Alright, birders! We have 1.9 almost ready to go for a full public release. We’re not *quite* there yet, though, as there are a few more tweaks and fixes we’d like to make. For those of you who want to get your hands on the brand new version, however, we’re releasing a blessed build of 1.9.1. It’s not technically a beta, and might require manual upgrades when the full version lands, but it will give you access to some of the best new elements of the 1.9 release:
- Play Queue – queue up and manage a dynamic queue of music
- Performance Improvements – the 1.9 release should be a lot more responsive! See Aus’s notes in the blog here and here
- CD-Rip for Mac – improved support for ripping your CDs on the Mac platform
- Updated 7digital Store – our integration with the 7digital music store has been updated to provide a better experience and a new way to get music recommendations
Check out our full release notes over on the wiki!
Again, this is a blessed build, and not a full release. If you run into any areas you’d like to see improvement, let us know!
Installers:
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[...] finale soit estampillée 1.9.2. Songbird ne compile plus de version x64 pour Linux. Source : Blog de Songbird [...]
iTunes 10.1.1 und Alternative Songbird 1.9.1 released…
Apples iTunes wurde ebenfalls aktualisiert, so hat man bei der Version 10.1.1 nur ein paar kleine Probleme behoben. Addresses an issue where iTunes may unexpectedly quit when resizing the iTunes window. Resolves an issue where iTunes m…
94 Comments
SubscribeSo there is something happening out there!!
Please keep us up to date on where you are at with development there seems to have been a real shortage of information lately.
^^^ what Steve said. I, too, appreciate the sign of life.
D/l now, can’t wait to test the play queue!
Well I knew it would happen. The devs are nice enough to provide a sneak preview of the next release, and the first thing anybody does is complain about a lack of communication. Real classy Steve.
Thanks for the build. Library migration seemed to take a while, but since then it’s been pretty snappy. The play queue was a long time coming, but glad to see it finally made it.
I notice the 7digital addon didn’t update itself.
I thought for sure this project was dead. I’ve been using MusicBee since the latest Songbird releases have been so slow (and Linux being discontinued altogether).
How is the performance on the latest Songbird builds? I care much more about that than new features.
@Foolishgrunt: what version of the 7d add-on do you have? Check the Tools -> Add-ons menu. Does the Find Updates button find the new version for you?
@SquareWheel
You can grab the Linux build for this release here:
http://download.songbirdnest.com/installer/linux/i686/Songbird_1.9.1-1920_linux-i686.tar.gz
Our Linux builds are contributed/unsupported builds (see https://wiki.songbirdnest.com/index.php?title=Developer/Articles/Builds/Contributed_Builds) but if you find bugs or issues, you can file them in Bugzilla or look for help on GetSatisfaction.
-Preed
@SquareWheel
We’ve had several testers report that they can use Songbird with 500,000 tracks and it’s reasonably fast.
For anyone with libraries smaller than 100,000 tracks you’ll notice a _seriously_ *huge* performance improvement.
@ali: Hitting the button after the upgrade did do the job. Unfortunately I already did it and didn’t check the version beforehand, is there a way to check it now?
Excellent, thank you. I have a 27,000 track library so that is good to hear.
Songbird doesn’t show the album art, it still missing.
@carlos: You might be seeing bug 22056. Is album art missing from all of the tracks you imported the first time you ran Songbird?
@Foolishgrunt: Nope, you’re upgraded now. Strange that you didn’t get upgraded automatically; did the other add-ons update automatically?
Thanks for the update.
To avoid “complaining” I will just say this: Steve, I feel you wholeheartedly.
@ali: Yes, all the obsolete plugins were disabled and updates were automatically found and downloaded, except for 7d. It works fine now though.
And for the record, this IS communication. This IS being kept up to date. And we’re not just being told how progress is advancing, we’re being shown. I suggest that, for people who require more frequent updates, you frequent the IRC channel.
bleh… no official linux support… and to top it all off you officially support mac! Unbelievable, how offending.
