songbird is dead.

Thanks for all your hard work guys! This is awesome!
I’m feeling a little speed increase and 30MB less RAM! I’m lovin it!!

Yeah, I just don’t feel excitement to see Songbird updates now. You’ve killed my spirit by killing my Linux build.

@ Bugger_Me,

This is not mourning or crying. This is hard criticism.
And the reasons for discontinuation of Linux version is not satisfying. No Mac user cares Songbird while there’s iTunes that comes out of the box in Mac OS, as much as Linux users care, for example.

The point is, although linux users are not much as windows users in statistics (Ohh what a surprise, yeah?), we, linusers were more interested about what was going about Songbird. Because I think we are more aware about what we do than other OS’s ‘customers’ do.

That’s the way it is.

Nevertheless, it was a good option to have SB as a music player in linux. Thanks anyway for the effort so far.

I’m sure more harping on the Linux drop can be expected in this thread, and that’s hardly surprising. The good folks at Songbird have gone to a lot of effort to produce a vibrant, thriving community, of which many of us feel very much a part. They’ve done a good job of this, and it’s commendable. It’s one of the few projects I follow so closely!

Which is why such sweeping changes, when made without any input or discussion with the ‘family’, feel like such a betrayal. And inevitably result in vigorous (and warrented, IMO) backlash.

THIS, however, is a decision that is unlikely to remove any features or functionality, as the Mozilla folks do seem to be strongly dedicated to the open source ideals of cross-platform development.

I’m sure it’s going to be a lot of effort to work out all the details of the move, but speed and memory footprint have been one of the biggest complains in the last year. This is a step (footprint… step… see what I did there?) in the right direction.

I still want Linux. Yes, I do most of my posting from a windows box, but Songbird is -also- my Linux player. I’d like to keep it that way.

I can’t say for a fact whether dropping Linux users was a good idea or a bad idea. However, the fact remains that I’m not going to use it anymore.

Songbird was the best replacement for Windows Media Player I could find when I migrated my desktop to Ubuntu. Truthfully, it was missing quite a bit of functionality compared to WMP, but it had enough. Despite the fact that I personally hate iTunes, I don’t see many users moving from WMP/iTunes on Windows/Mac. Sorry, but they both are pretty polished.

Now excuse me while I go and groan in the corner while I think about how I spent 5 or 6 hours coming up with a way to edit my ID3 tags so that the WMP assigned star ratings are reflected in Songbird.

@bokbird

Some of us would definitely rather have something other than iTunes on the Mac, but we are few and far between. Also, unlike many of the people in the last thread, I thought that Linux development would really help Mac development; both have always been left in the dust compared to the WIndows version where people don’t need other media players. Maybe we should bug the creator of Foobar2000 to port it to the other platforms.

Anyways, I’ll still use iTunes until the day that Songbird can catch up.

No Linux. Goodbye Mac windows. Goodbye songbird. The years were good, until you turned your back on our community.

I have to agree with Wes on this…The whole dropping Linux thing is just a downer. I use Windows and Linux, but ever since reading the news about dropping Linux support, the blog is just less exciting. It seems like that little farting bird icon represents exactly what you’ve done to the Linux community. It used to be a neat, funny, and clever icon. To some it might still be…but for me, it’s an illustration of what has happened to your Linux supporters.

Songbird was a great media player, I was forgiving of its shortcomings because it was multi platform.

What the hell were you thinking?

–Happy rhyhmbox / foobar2000 user.

I’m with Good Bye et al, I’m mainly a 32 bit XP user at the moment, but I am 90%+ sure my next box will be a 64 bit multi core Ubuntu (kubuntu?) machine, MAYBE with a dual 64 bit windows boot, but maybe not, depends on games.

That’s likely 2 years or so away which is an eon for software developers I know, but I’m in the process of getting used to all the software NOW, especially because my wife (who cares not one bit about open source) has to be brought along. We’re using FFox and Tbird, and she’s actually really impressed with Open Office, and well, there was Songbird. We both liked it a lot, but some weeks ago she finally noticed it wasn’t updating her ipod, oops. I advocated sticking with it, I was pretty sure someone in the community would give it some support sooner or later, but now, *sigh*.

Actually, I’m now checking out the blogs to see if a “mea cupla” is going to be forthcoming, since I can’t believe for a second that “only” 10% of users cared about linux support. I’m also hanging around to check out the next release as well, but sadly, I think I have to install iTunes. Not angry here, just really sad.

Here’s hoping you are a big success, cut your teeth on windows and mac, and will be playing my music on my fantasy build in the future.

Actually, it’s worth noting on Linux, all that’s going is OFFICIAL support. They aren’t going to go out of their way and break it.

