Hello birders!
We’ve just wrapped up work on the latest beta of our Android client! If you have already installed it, it should auto-update shortly. If you haven’t, now is a good time to try it out. 
Here’s a list of interesting changes in this release.
- Playlist creation and editing!
- Settings!
- Set your favorite song as a ringtone.
- Better interaction between player and phone.
- Better support for headsets with buttons, including using the headset hook button to answer and hang up calls.
- Lots of bug fixes.
Playlist support is accessible via context menus (press and hold) on songs, artists and albums. You can also re-order items in existing playlists by using the dragger on the left of each item in the list. Removing playlists is also done via a context menu option when pressing and holding on a playlist from the list of playlists.
This QR code will take you straight to our app in the Android Market.
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48 Comments
SubscribeSo umm, is POTI’s focus now on an Android player?
Awesome guys, this is now my main player on android
I just think there should be an option to remove the notification on the top bar, it isn’t really necessary if you have the widget. ^^
Any chance you will support browsing music by folders at some point?
It would be helpful if you also posted a link to the Android Market for those of us browsing on our devices.
http://market.android.com/details?id=com.songbirdnest.mediaplayer
(or so says Barcode Scanner on my CM6 HTC Desire)
You shouldn’t only post the market link for browsers on the phone. Have you guys at Songbird heard? The market is now on the web, surely you know about it.
@Andy
No, we are still dedicated to developing the desktop client as well.
@Danny
We’re pleased to be your new default media player
Also, good idea for a setting. We’ll consider adding it for 1.0.
@Jaecen, Chris
Oops, sorry. I did mean to link “our app in the Android Market” to go to our page on the Android Market. That’s been fixed.
@Razor
Yes, that’s something we’d like to support at some point.
Just downloaded the app for the xperia x10. The facebook integration does not seem to work. I couldn’t find any settings related to facebook in the app for giving permissions, signing in, etc, and when you click the facebook button on a track it just opens a blank window with the facebook title bar. Overall I love the app so far.
@Matt
Hmm, we’ve heard that it works but is a little quirky. It can take a little bit of time for the web view to load the login for facebook. You’ll also have a little bit of a hard time granting the application permissions.
Otherwise, I think it should work.
Great product!
But: will ratings (and syncing them) be supported at some point?
So, im syncing my HTC Desire with Songbird on Windows.
Why is there only options for the music to be in sdcard\*artist*
it takes up all the space on my sdcard… what i want, is an option to sync all my music to sdcard\music\*artist*
I know this dosnt adress the songbird app, but i thought i would get an answer here!
@MikkerBabz: did you install the devise-addon?
http://addons.songbirdnest.com/addon/1895
gapless playback yet?
@LeMirque
Yes, we’d like to provide syncing of ratings back to the desktop.
@Awesome
I’m afraid not. That one is quite a bit of work. While we would definitely love to support that, it’s unclear right now when that would happen.
@MikkerBabz
I manually created a folder called “Music” on my sdcard and songbird started putting stuff in there by default. Might give that a try.
Great job as always. One thing: could you please make lock screen controls a priority for the next release? That is the one thing keeping me from using Songbird ad my default media player. Add that and were golden.
Also, I’m seeing duplicates of all of my tracks on Nook Color. Any reason for this? Can it be fixed?
When the “Artist Name – Song Title” is too long in the Songbird widget, the top portion of the widget shifts leaving a black box to the right of the widget. I’m on an Atrix.
My guess is that the widget is smaller than the width of the homescreen so when a song title is too long, it increases the width to the standard width of the homescreen. If I place the Winamp/stock music player widget right above/below the songbird widget, the Songbird widget is noticeably shorter.
I, and probably others, like to listen to audio books and podcasts. There is a couple of things I miss:
- remember position. This could be implemented as playlist-feature and you could apply to songs in a playlist
- play count synchronizing back to main app (so I see which chapters I’ve fully played)
- smart playlists, so the shuffle all-function does not suddenly play an audiobook in the middle of other songs
@EspenA: +1!
An equivalent of the überuseful desktop Audio Bookmarks addon is even more relevant on the Android app.
I would like to see *any* music player for Android allow a user to set or direct the player to a specific directory. This would allow me to segregate music from ringtone directories, and possibly allow me to use the majority of the 8Gb of space my d2 has, but won’t let me access without a pass from my mom.
Of course, if Songbird did all that *for me*, well, that’d be killer, and worth paying a few bucks to use.
I think Songbird will be my default player. I like the look and feel and the navigation in the app. Songbird also is one of the few players that handles albums with multiple artists perfectly (at each artist the complete album is listed, e.g. Demon Days by “Gorillaz”, “Gorillaz; MF Doom”, “Bootie Brown; Gorillaz” etc.).
I just found three quirks:
- When pressing the remote button on my cable headset Songbird pauses and restarts correctly but the VoiceCommands app also starts on every click
- Using the search button slows down Songbird extremely so letters appear seconds after pressing the button and I have to click multiple times on the back button to leave search
- It would be a nice feature to be able to reorder the categories Artist – Song – Album – … on top of the screen
I ran into an error trying to install the app that said “Signatures don’t match”. The issue was I had previously downloaded the apk from your site and the version from the market won’t install on top of it.
If you run into this error uninstall the version of songbird you currently have and then try to download it from the market again.
@christopher I think the Songbird addon “Devise” might fix that for you. I think I saw some directories to omit from music when I installed it. I didn’t look into it as I used Devise to set up m4a-synchronization to my Android.
Truly great app, really hope to see ratings and playcount sync with desktop Songbird in the next release. The Apple iTunes ecosystem would have nothing on the Android music experience then!