Now its only a matter of time, the natural selection of the open source community
Adios.
Great! Finally it can replace iTunes for me. Thanks to the performance work.
Btw, will the rhapsody add-on be available on final release of 1.9.1?
@ali: yes, the album art only appears in the latest imported tracks but it doesn’t appear in all the tracks I imported the first time I ran Songbird, any solution?
good work with this release!
Hi, I tried to find the build for linux 64bits but http://download.songbirdnest.com/installer/linux/x86_64/Songbird_1.9.1-1920_linux-i686.tar.gz doesn’t seem to work.
Is there such a build ?
Thanks and keep up the good work !
Thank you!
It’s alive! It’s alive!
Ok. Its absolutely fucking great. The perfomance for my 75.000 track library ist very very good.
thank you. keep up the good work.
Huzzah! It’s great to get news, and this is great news to get.
I’ll be downloading this tonight as soon as I get home. Really looking forward to playing with the playlist feature – that was one of my favorite things about MMJB.
Hopefully my 20,000 song library will fly on this build. All puns intended.
Hope the PortableApps version comes along soon.
Good to hear more news, and thanks for a blessed release.
Like I’ve commented on the speed threads, the improvements are great. However, things are still too slow for me on Mac with <9000 item library.
It's mainly with searching for terms, e.g. "back to mine". If I type it at normal speed, the search box will stall after displaying "bac" and then 'beach ball' the system for 2-3 seconds will searching, and then display the full "back to mine" with the search results.
This is obviously not ideal behaviour. Have you guys got plans to make this smoother, so searching can be as fast and instant and elegant as iTunes or things like Amarok?
Oh, and there’s still the issue when searching sometimes of seeing “ghosted” results in the track listing pane. By this I mean the only columns that display data is the track star rating column – the rest are blank. But it’s clearly just a UI issue as the tracks still play etc. (well, you can’t click on them – but they’ll play as the next track if the current one finishes)
Generally clicking something in the artist or album pane to refresh the track pane will remedy this situation.
Can’t say I’m satisfied the way playback queue works. Its almost the same as creating a new playlist and does not address my use case scenario at all. Here is what I need:
I need ability to tell songbird that after it finishes playing current song it should jump to some other song without altering the playlist (changing the song order). Amarok, Foobar 2000 and Winamp all have this functionality. Please add this functionality.
I must have all daily addons, because none of them work for this version. Where can I find them for this version?
@Shane; try this URL in Songbird and restrict on Installable ones.
http://addons.songbirdnest.com/addons?order=last-updated
@klint ahah! worked perfectly, thanks!
Hmm..my nexus one get’s recognized by songbird, but i get a message “no storage available” I have the MCS plugin installed.
could you please upgrade “MinimizeToTray (Songbird version)” addon ???
Will this release have a theme that doesn’t suck so hard? Sorry, usually i would leave constructive criticism but there is so much wrong with 1.8′s default theme that i don’t know where to start.
(And unfortunately none of the good feathers have been updated to 1.8 yet…)
@Simon
Hmm, sounds like there is something funky going on. The search performance is pretty zippy for me on a Mac with 100,000 tracks. Have you been using the same Songbird profile for a long time? It may be good to try a new profile (using the Profile Manager).
We’re obviously looking into it and we’re absolutely trying to provide a super fluid search experience. Expect more awesome performance improvements for the next release.
Where are the scrobbling credentials? o_O
The last.fm add-on seems to be broken…
The properties button in the add-on list is disabled, there’s no icon in the status bar and played songs are not listed on last.fm webpage.
Will you make an official release of Songbird 1.9 for Linux Ubuntu? I hope so
行业宣传贴吧，每天都很多人咨询我呢，到这里来发帖就可以了www.tbdy.net
@Shane Brady
You need to make sure to turn on ‘usb mass storage’ mode on your phone. There should be a notification about it when you plug in the usb cable.
