Helloooooo birdfans!
We have a shiny new release for you! There are four major highlights in our 1.9 release:
Play Queue
Open up the display pane on the right side of the application and choose the Play Queue option from the drop-down icon to see it. Once opened, you can drag and drop music from anywhere in your library to the Play Queue to create a new on-the-fly playlist.
Performance Improvements
Many of you mentioned that your large libraries were getting a bit sluggish, so we spent some time tightening things up. Extra thanks to those of you who downloaded the blessed build to test this out.
New 7digital Store
We have a brand new integration with our friends over at 7digital and we’re thrilled with how well it turned out. Happy shopping!
CD Rip for Mac
Mac users: you can now rip CDs directly into Songbird. Existing Songbird users, you’ll be notified of this new add-on during the update process.
Downloads for Windows and Mac users are available at http://getsongbird.com. Linux users, we have builds posted on our Contributed Builds page for you.
We’re still hanging out on Get Satisfaction, reading your comments on twitter, and actively monitoring all of your input in Bugzilla — let us know if you have questions or problems with this release.
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[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by songbirdteam, Jeferson, Howard, nkreeger, Anthony Wastella and others. Anthony Wastella said: RT @songbirdteam: New blog post: Songbird 1.9 Released! http://blog.songbirdnest.com/2011/02/09/songbird-1-9-released/ [...]
[...] 1.9.3 released with new features and improvements. Songbird is a media player supporting podcast, radio, [...]
86 Comments
Subscribeplease bring back linux support!!! I miss you guys! I need some music management on my android device from linux! Especialy now that we have song bird on android
Congrats!
Excellent news, thanks and kudos
what happen to the portable version?
I’m happy about the new release, but a little bit dissapointed at the structure of songbird, why do you put everything in the same place? I have 70 Gigabytes of music that I don’t classify and I don’t want to waste my time classifying, for me the library is completely useless, instead I would prefer to have playing now queue list there where the library is, while taking advantage of the side panel by using the directory browser to fill the queue, and then changing to the lyrics add-on. But now I have three things that I want to use, hopefully at the same time, exactly in the same space, while more than half of the application is gone in something that I don’t care for.
I know a lot of people use the library, because of that it would great if we have a choice of where we want things, to be able to organize songbird according to the user.
Play queue is a great addition! I’m relatively happy to once again being able to recommend Songbird as on its way back to the great music player it once was meant to be.
Thank you.
Was so excited to see this until I saw there was no 64bit Linux build. I know you guys don’t support this anymore but is there any chance of getting a 64bit version out?
Excelente!!!
lo acabo de probar y es super rápido
(I just installed it and it’s very fast)
Congratulations!
Already loving the 32-bit Linux build!
Question though: What happened to the MSC support add-on? It seems it still only exists in nightly form (which didn’t even work for me anyway, but still). Is that a 1.10.0 goal or did I miss something?
I’ve had many issues with performance and duplicates of tracks in my library. I’ve removed both the duplicate versions of the tracks as well as the originals and re-added them to no avail. My library also makes all tracks invisible at times when I scroll through it.
I actually managed to fix the problem, although I had to completely uninstall Songbird along with all my profile preferences and re-install the new Songbird. It works quite well so far but I had a hitch at the beginning with the search bar not working.
hey guys just wondering if there’s some sort of visual player, if not that would make a cool update
there is but it wasnt as reliable
Thank Moses (and Songbird Team), this is the greatest news ever!
Congratz, have been looking forward to this!
Great work…now she’s running smooth! Songbird returns as my fav player on Windows…Mac is a hard one…iTunes still makes things too easy and quick…will see. Thank you guys for all the hard work – this mustn’t be an easy product to manage albiet for free.
Please, bring back the linux version. This is the ultimate music player for people working with different OSs but with no Linux support I had to switch to other players…
Great !
Although I don’t know why you decided to drop 64bits builds for linux, let people know that the 32bits version runs fine on 64bits.
Launch is still slow (note that neither firefox nor thunderbird are faster), but search is much faster than before.
Also Mediaflow view is not working for now, is it going to be updated or is there an other coverflow-like extension that I could use ?
Stopped/restarted songbird once and now the lauch is pretty fast (no idea if it’s because songbird binary is somehow “cached” by linux though)
Congrats
Blazing speed, and based on XULRunner 1.9.2
Now fix Bug 21368 http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/show_bug.cgi?id=21368 it’s an easy one !
