Hello fellow birders,
We have some great news for you today — we’ve released 1.0 beta 1 to the Android Market!
Songbird for Android is a intuitive way to browse and play your music on your Android phone or tablet. The now playing drawer gives you easy access to the currently playing song and controls. Songbird also lets you tell your Facebook friends how much you like what you’re listening to. Flickr photostream allows you to check out awesome photos of your favorite band while on the go. Give it a try and let us know what you think!
As usual, here are some instructions to follow so you can get the most out of this new Songbird for Android release.
- You should uninstall any previous community beta release from your phone
- You will need a phone that runs Android 2.1-update1 or greater
We’ve also made several fixes and added some features for this beta release.
- Phones with on-board storage as well as SD card storage are now fully supported
- Launching and controlling Songbird via your bluetooth headset is supported
You can expect a 1.0 final release in the next few weeks delivered to you via Android Market. 
The following QR Code will send you directly to the Market page for our application. If you don’t have a QR Code reader you can also search for ‘Songbird’ and find us easily.
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[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by songbirdteam, Mike Fitzpatrick and Steve Lloyd, Cory Sklar. Cory Sklar said: Now on the market, Android users! http://blog.songbirdnest.com/2011/02/03/songbird-for-android-beta-release-to-android-market/ [...]
60 Comments
SubscribeGood work guys!! Maybe there’re some things missing (Last.fm scrobbling support, now playing list, customizable interface/colors, maybe plugins?…) but the design is nice and clean and the app works without troubles.
Thank you!
@afx
Thanks! Last.FM scrobbling with their app installed should work in the 1.0 final release. Other things we’re looking into is performance (we’d like it to be a little speedier if we can manage it in the next few weeks). Queue and Now Playing list are not going to make it into 1.0.
how do we scrobble in this latest beta?
Beautiful. Nice job. Good polish.
Out of curiosity, are bluetooth headphone controls supported in this release? First one didn’t, second one disabled other ones but didn’t add any. I ask ’cause I use my phone’s music player while on the go, and right now that involves walking through two feet of snow. Don’t want to pull gloves off to pull a phone out to skip the track when I have a button on my headphones that’s supposed to do just that.
@rougegoat it says in the post “Launching and controlling Songbird via your bluetooth headset is supported”
What about Songbird 1.9 ? Did you drop it just like you dropped the Songbird version for Linux ?
However, I wish you the best for this Android release. But please DON’T FORGET the version for desktops.
Thank you stevedog. Been staring at a screen for too long and didn’t read closely enough.
Thanks for the bluetooth support guys. You made my day with that. Goodbye winamp beta. Hello Songbird!
I wish Songbird had Now playing list support like Android Winamp.
Is it extensible enough ? I mean addons ? Are u going to add addons support ?
@air-dex
I understand that it’s frustrating that 1.9 hasn’t been released yet but the people that are hard at work on that release to bring it to you are pretty saddened by your comment. This isn’t really the right thread to discuss this but here it is anyway: We’ve run into an auto-update problem that’s preventing us from releasing 1.9 when we wanted to. We have some great people that are working on it and we’ll release it as soon as we can. I’m sure those dedicated folks working on it would appreciate your moral support
@ssj4Gogeta
Yep, we hear you
As I’ve mentioned in a previous comment a Now Playing List / Queue won’t make it into our Final 1.0 release but is absolutely planned.
@Jigar Shah
Short answer, yes, we will allow add-ons to be integrated into the Songbird for Android experience.
@mike
Scrobbling isn’t supported just yet but will be for 1.0 Final.
@afx
Thanks! We’re definitely trying to keep it nice and clean which means that some of the features you’re curious about, such as a customizable interface and colors may not happen. Part of what makes an application nice and clean is the lack of customization of precisely those things
That being said, we are exploring some things such as pinning certain items to the home screen to help users get to the stuff they want even faster.
It is looking good…It is using over 60% of my cpu though and i just have a song playing and photostream/facebook are both disabled…performance is a high priority for me
@Chris
That seems pretty abnormal. Can you give us a more information? Believe me, if we had seen that kind of CPU usage in our testing we would _never_ have released it.
I want a pony
http://blog.songbirdnest.com/2009/06/12/equalizer-pony/
Great job guys! Can’t wait for next version (with last.fm scrobbling)…
If you plan to translate the app, just let me know (for German); I’d appreciate to be a part of it
I’m using songbird sice first beta and there’s just one thing I can say – GREAT! It’s one of best players out there (if not the best). But there’s few things I would change…
1. Add playlist editor with “edit this playlist” button. In most android players you have to hold finger on track->add to playlist->choose right playlist. Instead of create new playlist->edit this playlist button->add song from album 1, add song from album 2, add song from artist 5… Some kind of sonyericsson’s walkman phones, or iPhone’s “+” button in playlist editor.