Always lots of activity, check the nightly builds….plus the small matter of Philips having a custom version to include with their GoGear players….I’d be happy that a linux version actually exists if I was mad enough to use a server OS on my desktop….*sigh*, ( joking ~p)
Everything good here….thank for the release ‘bird dev’s : D
Hi. I’m just another Linux x86_64 user in search of a recent build or progress on Nightingale. Argh.
Dear Friends,
I downloaded you application for the “Smartphone” HTC EVO 4G. It keeps looking for the IP address of something, It is not the one primary or secondary of the EVO 4G nor the one for the main device (a IBM Thinkpad 41T running Windows XP 3, Could you let me know what is the application trying to tell me?
Is that hard to add Windows 7 thumbnail controls?
@NicolaDrugi: +1 VLC did it some time ago now (open-sourced as well.. just saying).
Songbird is a great program and I was using version 1.8.0 until today. I uninstalled the old version and installed this new 1.9.1 but a strange thing happens. When I log in with my user account (normal user, not administrator) and click on the Songbird icon to start the program, I see the Songbird splash screen for few seconds and then nothing else happens. So I tried to run Songbird with the “Run as Administrator” option and it worked flawlessly. What does this mean? New Songbird 1.9.1 cannot be run as a normal user? I’m on a Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit pc. Never had problems with Songbird 1.8.0
Hope someone could help me, I really want to try new version
Regards.
Please add a Filename column (not Filelocation…) and everything is good. It’s totally retarded that this option isn’t available.
I caaaan’t wait for the performance improvements to go public ^^!
@Nicola I’m just speculating, but I think it’s indicative that your songbird personalizations are breaking 1.9.1. It’s most likely something to do with one of the registered extensions you have.
Try going into `C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\Songbird2\Profiles\.default\extensions\` and delete unofficial extensions one by one until Songbird starts up properly. Once it starts working, submit a ticket for the offending addon to the developers.
The path looks like this on my computer `C:\Users\Filip Dupanović\AppData\Roaming\Songbird2\Profiles\lgvuh86e.default\extensions\`. Navigate to `C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\Songbird2\Profiles\` and you’ll see your unique profile folder there, the extensions folder is right under it.
Thanks for the performance improvements.
I have been using 1.43 forever because of the sluggish performance and buggy non-essential features (video?).
Looks like I will be ready to upgrade to 1.9 as soon as Telescope or some other remote software is functional on it.
Please keep up the good work and keep improving that performance!
@HenningStummer:
Same here, Addon seems to be broken.
even installing nightly builds didn’t change anything on my end.
*referring to own post*
of course, I’m talking about the last.fm / ausioscrobbler addon.
At last!
You did it! You did it.
After some testing (mbp;10.6;~3,000 tracks) I’ve found that while songbird uses about twice the cpu as iTunes it tends to leave me with slightly more juice for my Battery, which means I can unplug for longer.
I should note that my initial “upgrade” experience didn’t work out and I ended up deleting my profile and starting again.
What I’d really really love are global keyboard shortcuts, pretty please.
I can dump iTunes now.
(PS. Any small gift I can get someone on the dev team?)
@_zaq
Glad to hear it’s working so well for you
get some updates out ASAP,
1.8 is way too unstable.
random crashes twice a day are unacceptable!
Please please please please add Windows 7 thumbnail controls!!!!
Does anybody know how to fix the last.fm addon for the 1.9.1 release?
I cant even find the properties for last.fm and scrobbling isnt working too.
Is there any topic on getsatisfaction for this problem?
anything else is working great with the new songbird. performance is really good now.
The syncin stilll does not work.
scrobbling works, but i am changing to a new media player now, i’ve had it with practically no mtp/msc device support and bad syncing options.
+1 for Windows 7 thumbnail controls!
@magnusore: can you be more specific? What does not work? in which mode and with which device?
I’m having no issue which sync, so, it works, sometimes at least
Thanks
im so excited about the new version.plz hurry
I’m still having no luck with any of the MSC syncing. I have MSC plugin installed, I have the phones using mass storage mode. I can access them via the computer as mounted drives on OS X. But Songbird no longer recognizes them. I had this working once.