Thx! Great version. Great player!
Songbird 1.9.1, Build 1920 (20101209044249) nightly version doesn’t see the stable 1.9.3 version when I ask it to search update.
Otherwise, thanks for the player!
Finally! Now I can publish new Adblock Plus versions for Songbird again.
@storageer
If you clearly read the 1.9.1 blog post it say :
“It’s not technically a beta, and might require manual upgrades when the full version lands”
Oh and what about Concerts not being updated ?
Do none of the Songbird developers have compilation albums in their music collections?
How does it not annoy the crap out of you guys when you scroll through your libraries to see your Artist pane ten times larger than it needs to be?
Really happy with this release. Now I hope that someone creates an add-on for windows 7 taskbar.
Love this player, specially now that it is no so heavy as before
*happy happy dance!*
Congratulations, guys! REALLY looking forward to it… I’m downloading it now.
Any estimates on when PortableApps will get their mitts on it?
As always, a hopeful plea for official Linux support, but a delighted THANK YOU for continued UN-official linux builds. Just put one on my netbook the other night, and it looked really good. Being able to share my hard-won thousands of songs given ratings and playlists across so many platforms would be so awesome.
Well, even more awesome than the current awesome.
Thanks for the positive feedback, everyone, and thanks for your patience while we got this release out! Part of the delay was due to us needing time to fix a couple of problems in automatic updates; we expect to get these out later today.
To address the various Linux questions and comments…
@mike, @simone: There is still a Linux build available. We’ll have an unofficial yet wholly functional MSC add-on to go with it in the next release; if you’re feeling bold, you can preview it on our nightly builds (http://developer.songbirdnest.com/builds/trunk/latest).
@db: It’s going to be a tremendous amount of work to get our build infrastructure updated to create 64-bit Linux builds with XULRunner 1.9.2, and it’s something we just didn’t have time to do. Some of our internal infrastructure actually relies on having 32-bit Linux builds so we did undertake the effort to get those working. We don’t have any similar internal requirements for 64-bit builds.
@flibitijibibo: The unofficial Linux MSC add-on is new as of the 1.10 version of Songbird that we’re currently working on. You may be able to successfully change the compatibility and get it working on 1.9.
@ali – thanks for the reply! Really hope that it might be looked at when time permits. Also the roadmap hasn’t been updated for about 6 months now, would be great to see what’s coming in future releases again even if timescales aren’t definite!
As for this release it does seem to be a fair bit quicker searching although switching playlists/all music still has a bit of lag.
Also a whole bunch of mp4 songs that played fine in 1.8.0 and play in rythymbox now bring up the error message ‘unable to play because the decoder (MPEG-4 AAC decoder) can not be found.’ Anyone know what that’s about?
Thanks very much, love the project!
Congrats Ali and all you birders.
sorry if i’m psting in the wrong place
i like the look of song bird but it doesnt like my win7 home premium 64 bit
any advice
Songbird 1.9 doesn’t recognize my Nexus One storage, snif
Note: Windows 7 x64 and Nexus One with last update of Android (2.2.2)
well, i will give songbird another shot.
the pervious build and the blessed build were much too unstable. (random chrashes etc.)
Thank you for making me beg for Win7 thumbnail controls
Nice update though ! 
Well done guys! keep persisting with what I’m sure is a difficult project. Me for one I can’t wait for it to complete with WMP. I have a 1TB music library and Songbird is struggling to cope with half of that. Focus less on features and more on speed. Access to my library is what is important so that I can filter then play by artist on a whim. WMP is just too slick an application for any other application to beat at the moment since it does this easily. Features in Songbird are great and is what will ultimately knock WMP off it’s perch but functionality is paramount and is why in the meantime I treat Songbird Final as Beta. I’ve been following your project for ages now and will continue to follow your project so keep going guys ‘n gals!
Great job ! I am very happy to see this release. Play queue is great and songs are launched faster. I enjoy it !
Let’s smoke on the water with Pink Floyd 
However, it would be nicer when developpers will update thier addons (@Antoine Turmel / GeekShadow : pense à BirdTune svp) and feathers (going back to Purple Rain is odd for me).
Great performance improvements. Thanks for that and good luck!
Working well on my Mac – Great stuff!
