We’ve been listening to everyone’s wishes for better performance while browsing and searching the library and plan on improving this area substantially for Songbird 1.9.
The current nightly builds already show really good improvement when using the filter panes and search. If you’re curious, you can go and try it out now by grabbing a nightly build.
Here are some links to the performance bugs we’re tackling for the Pink Floyd release which already show significant improvement in the nightlies.
- Bug 21545 – [perf] 1.7.3 filter pane view very slow (plus start up very slow).
- Bug 21385 – [perf]Terrible performance browsing a large library.
- Bug 21474 – [perf] Library search is slow.
I’ll be posting some follow ups as work progresses. 
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45 Comments
SubscribeAus! you’re the man! Thanks for all your work.
@Michael Purses
Thanks for the kind words. It definitely helps with motivation
Finally!
Good luck
Yay! Really pleased about this – Songbird is awesome, but the performance issues with searching etc are seriously frustrating. Really liking the updated service pane as well (although I’ve noticed that when adding tracks to playlists songbird freezes for about 5-10 seconds, which is new to 1.8).
@bobthemagicfrog
The playlist hang doesn’t seem to be happening in 1.9. If it persists for you with a 1.9 nightly build please file a bug and I’ll look into it. If you do file a bug it would be great if you could tell me exactly how you’re adding those tracks (eg. drag and drop or context menu)
Awesome!! Honestly, I stopped using Songbird once the 1.8 final came out because I couldn’t put up with it any more. Glad to know your goal is performance this time!
Just out of curiosity, will you be using the new mozilla platform found in Firefox 4? how about javascript engines? what all is getting updated for this release?
@Josh
We won’t be using the platform found in Firefox 4 just yet but we will be updating the JavaScript engine to TraceMonkey.
Please improve startup time as well. On my machine, Songbird is slower than iTunes!
Yay!
It’s great
Communication is the key.
Great! Maybe everything is not lost.
Thanks so much for this update and all the good work behind… This is the post’s title we were waiting for so long
A bird is singing I can’t tell where
He is I think your soul that waits
And the singing bird enchants my ear
Listen to him sing tenderly
I can’t tell on what branch he sits
And everywhere he bewitches me
Day and night the whole week long
Sorry, but this version is also very slow and since there is no further Linux Support, I’m using another Player.
Great to see you’re working on further improvements! However you have to take a look at the spam-filter for the addon pages sometime in the future.
Keep the good work up!
I’m really pleased to read that you’re attacking those problems. Not quite that fast as it used to be but still…
In love again!
Excellent news!
Hooray! Thanks for the update. My faith in Songbird is beginning to be restored.
Just fired up the latest Linux nightly on a 12K+ collection and the 5 sec lag has all but vanished – songbird is definitely back to usable. Shame about the discontinued Linux support though, used to be a happy user.
Excelllent news! I’ll give a shot at installing the linux and windows builds as soon as I get a free evening. Thanks for listening, and letting us KNOW you’re listening – it makes all the difference.
Great news! I will install the nightly right away. Maybe I can finally come back to Songbird, I can’t stand Winamp anymore.
Happy to hear this news!!!One thing that keep me way from Songbird is no thumbnail controls in Windows 7,will you manage that soon?
tnx
Wow! I just tried the nightly on Win7 with around 10,000 songs and everything is starting to look very good. Search results were almost instant, navigation went without a hitch, and startup time even seemed a little faster. Thank you devs!
@Wolfomir
Ah, yeah. That would indeed be nice to have playback controls in the thumbnail view. We’ll see what we can do
Good news on that, was definitely an issue for me as well. To the extent that, heck, I switched to MusicBee for the time being.
Once 1.9 gets some beta’s, I’ll give it a try. Don’t trust nightly builds too much with my library though
Keep up the good work!
I just ran the nightly win32 build against 6,900 songs, started typing into search and did a spit take.
Fantastic performance improvement, great job!