2. Add graphical equalizer with editable presets.
3. Little UI changes:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17229025/Android/SongBird/Songbird_player.png
Decide where to put song title, artist, album. Now, everything is down, under cover art. After you slide down “now playing” screen song title appears on top of it. Just one place for it may look better, but that’s just my opinion.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17229025/Android/SongBird/Songbird_list.png
Cover art in album view is too big. 4 songs in list isn’t enough. Smaller album would be OK, but I think blured cover art in background would be the best and useful – more songs on screen mean less scrolling.
Nice interface, guys. Unfortunately, it does not play .FLAC files on my HTC Incredible. PowerAMP and a few other players will. I won’t use this player until it does support FLAC. See http://powerampapp.com/oss/ for the open source code PowerAMP uses for their FLAC implementation.
love song bird. looks a lot better than stock player on Droid incredible. but Gapless playback is a MUST
Really great job!
Songbird is a very good app for android!
Some suggestions for further version :
- forbid songbird to list the directory media/audio on SD card when he is searching for music. It’s not really interesting to listen my ringtones in the middle of real songs
- give the possibility to sort by the tag “artist album”
Thanks a lot for your job!
@Aus:
Glad to hear that a queue feature is planned. There’s another awesome feature though, which the stock Samsung player on my Galaxy S has and no other player on the market has – notification area music controls. I don’t even know if it’s possible without for example rooting your phone, but it’s absolutely great. You can control the playback without leaving the app you’re working on.
Here’s an image of what I’m talking about:
In case the tag doesn’t work:
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/_qVwCrGXIBZo/TUxbmhMfTTI/AAAAAAAAAPY/H_WI1xMj_Mo/s720/screenshot1.png
In future releases could you switch the order for displaying the Artist and Song Title in the notification area and widget to ‘Song Title – Artist’? Or at least give the option to changer it around? It just seems to me that the song title is more important to display then the artist, especially if you have long Artist names.
Seems good so far.
First thoughs:
good:
-Nice sensation overall.
-I like the flckr thingie.
-A lyrics windows would be awesome.
Bad:
-Search takes ages to respond, and ages to search. So does desktop Songbird one, by the way. If this is the final version speed, that would be a no-go for me, as I use to search a lot.
-Search button should be visible always, not in the more options menu. I think it’s more used than any of the three (playlist, artist and songs) shown. But I guess it’s a matter of opinion.
-Same as ssj4Gogeta said, as a Galaxy S user I would miss the shortcuts on the notifcation tab too much.
-Having some control over the folders it reads would be nice as well.
@Aus AND the 1.9 team :
Ok I understand why Songbird 1.9 is late. I recognize that my comment was harsh (especially for the Linux version) and I apologize to the Pink Floyd Team for what I said. I keep your spirits up.
But please communicate about this next time. Seeing nothing about 1.9 for weeks and a lot of things about the Android version in a short stretch of time made me thing that Pink Floyd was not a priority for you anymore. I am really happy to know that people are making all what is possible for keeping the desktop version alive and allow moaners like me to point, click and rock easily
.
@air-dex: I’m about to sound misanthropic and cynical again, but oh well…
Seriously? The devs are nice enough to provide a sneak preview of one of their new projects, and you find reason to complain about it? First off, this definitely isn’t the place (thread) for it. Second, nobody said you couldn’t get more communication.
Did anybody say you couldn’t drop into the IRC channel and ask your questions directly? Did anybody say that you had the right to demand more blog posts? Would you rather have the POTI developers working on stability and performance for 1.9 final, or would you rather have them spending their lunch break worrying about whether their last blog post was recent enough?
Working great on my Droid X, can’t wait for the 1.0 release!
On an unrelated note, I noticed after trying to install a feather that the Linux builds of Songbird are marked as 1.10.0a? Are you skipping 1.9, or is it just something that’s being done with the Linux builds? I don’t have the Windows/OSX builds, so I wasn’t sure what was happening.
Thanks again!
Also, for the MSC support (Feb 4 build), is there anything special that I should be doing past installation and connecting the device (USB Mass Storage mode)? The device isn’t showing up in the program…
@flibitijibibo
That’s because the Linux build you have is a Trunk build and not a branch build. There will be a 1.9 Linux Branch build available when we release 1.9.
You need to download the MSC Add-On for MSC Devices to work. You can get the add-ons for nightly builds here: http://developer.songbirdnest.com/builds/trunk/latest/addons/
Right, I’ve installed the add-on (I should have been more specific about “installation”, long week…). Anything else?