Can I use fading in this program?
Songbird is yet another stupid player which forces you to make a library of your music files instead of just letting you select as many songs as you like and plying them the way you want (like Winamp or WMP does).
I uninstalled it after two minutes, as soon as I realised I cannot play my music files the way I WANT.
THANK YOU to everyone at songbird who worked on this build. Its a LOT fast and stable then the previous.
Hey guys, just wanted to congratulate you for that great work. Since 1.6 or 1.7 release, when songbird became too slow when browsing and changing between genres, I was forced to stop using Songbird, basically because of bad performance. But you realy fixed it, so here I am again.
THANKS A LOT!!!!
Seriously has anyone else had problems playing AAC files or know how to fix it?
http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/topics/no_support_for_m4a_aac_files
Congratulations on the release. Much much much faster than anything since at least 1.4.3.
Will Windows 7 thumbnail controls be implemented next version? VLC, WMP, Winamp, etc all have them already.
Thanks for the latest 1.9 release. It is great.
Is anybody who can check or work on MediaFlow addon to get it compatible with SongBird 1.9.x?
I liked to use it with 1.8.x release.
Thanks
Ahhh *relief* the long awaited performance issues have been solved. Good work, guys, thumbs up! I’ve been waiting to switch to Songbird for quite some time, now I think the time has come – almost… Here’s why.
One thing completely doesn’t go into my head: It’s Bug 15710 – Skipping to next track before end of song”
http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/show_bug.cgi?id=15710
which is still present for me (WinXP, Songbird 1.9.3, Build 1959). In my opinion, this one is a show stopper, although this bug might not occur on many systems (can’t verify…)
I understand the technical impact is huge. But citing Comment #31,
http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/show_bug.cgi?id=15710#c31
wouldn’t it be a viable option to make gapless playback _really_ optional, instead of setting the output buffer to < 100ms?
And still, some tracks are completely skipped when advancing through the playlist, while double clicking these skipped tracks plays them well.
I would like to love Songbird. But a media player that doesn't do it's core feature well, that is playing my media, is not a real option
Sad but true.
Yay for a new build!
Boo for the fact that it just hangs at “Rebuilding the library sorting data” and is now an unusable mess.
Disappointed, again.
I have EXACTLY the same problem as Iain above me – just updated, now whenever I start the program it freezes on ‘Rebuilding library sorting data’
Very aggravating when I just want to listen to some music on a Sunday night.
Never using songbird again or recommending it to anyone. Froze on Rebuilding library sorting data and when I finally got it to work all the music I had added that wasn’t in itunes was gone. I have no more info on play count or actual date added, its all mixed together. Fail.
Play Queue is a move in the right direction, but why not just provide a “Now Playing” pane? There are a couple of add-ons that do this (not yet compatible with 1.9), so I’m sure you guys would have no problem implementing this
Other than that, absolutely love 1.9. Library is now silky smooth compared to 1.8 which was always laggy.
Thanks and keep up the good work =D
Is there any way I can get the play queue to start playing after whatever random song is playing in a playlist once i’ve selected “queue next”, then once the play queue is done I would like it to return playing random songs from the playlist i had previously selected.
It seems a little silly for it to never play the song when I’ve selected it to play next unless i manually click it in the playlist. The music shouldn’t stop at the end of the playlist unless i press pause, if i wanted it to stop i’d make a new playlist with repeat and random turned off.
Hey, I`ve been using Songbird 1.9.3, Build 1959 for a few days and I have two suggestions for the Queue list: 1) it should be possible to apply shuffle mode to the Queue list 2) also to apply song ratings
AWESOME! V1.9.3 is much much faster on osx 10.6.6. Playlists and browsing now instantly update with huge library (used to be a few seconds delay when selecting playlist or artist/genre/etc on MacPro 8core). Great work thanks!!!
Now Playing List was definitely important enough to integrate into the core player, but why didn’t you integrate all of it? I prefer my queue to be in the bottom pain, and I use double-click to queue a song.
Without those features, you’ve severely damaged the usability of the app.
@All People that think the app is freezing while rebuilding sorting data
It is crucial for this step to complete! We’re sorry that it can take a while but you’re the ones that are breaking your data by killing the application in the middle of that rebuild! The way Songbird stores data has changed since 1.8 and it needs to cleanup and reorganize it. iTunes has to do this all the time during updates…
Hi, on rebuilding the library data: It got to a certain point then hung, after half an hour it had made no progress so I killed and tried again. Same issue.