So here’s an old fart question for you. Where’s the user manual?
I’ve installed Songbird on my iMac, thinking it could coexist with itunes for the time being while I test it out. Ultimately, what I hope to use it for is to stream a 96 kbs/24 bit FLAC file to my USB port, where it will be picked up by a dcs Puccini D/A converter. Actually, that’s oversimplified … it will be buffered by a dcs U-clock first, then go to the Puccini.
But I can’t persuade Songbird to even do the simplest thing, like open one of these FLAC files and then play it locally on the iMac. I’m sure I’m missing something that is obvious to all of you … but how am I supposed to know? If by analogy to itunes, well then, it doesn’t behave as itunes would. Please help.
I have MSC plugin installed, I have the phones using mass storage mode.im so excited about the new version.plz hurry
Thanks for the build. Library migration seemed to take a while, but since then it’s been pretty snappy. The play queue was a long time coming, but glad to see it finally made it.
Seems to get hung when starting for the first time about 1/4 the way through “Rebuilding library sorting data.” (Tried a few times, this time it’s been going over an hour and been stuck at the same spot)
Let me give it a try. I hope it will be ok, without any issues.
Update to 2 comments above:
(Forgot to mention: OS X, 10.6)
Went back to 1.8, disabled manage files. Upgraded again to 1.9, this time did not check for update to add-ons*, instead just left them disabled. Songbird launched and rebuilt the library just fine.
*Add-ons:
mashTape
MSC device support
New Releases
QT playback
SHOUTcast radio
Songbird Remote
Partying with Songbird and Party Ruffle
Happy New Year to all of you
For sure i’ve quite tested all music player under linux&osx. With my 40k well tagged library its very hard to find a full featured and reliable music player. So Itunes is out for a long but i’m still using it. On Osx there are not so much alternatives in terms of quality and support. Songbird was amazingly slow in previous version, and this 1.9 is quite a reborn. Its quite fast as Itunes. Ok it still looks not multithreaded, but the speed of the search has been really increased. No more held and crash on few letters wrote. Track count is very accurate and flac support help to get a WHOLE and COMPLETE library. But i’ve 200 well tagged albums which are not properly drawed. Only the namefile is show and tags remains empty in songbird’s metadatas viewer. I’m still looking the origin of problem because those tracks are well displayed by Itunes…
However i’m thinking about switching if we could get some songbird’s genius mix based on last.fm/last genius. Recommandations in current version doesnt work so well.
To conclude, you raise this bird a way higher and its sound very good for him. Thanks for thoses great improvements.
@HLV
Just asking, but have you tried Smarty Pants (http://addons.songbirdnest.com/addon/1572) and Recommended Playlists (http://addons.songbirdnest.com/addon/1448) already?
Set a new boolean extensions.checkCompatibility.1.9 to ignore version compatibilty.
“But i’ve 200 well tagged albums which are not properly drawed. Only the namefile is show and tags remains empty in songbird’s metadatas viewer.”
Does rescanning metadata help? (You might have to turn that feature on; in about:config, you set songbird.commands.enableRescanItem to “true”).
Or, maybe there is a conflict because more than one different tag versions are included in the files (one empty and one properly filled).
@HLV
Just asking, but have you tried Smarty Pants and Recommended Playlists already?
Set a new boolean extensions.checkCompatibility.1.9 to ignore version compatibilty.
Hi there,
thanks for the good work! I’m about to switch from amarok 1.4 to songbird and do actually some testing. And I’m desperately missing one feature for dynamic playlists: As in amarok I’d like to have a dynamic playlist which chooses for example 25 songs out of the library which fulfill certain criterias (e.g. genre: raggae or soul). After one song is played a new one should be added to the list, so that it is never ending until I stop it. And I’d like to add manually songs from the library or remove some from the playlist without stopping the playlist. With this feature I always see what will be played in the next time and can influence it manually. This is what I’m using day in and out…
Does this feature exist and was I just to stupid to find?