And anyway, there is now an active community who are actually hoping to bring in changes POTI couldn’t at the time (http://getnightingale.org). It isn’t a fork, but a branch rather, where changes will likely get merged back into Songbird.. You’ll actually find ironically, Linux support might get better in the future (because the people who were working on trying to get it into the Ubuntu/fedora repos, which is going to be a big focus for the community team).

I think the announcement has been blown out of proportion really. I’d actually expect support to get BETTER now by the community.

For those who don’t know, XULRunner is what Firefox 3.6 uses, so its introduction will hopefully make the 3.6 technologies (like persona, jetpack and weave), a possibility, whilst making Songbird faster in the future (and we’ll get it too).

I use Songbird for Windows and the Devs can still eat a bag of ***** [ed] as far as I’m concerned. WTF is wrong with them.

[ed] Comment edited because of language

I am also disappointed about closing linux support by POTI, but thats no reason to uninstall songbird right now. I have thousands of ratings for my songs in the library. I had to find a way before migrating the ratings to another player, before I could switch. But theres is a problem: I don´t know another player on linux which fulfills my needs. Banshee has no genre pane, and no powerfull tagger, so it is useless. Rhytmbox has no powerfull tagger too and no automatic library management -> useless. In Amarok I am not able to view the songs of several genres at a the same time (or don´t know how) -> useless.
Ubuntu 10.4 will be released at the end of this month, and songbird 1.4 works with it, so I have 3 years to migrate my library. I think in this time we will see a few interesting builds of nightingale, so there is no need to use another media-player.

Commenting on blog posts is a privilege… don’t abuse it…

die!

@Preed , can you answer me which these Pending features will be ready at songbird 2.0 become released? And wich of these features will become ready at 3.0 ?

1-Podcast subscription
2-Burn CD
3-VISUALIZATIONS
4-Crossfading
5-Media View that works like an Album View
6-Songbird to default media player
-6.1 Associate icons to songibrd
7-Songbird miniplayer in taskbar (like windows media player and itunes does)
8-Now playing included on songbird
9-Preset features to Equalizer
10-Songbird to play DVD

Geez… some of these comments are so amazingly childish. “U r stupud i hait u!!!!@@@!” is not a good way to get anyone to take you, or your desires, seriously,

@Andrew – thanks for that thoughtful comment. It’s good to know that Nightingale is a branch, with a likelyhood of getting changes merged back in. That’d be excellent, for BOTH sides of the equation.

Let’s get some civility and level headedness back in the blog, folks.

I like Songbird for windows better than any other player. I hope the Nightingale branch will produce great things.

I really need to get off my rump and write a tag-parsing plugin, since nobody’s done one that supports the old MMJB tags. Anybody got any good hints about where to start? I have -never- written a plugin for anything, and it’s been several years since I did any serious coding.

Looking forward to seeing what the new Mozilla platform brings.

they forgety that the base communitty is linux the main operating system for free software. they base this decision on numbers, knowing that you can’t count linux users, not even for the number of bug reports. I’m mandriva user i report to mandriva not to songbird!
just to remenber that this is free software and for your wrong decision you got a fork

http://getnightingale.org/

so those not happy with this decision please support this new project directly. marketing, translations, support, bug reporting and developing.

Just excpecting that you songbird decisors don’t forget the values of this communitty and you may not agree with the comments and opinions but you may have to accept what people are feeling.

@Aus – Yes, I know some addons that do it.
But I am waiting the time the songbird will have all this features to become more competitive with windows media player, winamp and itunes (I think the leaders of the player market from the windowsXP/vista/7′s world .
Conquering this piece of the world, I believe the next step will be easier …

Only after leaving the songbird done, we should think about advertising (the promote).

@Andrew

Nightingale is a true fork. Just one example of why: Songbird bundles a patched version of gstreamer and taglib with Songbird; both of these programs are available in Linux separately and it’s more appropriate for Nightingale to use the versions bundled with various Linux distros. I believe this is part of the plan for Nightingale, to remove the patched, Songbird versions and use the ones in the distro. This will make many of the changes to Nightingale difficult to apply to Songbird.

@Forest, actually, in the case of Gstreamer, They already shipped with an environment variable to disable the inbuilt one .. The other libraries might be a bit harder though (but we don’t know really yet).

Overall though, I think SB will merge a lot of the changes back. If it was a true fork, we wouldn’t regularly pull Songbird’s updates, but I hope we do so.

The facts are, there isn’t really enough information yet, and nobody has really started the separation process yet I think..

Without Linux Users/Devs the momentum is over. Good night.