Fortunately someone on getsatisfaction has noticed that if you delete your extensions folder it works, and when i tries this it rebuilt the library data in about 30 seconds.
http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/topics/_rebuilding_library_sorting_data
@lain
That’s totally weird! Thanks for taking the time to figure it out. We’ll try and figure out what the heck is going on.
Not running on my Maverick with Gnome-shell
Failed to load plugin ‘/usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstaiff.so
Failed to load plugin ‘/usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libfsfunnel.so
error: /usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/gst-0.10/gst/_gst.so: undefined symbol: gst_xml_get_type
Could not initialize GStreamer: Error re-scanning registry , child terminated by signal
Runs fine on Lucid (w/o gnome shell)
Thanks to Iain and to whomever discovered the extensions deletion fix, that was driving me crazy. Also thanks to dbradley and GeekShadow for hearing me out yesterday.
Glad to have SB running smooth again! Best change is that it doesn’t take 15 seconds to add tracks to a playlist.
If you’re getting stuck during the step to rebuild your sorting data, it looks like it’s a bug exposed by the Songbird Remote add-on. Remove it from your profile’s extensions directory and relaunch the app to get around the issue.
Thanks to those of you who helped us debug this.
I just downloaded the update reluctantly since usually when I update anything on any program it takes away functionality. Now the program freezes when I initiate a search which makes the program practically useless.
Hello,
first I’ll thank you for the new release. But I have a problem and I hope someone can help me. I’m using Windows 7. First days after the download songbird works great, it finally played songs like they are listed on an album. But today I opened Songbird and saw that the songs are not listed and played in the rightx order again. Deinstallation wasn’t helpful. Please can someone help me? Or is it a bug and you can fix it?
“Open up the display pane on the right side of the application and choose the Play Queue option from the drop-down icon to see it.”
am I missing something here??? cannot find this play queue list to save my life.. please post screenshots
using osx
I love love love the play queue, it was needed. I would like the ability to rate songs and organize by track number in the play queue. When I drag an album over from filter view it isn’t organized by music and I think it should. Wanted to suggest that thanks!
Have been very happy with songbird ever since getting my mac six months ago. Particularly the ability to sync my nexus one and play music directly from it. But the version has broken nexus one support with songbird. I will now need to find another music app unless this is fixed soon.
Loving the new update, but one thing I would love to see in the the future is a release that focuses entirely on bug fixes. New and upgrade features are nice, but its the annoying little hiccups that I think end up getting noticed more.
One bug in particular is the bug where the player shows you a music library called library instead of music. I have customized my columns in my music library, but every time songbird starts it goes to the library “Library” and it doesnt retain my custom columns. There is already a bug filed for this bug, just can’t find it right now.
Just wanted to say thanks a lot! I was in the brink of being forced to switch to other media players which don’t do nearly as much as Songbird does for me, just because of most of the things you just fixed: performance and tag managing. Still not as polished as I wish it were, but a very big improvement nontheless. Keep up the good work!!
Please, make mediaflow work again! And by the way, Songbird is really the best player. Thanks a lot you people:)
i like to use Lyrics pane addon so having the Queue list in the right pane isn’t an option for me.
The Queue list is a fueture I wanted for a long time – is there a chance we could choose to have it in the lower left corner pane?
you guys are doing a great job – hope to digital store goes well. if you start selling HD movies there i will surley buy some.
This release is really better than the previous ones.
Would you mind updating the roadmap?
I agree with Mike Frisco. Songbird is seriously annoying without support for compilation albums. Please PLEASE make this a priority!
Same issue as always. Audio quality is on par with iTunes, which means it sounds like you’re listening to a speaker at the far end of a long tube. I’ve been dying to drop Winamp and switch to Songbird, but I always give up on it because the muddy, muffled sound drives me away.
Anyone think to take a little time away from all the bell and whistles and just make it SOUND better than anything else? ANYONE? PLEASE?
Wanted to add the that high end is almost non-existed at the stock settings. Not everyone listens to exclusively bass heavy music. Additionally, upping anything in the low end through the equalizer results in distortion, though if I use the equalizer on my sound card, it doesn’t do so, so it’s not the speakers.or the sound system. Just Songbird. Mid range is a little more forgiving, while high end can go up all the way with no distortion.
