Thanks Ali
Can you confirm or correct my understanding:
POTI won’t be advertising 1.7.x further (so, no real official announcement, widely broadcasted), but rather will do it massively for 1.8 soon (as it will bring significant new things: full MSC support for Mac, bunch of new supported devices, new layout and – have I got it correctly?- better support for large libraries) ?
Is that the idea? or?

Hoping the Sony Ericsson phones support
Thank you

Artwork does not appear in Windows 7.

What’s the point of the whole device support story for audio playing software? I mean, almost any device can be connected as a mass storage device. Thus I simply copy the files I want to have on my mobile device by the means the OS provides…. Why would I need Songbird to do this?

So this beta doesn’t include the performance fixes?

Yep just tested, still very slow GUI/library performance on OS X.

Timed it with a stop watch: switching generes takes ~2s to complete/refresh and making the interface usable again. Other media library operations are similarly slow, and searching can be ~4-5 seconds.

This is OS X 10.6.3, MacBook 2.4GHz Core 2 duo, 4 GB RAM. Library size = 8,630 items.

Clearly these problems were not resolved by the actions associated with this bug: http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/show_bug.cgi?id=21385

Very slow on Windows Vista

Do you have any active plan to update the XUL platform for this release? (as you announced in the post “Songbird Spotted in Namoroka!”)

Can you please add FLAC album art….I’ve been waiting for ages for this function…

I have deleted the old eSongbird from my iPhone. Installed the new one but…I am not allowed to download htttp://addons.songbirdnest.com/addon/1467. It’s shadowed an I can’t contol Songbird from my iPhone. Why?

Hey guys, I tried Songbird since version 1.2 and never got it to work properly on my mac. Always something was missing. First there was no AAC import-support (which meant 60% of my iTunes library wouldn’t show up. Show-stopper.

Now I gave it another try with 1.7.3 and 1.8b1 both couldn’t import my iTunes library properly. And I don’t know where to ask for support.

Can anybody give me some hints???
Please post here:
http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/topics/itunes_import_on_mac_os_x_10_6_3_with_songbird_1_7_3_failed

Does this Beta finally include the ability to queue tracks, like every single media player known to man except Songbird?

hi,
can we finally podcast with SB ?

Hello,
thanks for this new release.

Why SongBird has a default “Export Playlist” tool like the plug-in http://addons.songbirdnest.com/addon/51 . For my part I really need this so as to work on the file I choose in a playlist for parties so as to rename them and other stuffs via Python script ?

So some acknowledgement of performance issues?

I don’t get it. We get a lot of reports of issues from different OSes etc. – surely all the Songbird team must also be having perf issues? How could they release 1.7 like that? Weird.

I came here because I was curious due to an article on The Register

“Songbird (technically no longer developed, but still available)”
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/18/linux_versus_mac_windows_1/page4.html

I was surprised to see that statement they made, and so came here to check it was true or not. Clearly with a new release they are wrong, but they must have got the idea that Songbird was dead from somewhere?

This is how I see it.

People who care nothing for visuals, the artists bios, and where they will be in concert move to FOOBar 2000 which is like a Jeep. It has an ugly primitive interface but it does conversions, diagnostics and playback well. It’s horrible FreeDB tagging and lack of usable artwork addin (yes I tried the only one and it fails) makes people who care about proper tagging and artwork move elsewhere.

Now MediaMonkey is a midrange vehicle, it can tag well,handle artwork, rename, move and delete the files and does decent conversion and playback. It’s not as good as FooBar at the hardcore utility’s some users need and it’s not very pretty.

Songbird is a Cadilac of players. It is for people who like both sight and sound of their experience. It has a nice interface which is customizable. It has slick features that allow you to see a musicians; face, their bio, where they are playing next, the albums artwork plus it has a web interface which opens up so many more possibilities. Songbird can allow users to access streaming music and even on-demand video. It has the potential to become a total package entertainment software.
So my points of weakness analysis is:
1) The on-the-fly track metadata lookup is nice but that is problematic because Gracenote is often wrong especially on older collections.
2)Songbird doesn’t have the wide market share to decide standards. WinAmp, MediaMonkey and others have a standard and they aren’t dying soon and so since Songbird 1 support for their tagging schemes is needed. Artwork placed by these programs could easily be read and displayed by Songbird.
3)Trying to become an all-in-one entertainment vehicle means you will run into the problem of poor performance in some areas. People with 30k or terabytes of music maybe never be happy with Songbird performance and may switch to other products.
4)Maintaining huge music collections isn’t for people with jobs, overtime, kids and bills. They built their collections in college and now just want to play them and have accurate metadata and because of time constraints they might like to open Songbird and go straight for on-demand products. Shoutcast or Pandora radio, and if you are watching the trends; Hulu, Livecast, and a slew of portals like NPR podcast, Comedy Central on-demand.

–I’m trying to say that with so much media stored on the web available for listening or viewing now that it becomes a waste of time to maintain large collections of your own. And the people who think this way are usually the ones with bigger pocket books able to donate…

I generally have to agree with @Stevels on several points, though I think his vehicular analogy is a bit flawed. Jeep, for instance, may be bare-boned on several models, but what it does, it does EXCEPTIONALLY well.

