I had to go to another website to get the DEB packages. I persevered and eventually managed to get it installed but a lot of people will be put off by this and will just give up.
Also there doesn’t appear to be any proper support/community forums for Songbird where we can ask questions or offer feedback. It took me ages just to find where to post this entry.
I just feel that windows & Mac are already well served with good media management/player software and Linux was crying out for something to compete. Songbird was offering that to the Linux community and now it has been snuffed out just as it was beginning to come good.
I tried an earlier version but it would not import media from my NAS server so I decided to wait for a later version. I have just installed 1.4, once again after having to find the DEB package elsewhere, and this version is importing my media just fine. It is working great and I was starting to get excited about the prospects and then found the post that Linux support was to be discontinued.
Very sad indeed and, in my humble opinion, a very poor decision.