Your decision to delete the “layout.css.dpi” setting on start-up broke it for me. As I don’t posses a 120% eyesight there is nothing left for me then to de-install Songbird.
Well another case of accessibility sacrificed on the altar cool and hip design and I have no words for such an inconsiderate behaviour which would not be considered an insult in most civilisations.
still random chrashes…… wtf ?
Great job on the update! I would love to see a better integration of Windows 7 such as playback buttons on the aeropeek thumbnail and a progress meter in the taskbar icon itself.
Hello.
Thanks for 1.9.
Please get rid of the integrated web browser. It’s of no use. It is heavy. It multiplies the risks on a box. I have to maintain 2 doors to the web instead of one (FireFox). This was the same mistake done on dead Netscape : all in one : emailing, html editors, web browsing… Ends up in something not doing properly what is is supposed to mainly do, neither doing properly other un-wanted features.
The “Now playing” extension is what’s wanted. The “Play Queue” : I still do not understand what it serves.
Fantastic : I simply totally disabled live search thanks to about:config and switched off the “songbird.livesearch.enabled property. It radically changed the usability of SongBird from “rather bad” to “well acceptable”.
Best regards.
Keep going.
Hello,
I would just mean that it would be interesting to add the following features to the software :
_ Visualizations : on Songbird this option defined display modes but not screens of atmosphere of the reading current as on Windows Media or VideoLAN media player.
_ Tempory Playlist : if it is possible to create, once again, Windows Media (and VideoLAN also) is better than Songbird because he allows to make a list of ” temporary ” and fast reading, just for the session and which disappears in the closure of the software.
_ On Songbird, we cannot modify the information on a whole group of elements at one time/go…
Here we are, that will be it for now.
___ ___ ___
Salut,
Je voudrais juste dire qu’il serait intéressant d’ajouter au logiciel les fonctionnalités suivantes :
_ Visualisations : Sur Songbird cette option défini les modes d’affichage mais pas les écrans d’ambiance de la lecture en cours comme sur Windows Media ou VideoLAN media player.
_ Listes de lecture : S’il est possible d’en créer, encore une fois, Windows Media (et VideoLAN aussi) est meilleur que Songbird car il permet de faire une liste de lecture “temporaire” et rapide, c’est-à-dire, juste pour la session et qui disparait à la fermeture du logiciel.
_ Sur Songbird, on ne peut pas modifier les informations sur tout un groupe d’éléments en une seule fois…
Voilà, ce sera tout pour le moment.
I’m very happy with the Portable Apps version of 1.9.3, so far! It seems snappier all around, and the search is MUCH better behaved. Playback seems to behave a little better, especially around the end and beginning of songs, where there had historically been occasional glitches.
Although I’ve got a bunch of well developed playlists, I -love- the addition of the ‘Play Queu’. I used it a very similar feature -all- the time in MMJB. Now I just need to get used to the way Songbird handles it.
http://portableapps.com/apps/music_video/songbird_portable
@Gaël G. – “On Songbird, we cannot modify the information on a whole group of elements at one time/go” Sure you can.
1) Multi-select any group of songs (shift-click or control-click works fine).
2) Right click any element of that selection.
3) Select ‘View Metadata” from the pop-up menu.
4) Make your changes, and select OK. You’re done!
“Tempory Playlist : if it is possible to create, once again, Windows Media (and VideoLAN also) is better than Songbird because he allows to make a list of ” temporary ” and fast reading, just for the session and which disappears in the closure of the software.”
Doesn’t the ‘Play Queu’ handle this? Admittedly it doesn’t clear on restart, but it’s a one-button action.
Buggy as hell. Randomly when I seek back 1 min in a track, it either, fast foward 30 secs form where I want it to be, or out right fast foward to the next track! Wtf.
I appreciate songbird as the best itunes alternative for us mac users, but it still has a ways to go. Reading others’ comments, i totally agree with ditching that web browser inside the application. I’ve never understood why that was there. Also, it *is* annoying to have my compilation cds blowing up my artists pane. I cannot imagine songbird expects users to go fill in the album artist tag by hand for every album in our library.
I look forward to new releases where these issues are hopefully ironed out.
I’m sure it must be better – however since downloading the update Songbird won’t load at all!