If not: Do you think, such a feature will be added in time?
Best wishes for the new year!
@Achim:
http://addons.songbirdnest.com/addon/1719
Should be more or less what you are looking for!
pls pls pls get songbird get back for linux (and 64BIT)!!!!!
i couldn’t understand…..
or can you support nightingale???????
@Marc http://wiki.songbirdnest.com/Developer/Articles/Builds/Contributed_Builds
or
http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/topics/i_installed_songbird_on_my_linux_machine_using_a_deb_or_rpm_package_and_now_im_having_problems_help
or http://developer.songbirdnest.com/builds/trunk/latest/
for latest nightlies…
Are you planning some integration with HDtracks?
It’s a shame that a player that support FLAC files doesn’t have a HD store.
I swear, you could just search for Nike and delete over half the spamlink messages.
How’s progress going toward an official, released build? One that will get passed to PortableApps, for instance…
Why just not remove the hyperlink on the post’s author name? That plus moderation, bye bye spam (by the way, my own comment with a link outside of getsongbird.com is still awaiting moderation
)
We’re aiming for end of January for the final release. No guarantees though.
@klint None of those links give Linux users Songbird 1.9.1 64 bit. That’s what we all want. I even tried to compile it myself, but got stuck on the vendor binaries, which don’t seem to exist for Linux x86_64. If using 32 bit is your solution, thanks but no thanks!
No support for podcasts…*tear*…oh why do you deprive me of my Grammar Girl?
Thanks for the new build! Any idea when the Guitar Tab add on might be updates?
thanks
song bird is a program that a person must be microsoft certified pro to use.
your average joe shmo like myself is very frustrated with it. i need mouse tabs to do just about everything i want a progress bar while down loading to my device and i want to be able to delete songs from the recently added list. i want importing songs easier and once imported i want to be able to move them up or down the list as i want(impossible with songbird) this program i have found to be frustrating.
Excellent!
I Had a few hiccups installing (kept freezing while upgrading sorting data); But, with a library of about 30K (Most FLAC), performance has improved spectacularly with this build.
Nice one.
where i can find visualizations for it? the wmp, winamp, vlc, etc have it but o songbird…I reference by visualizations images that execute in runtime with song, like Blazing Colors, Color Cubes, Dungeon Siege, Energy Bliss, for exemplo, that are visualisations for wmp.
thanks
@Tiago – Ahh, I long for the days of truly music-synch’d visualizations like Cthugha, rather than random sparklies and swirls that keep doing the same thing regardless of the tempo or tone of the song. But anything would be kinda nice.
Actually, I’ve notice during New Year’s eve that Mashtape’s slideshow was quite nice and good looking… Just enlarge it at maximum and you have a new art of visualization
The MSC addon still only recognize mp3 music files, not Flac files. At least on Mac.
You have to use the “Devise” add on to tell Songbird that your device supports Flac.
@klint Thank you!
I can’t believe we have to do this by ourselves. Why are those settings files not already included in the MSC addon? especially for a popular player like the Sansa Fuze.
@jpbaril:
I don’t think that feature is possible to do automatically under the MSC protocol. MSC is a simple method for transferring data, and I don’t think it’s capable of detecting a player’s codec support. But I’ll let klint answer definitively.
Tomorrow will be the one month anniversary of this post… surely things have changed (improved) since then?
What’s the word, bird?
Yes, Foolishgrunt is right: on the contrary to MTP, MSC is just a way to mount your device as an external drive, that’s all.
Actually, when it comes to MSC, the capabilities of your device are described in a sbsettings.xml file that is created on the root dir of your device.
For some devices that are officially supported by SB, this files ships with Songbird. For others (including Sansa ones), the SB file is created by default and only contains MP3 support. But the “Devise” add-on allows you to manually define broader capabilities of your device.
Detailed format of that file is here:
http://wiki.songbirdnest.com/Developer/Articles/Devices/MSC_Device_Capabilities_Specification_File
Devise addon is here: http://addons.songbirdnest.com/addon/1895