Thanks for all the awesome encouraging comments everyone
Hopefully I can get back to using Songbird, which I gave up long time ago due to performance issues. Thx for the work on this.
I’m running Songbird on a Mac for my FLAC collection and hanging in there. It is very slow which has made me temporarily use Play (Great and very basic) and Mixx (more DJ software)…so am really looking to sped up improvements!
Keep up the good work!
Wow, what an improvement!!! I just tried the 1.9 nightly and I’m just sooo excited about this giant leap for mankind,…ahmmm, I mean for SB Users. Keep on this track, you’re definitely on the right way!!!
Thx so much!!
Very, very, very fast compared to 1.8 – damn near on par w/the 1.7.x release. Migration from 1.8 to 1.9 database (for ~30k songs) took ~30 seconds, sorting data update took another 30 seconds or so. The library speed is MUCH fast than 1.8 and no lag when searching or clicking – Poop is very happy now. I can easily live w/nightly builds until 1.9 goes final.
Devs – thanks for listening to your users.
I’m using 1.9a 1820 on OS X.
Switching playlists and artists/genres etc. is much improved, and almost ideal.
Searching however is still problematic. It is faster, but seems to still stall and choke up at points, especially with multi word searches. It still takes seconds to find a single small word.
Plus it does weird things sometimes like leaving “ghosted” versions of song results in the tune pane at the bottom. Just the star ratings are shown
@Simon
Does it stall when doing multiple searches in a row?
Can you give me a little bit more detail about your library size as well as the amount of genres, artists and albums you have? It will help out a lot.
So, I’m running the portable apps version of 1.4.3, and I’d like to KEEP my database and 1.4.3 on my portable drive, but I’d like to experiment with installing SB on my desktop and yet use that database… or at least import it somehow.
Is this possible? One of the great annoyances to me in the past is there seems to be no way to make a backup (export / import) of your database, at least through the menu system. Anybody got a suggestion on how to accomplish it?
@gryphon
It’s possible to create a new profile using the profile manager (Songbird -ProfileManager on the command line). The new profile would use a new database and will keep your 1.4.3 database intact.
There’s no database export/import available currently. Sorry
Given that database corruption is clearly not a terribly rare event, ANY method of storing off a copy seems like kind of a useful thing. Even if it’s not through easy menu options.
I can sort-of get there, through Export Playlist, and Im/Export Ratings… but…
Of course, if the data was just stored in the already available meta data, this wouldn’t be such an issue. Hint hint.
Aus,
I have 8263 items: 64 genres, 869 artists, 1030 albums total. Mix of Mp3 and FLAC. Mac 10.6.4. Songbird build 1820.
I find I can break it (i.e. it gives no track listing results, just some weird ghosted entries like described earlier) by doing two searches. E.g. one for “broken bells”, which works correctly although takes 3-4 seconds. And then if I edit the search term field to delete “bells”, it takes about 2s to complete but then presents no track listing results (a few weird ghosted entries), although the correct (presumably) selections of genres, artists and albums.
@Simon
OK. Thanks for the info. I’ll try and track down the problem and fix it.
Aus – cool, let me know if I can help out with log/debug info or anything else.
I also notice that the album art pane is working again in Windows 7 without third party add-ons due to a new “Artwork Extras” add-on. Good move. 1.9 is looking good!
The library performance issues were driving me nuts. I actually used Winamp in VMWare for a while and was beginning to look into xmms2. No need for that now: Library performance is great. There is still a spike in CPU utilization when switching tracks, but it lasts for a few seconds instead of minutes (this happened a lot!).
Thanks so much for fixing this.
The library performance issues were driving me nuts. I actually used Winamp in VMWare for a while and was beginning to look into xmms2. No need for that now: Library performance is great. There is still a spike in CPU utilization when switching tracks, but it lasts for a few seconds instead of minutes (this happened a lot!).
Songbird took all the jpeg pic off of my Flash Drive! How do I find them?