Personally, I wish Songbird were more like that – do music, and do it better than anyone else. But now, it’s getting to the point where it does a lot of things, but not all that exceptionally.

I have 19,300+ songs in my Songbird Library, and that will probably be closer to 30k by the time I finish ripping my vinyl collection. I want clean, fast, solid music handling. The things that keep me coming back to Songbird are the good tagging and library handling.

But the performance is really an issue, and I hate the idea that it’s just going to get worse as the birdy bloats up with video handling debris. I’d love an option to simply not even download the video pieces. There are a dozen programs out there that already do what I want – play videos. There are precious few that handle MUSIC as well as Songbird.

As a side note, I’m really, really pleased to see the Nightingale project developing coherence.

Rock on.

First of all, I’d like to make it clear that I wish Songbird were lighter and faster as well. In my opinion it’s still to resource-intensive to call it a polished product.

But with that said, it’s important to see that Songbird is accomplishing its stated goals very well. The devs have made it abundantly clear that their goal is to create a player that’s better than the current industry standard (iTunes) and not to be better at everything than every other player out there. Read: that does NOT mean do everything exactly the SAME as iTunes. It means do things BETTER. This means, for example, that Songbird doesn’t have “Podcast support.” Instead, it offers subscriptions. It’s a much more simple and intuitive way of doing things, but nobody likes it because it’s not what they’re used to. That’s not POTI’s problem.

As far as the project as a whole having misplaced priorities, I think that’s pretty unfair. I really don’t want Songbird to focus on being lighter and faster than Foobar. No, if I want a featureless program with a 1960s-era interface, I’ll use cmus or Herrie. That’s not what I’m looking for in Songbird. I like Songbird because of it’s attractive interface and music discovery services, as well as its smörgåsbord of features. I know that sounded like a commercial, but that’s the best way to put it. And I realize that if I want those types of features, it’s going to come at the cost of a larger footprint.

It sounds to me like a lot of the complaints floating around here really aren’t POTI’s fault. They can’t be all things to all people, and they can’t be held responsible for your unreasonable expectations. I trust that in time, once POTI have implemented the features they want, they’ll be able to invest some serious time into stabilizing performance issues. Until then I’ll remain patient, and thankful for the work they’re putting into creating the most complete audio player software in the world.

Are you guys going to add avi and webm video support ?

thankyou so much for finally adding in msc support for mac’s my n900 is currently syncing properly, no more folder addon’s for me!! absolutely love this

quick question:
when im syncing my n900, and i click on it under the devices tab, i can see one particular screen for a fraction of a second, before it changes to a screen detailing the space left on my n900, whether or not im auto or manually syncing etc. question is, how do i get to view the other screen (the one that appears only briefly)? it appeared to have info such as battery level etc etc for my phone?

thankyou so much again. will likely go back to using songbird as my main browser now simply because of the added msc support. cheers, youve made one user incredibly happy

I’ve noticed significant performance decreases with the 1.7.x release and the 1.8b1 as well, and my library is really small (just under 800 songs). The only benefit I get from Songbird at the moment is the fact that it uses less RAM than WMP and Firefox together if I have only one or two web pages open in Songbird.

I really think the only thing holding Songbird back from being much better than iTunes is performance. Make it faster, people will flock to it (ok, I admit… pun intended). I’m interested to see what performance boosts will come with the XUL update in version 2.

Also, what mozilla/gecko platform is Songbird using? (in the equivalent to a version of Firefox… i.e. is it using the same as Firefox 3, 3.5, or 3.6?) If it is not using the same as Firefox 3.6, it should be moved to this or the upcoming platform for Firefox 4. The update from FF 3.5 to 3.6 resulted in a significant performance boost and Songbird would certainly benefit in a similar manner. And which platform will 2.0 be using?

@Josh Regrettably songbird is even in the version (equivalent to Firefox) 3 and in the motor that uses it is the motor Gecko 1.9.0 (I believe to remember). I Also believe that when of him jump improves in yield and speed, he/she will be necessary to wait until then.

@ foolish grunt & simon

I feel I get what Foolishgrunt is saying, first get all your features into the player, THEN work on optimizing, because maybe, there’ll be some issue with video or syncing etc etc that you have to address that means that something you do to make audio work faster just doesn’t make sense. I can forgive that in a free, open source player, for now.

But Simon gets close to the point, POTI needs to seriously consider who is supposed to be using this and how. I’ve got SB on to machines, one is a dual core 2ghz 2GB ram macine with a 1K library. No performance issues there at all. The other is a single 2ghz laptop with 1 GB ram, AND 10k songs and clips etc etc. THAT is currently unusable, tanking multiple seconds to bring up a clip. Now, you can argue that a chip that does 2 billion calculations a second is too slow to manage 10,000 flies, or 10,000 files is way too big a library, but obviously I don’t think so, esp as I can see plenty of other players on the same system that work just fine. So *I* think 10,000 songs on a 4 year old laptop should be reasonable, but maybe I’m not the target user. So what is a normal system and normal library then? I don’t know but POTI really should, and it’d be good if they stated it, so we can figure if this is really something that is going where we *THINK* it should, or if we need to consider another player.

thanksss