Either way, thanks for the info on the build differences. I’ll keep an eye out for it.
Also, in an effort to bring things back to the Android app, you mentioned in previous comments that you had plans to have some type of communication between the desktop program and the Android app. Out of curiosity, what did you guys have in mind?
I know this isn’t the right thread for this and this comment will probably be deleted, but I don’t care — I just wanted you SongBird folks to know something relevant to your efforts: Dropping Linux support was a terrible decision.
I’ve used songbird on Windows for more than two years and the primary reason I chose songbird to begin with was that it worked on both Windows and Linux, the latter OS to which I’ve been trying to migrate to (and finally did this week) for years, but always having to go back to ‘doze for some reason or another until now. When I finally *do* migrate, I find to my UTTER DISMAY that SongBird can’t come with me like I thought it would this entire time. Meaning I just wasted 2 years of my life carefully adding ratings to my 80GB music collection that now can’t come with me to Linux once I’ve finally made it over.
I’m especially irked since i’ve read elsewhere on the web that you kept Mac support despite the fact you had a smaller Mac user base than Linux. Also, as a so-called “open source” effort, you don’t support the great-grandaddy of all OS efforts, Linux itself? Are you guys smoking crack? WTF?
VERY DISAPPOINTED IN SONGBIRD’S DECISION TO DROP LINUX.
I’m tempted to insult you in some way just to vent my frustration but I know it would only cause you to hear what I’m saying even less.
Thanks for wasting two years of my life.
@rastatech
http://developer.songbirdnest.com/builds/trunk/latest/
http://fedorasolved.org/Members/realz/how-to-install-songbird-on-fedora – Modify as needed
Merry Christmas. Remember kids: dropping support != dropping development
@rastatech – They’re smoking crack because the free product they make isn’t exactly what you want it to be? More constructively the Linux builds, while not OFFICIALLY supported do work pretty well in my experience (I’m using it on Ubuntu right now) so it’s definitely worth giving them a go before writing off songbird.
On a more related note I’m loving the Android app but could somebody please explain whether it’ll be open sourced on full release etc…
@rastatech
They still develop for Linux. You can see this by looking at their download page. You can still get the software. You’re complaining that they don’t “support” anymore. Well, it’s opensourced, and judging by the fact that these comments get left on every frakken post regardless of what the post is about, there’s a lot of you out there. So band together and do your own support. It’s not that hard. You’re complaining about NOTHING here. Nobody cares how long you spent adding music to your collection, and judging from the amount, you’ve broken a few laws getting there.
They were very open about why they dropped “support”(NOTE: support != development) for the Linux. I, a primarily Slackware Linux based user, don’t hold this against them. At all. Why? BECAUSE THEY STILL DEVELOP FOR IT.
You didn’t waste two years because of them. You didn’t waste two years at all. You used free software that you didn’t have to cover the expense of creating it or anything like that. This is akin to a guy giving you a porkchop and silverware for a long time, then one day saying, “Sorry man, I don’t have the resources to give everyone silverware. There’s a shop over there that you can get silverware from if you want it. Here’s your porkchop.” and you being outraged and telling him he’s wasted years of your life by giving you free food.
Besides, Songbird dropped “support” almost a year ago. Stop whining about it.
^ Also don’t hold it against them ’cause they’re doing this for free. No complaining about a free beer.
Hey, I thought this thread was about Android…
@Aus
Are you planning to add the ability to show ogg files embedded album covers?
My PC collection is in FLAC and when I transfer it to my mobile device with songbird it cannot convert to mp3, only to ogg, and so it cannot display the covers…
Will you work on it, please?
Thanks!
Looks very promising.
Is there any chance that some day intelligent/dynamic playlists can be created?
You know… when I read a comment with “This will probably be deleted, but…”, and it hasn’t been deleted, it makes me feel like the rest of the message is probably just as valid. Meaning… not at all. It’s a cheap, annoying shot.
@Foolishgrunt: They wouldn’t be worrying over their lunchbreaks if… they posted updated more than once a month. They would say “Our loyal users will be happy, because we kept them up to date on what we’re doing, and where we’re going. Thank goodness they won’t be grumpy about the delays with releasing 1.9, since we’ve kept them in the loop about the PERFECTLY LEGIT auto-problems that were giving us grief. Heck, with any luck, they might help!”
Just sayin’.
That said… thanks, Aus et al, for putting up with the banter here, and keeping on working. And super double extra THANK YOU for continuing to provide the linux nightly builds. I haven’t had the spare time lately to update my linux box with it, but I wound up having to boot into XP the other day, JUST so I could use Songbird, and my desire to get that new build installed on the Ubuntu parititon was redoubled. Must make time!
And then figure out how to import my old Portable Apps XP rating, playlist, etc info over.
Uhm… Obligatory Post-Relevant Content: Yay Android! I hope we’ll get real synch, as opposed to ‘copy the files over’, as with the Philips GoGear.
@flibitijibibo
We’re thinking about things like Wi-Fi + Bluetooth Sync and other fun things like that
@Pepso
I think that should already work as expected but there may be a bug in the desktop client that is preventing this from working. I’ll check and get back to you.
@db
I believe we are not planning on releasing the source code for this application at this time. However, the Plugin/Services SDK will have open source sample code. That’s all the info I have right now. Things may change later on though and I’ll let you guys know.
@Aus
To go along with Chris’s comment about high cpu usage.
I have noticed the same thing on my SGS Captivate. Its rooted running Perception 10.1 rom and firebird kernel. This was with the Jan 28th version. I just downloaded the latest from the market and the problem still seems to be there.
It seems to be using between 20 and 30% of the cpu playing both mp3 and flac files. This is being monitored through the built in task manager. In the Jan 28th version i did see it hit 40% once.
Overall though I love the fact that I have songbird on my phone! Been waiting a long time. Let me know if I can be of more help
FC’s on my Samsung Intercept. Hope further development corrects this. I like the looks of this.
Love the interface, one suggestion, please please add lock screen controls. Lock screen controls makes things so much easier
Very good app and top design !
Just a little problem for me (Nexus One, Stock Android 2.2.1): for some of my mp3 albums, the MP3 tags are not extracted correctly, e.g. album cover picture is not displayed… Don’t have that problem with the stock android music player.
a few things
1) Blutooth controls do indeed work, but they don’t disable the default player’s controls. This leads to the two players both playing music at the same time.
2) Occasionally, “Next” is interpreted as “skip 5 tracks”
3) It’d be nice if you went right back to where you were in the album list after you backed out of the specific album track listing(i.e. viewing tracks on “Fire”, back up, still be in the “F” section of your albums). Currently it does not.
Love Songbird, BUT it needs a EQ. I can’t use it without it. But so far, awesome work! Love the design.
Noticed a bug in this….
After a few shuffles, the progess bar (The one where you can fast forward and so on) stops, it dosnt move. And you can’t see how much of the song has played – The seconds also shows 0:00
Hi, thanks for the nice App. I’ve a question about the bluetooth headset controls: Is there planned an option for making songbird the default player, because now songbird starts as well as the android standard music player, if i press play on my headset. I have to stop one process manually all the time. Same procedure with Mortplayer set as standard – Songbird an Mortplayer are starting both.
@MikkerBabz
Hmm, that’s pretty weird! We’ll try and figure out what’s up
@koma
Yeah, we’ve noticed that too and we think we have an idea about how to fix it
Love the app on my EVO 4g. However I can’t get the album art to show up. Is there a setting I am missing?
@Darryl
The setting you’re missing isn’t in yet. “Beta” build after all.
@rougegoat
Thanks
Isn’t Songbird for Android going to be Open Source? Looked everywhere for the sourcecode and didn’t find it anywhere
Would be kind of disappointing if Songbird for Android would become a proprietary software to be honest…
This looks awesome!
Question about headset controls though: I’ve been using the Apple wired headset on my Incredible. While the volume buttons have never worked on it, other music player apps support double-click for next track, and triple click for back. It seems like Songbird only supports single-click for play/pause.
Any idea if I’m doing something wrong, or if that support’s just not there?
@devnullpenguin
Right now we only support single click for play/pause. I’ll add a feature request to support double/triple click for next/previous.
@Aus: awesome! Thanks!
I had some performance issues with CPU on the last build but will see if the 1.0 beta improves. Thanks!
Nice work. Thanks.
Hey folks,
great work there, I really love it! Just one minor thing: I listen to podcasts a lot, which tend to be 2 or 3 hours long, and I’ve noticed that songbird doesn’t remember the position that I left it. So when I’ve listen to the first 30 minutes and then hit Pause and try ot continue listening at this position the next day, Songbird will not only have forgotten the position but even the track that was playing. That ahppens especially (but not exclusively) when I do other things before continuing to use Songbird. I’d love that to be fixed.
TIA and keep up the good work!
@DasFaultier
Yes, we do plan on supporting ‘bookmarking’ for long tracks. However, we don’t have a specific target release for it at this time. We’ll keep everyone posted as to future features in follow-up blog posts such as the one about Beta 3.