Any chance of an option to have search bar showing at all times and another one to ste albums as default view after selecting an artist?
Would also like to see the ability to force sync all songs from pc when transcoding to lower quality files, at the moment I try to transcode files to a lower quality but songbird only allows random playlist to be syncronised as if it thinks it is transferring the original file sizes.
needs lyric support
@Christian Ide
Weird! What kind of phone are you using? We’d love to fix that voice command quirk before 1.0 Final.
Search is definitely a little sluggish depending on the hardware and amount of tracks present. We already have plans to fix that but not precise time when it will happen.
Customization of the Top Menu area is also planned.
@Jadjam
Yes! We are totally planning to sync back that data!
@punk45rock
Oh, interesting. We assumed it would be more useful to search for certain categories rather than others. If it’s useful for all, we will consider adding an option to have the search bar everywhere.
Also, when browsing an Artist, Songbird will remember the last selected category within that artist. So, if you stick to using Albums, it will remember that. We would consider adding an option to set the default state if we see enough requests for it.
@nwbee
Would making the lyrics that are available in the ID3 tags work for you or do you also envision Songbird fetching lyrics while on the go?
@chillwzy
Doh! We’ve seen that happen on the Xoom tablet too! We’re going to try and fix it but I’m not sure when that will happen.
@EspenA
Yes! Audio Bookmarks are a planned feature. As for ‘smart playlists’… would making the ‘shuffle all’ simply ignore audio books and podcasts be good enough as a starting point?
@katana346
While we would LOVE to provide Lock Screen controls, we also want to fix a lot of little nits we have with the state of the UI and UE. We feel like more polish would be better than more features for 1.0 Final. That being said, the Lock Screen controls would be WAY up at the top of the feature list for a 1.1 release.
And, as for the Nook, I’m not sure what the heck is going on there. We sadly do not have one of those in-house so I just don’t know what’s happening.
Small suggestion for the Android App; if an incoming call comes in, the song automatically pauses, which is nice. I think it’d be nice to allow the user to specify whether the song resumes automatically, or remains paused, when the call ends.
Currently, the song resumes automatically. While I can see the benefit to this if I were wearing some nifty bluetooth headphones with microphone, I’m primarily using the headset at work to listen to music. But since it has no microphone, I have to unplug the headphones to take the call. This is all fine, until the person hangs up and Songbird resumes playing my risque music for all in my cubicle world to here. I think it’s good music… but others may not.
On a side note; I tried all of the music player apps I could find in the Android Market and Songbird, although the last on my list to try, is the only app that I kept. Well done; keep up the great work.
@Aus I would think it could be made as a setting like “ignore audiobooks and podcasts in shuffle” or something (preferably two settings as one would be rather long and bulky description)
I don’t think it should be a firm rule as some people may want that in their shuffle for some reason. I would rather see it implemented as a working function (or setting) than a hack as hacks have the tendency to get stuck there as a feature for a long time. (I’m myself a developer, so I know this danger
@Andrew
That’s a good idea. Adding that option should be quite easy as well. We’re really happy you love the app
@EspenA
I don’t know that I would call this a hack if it has a setting for it and is supported.
This app is just lovely.
Are there any plans to support double-click for next song (i.e., click the headset button twice to progress; click it three times to go back)?
Keep on rockin’!
@Aus No, exactly my point. A setting would work, but I think a hard coded “Songbird never plays audiobooks and podcast while shuffling” is more of a hack in my eyes.
So: Yes to a setting and no to a hardcoded built in rule.
And keep up the good work.
Loving the beta 3 but have come across one oddity. I start playing a playlist thu the widget and then stop it, after some time or maybe loading another app and exiting, the playlist is ‘forgotten’ in the widget, that is the title displayed in the widget is just a -. Any ideas?
Any chance of getting “feathers” for Songbird Android? Really I just want a nice black/gray one instead of the weird shade of purple.
on my headset buttons, the back button doesn’t work. it just take me to the beginning of current track. Everything is OK. Great work! HTC Vision (Desire Z)
@EspenA
Gotcha. We’ll make sure to provide that as a setting
@EvadPS
Ah yes. The way android works is causing this. Android will shutdown services and applications after a certain period of time when they are not used. Currently we do not save the queued tracks. We do have plans to do this in the future.
@euphonic
Yes! That’s totally a planned feature although we’re not exactly sure when we’ll get to it. We’ll let everyone know when we get started on feathers
@costeluta
Yes, when the track has been playing for more than 5 seconds we will rewind to the beginning. Hitting the button again will go to the previous track.
@Aus
You guys have done an excellent job with the interface — it looks and feels great. On a more technical note, why does it continue to run a background service when it’s not playing music and it’s out of focus? It doesn’t start one with the phone, so I wouldn’t imagine it would need it for anything. I can understand when it’s playing music because you don’t want Android shutting it down if memory is getting tight, however after I’m finished with it, I notice the service is left running in the background. And it remained there for over a day without me ever going back into the app, so I finally just killed it. Just thought I’d ask since memory is still somewhat tight on these mobile devices. Thanks!
This is now my default media player on my phone
Any chance though of allowing skip to next / last track by holding down the volume up / down buttons? Would allow you to skip to the next track without having to unlock the screen etc.
Pretty cool, it works nicely! I found I had to set it as the default player for my bluetooth headphones remote control to work, but that’s fine because it’s great!
Ability to delete media would be handy – that’s one thing that my default Android player can do that songbird can’t. I like to delete albums as I go. This should include cleaning up empty directories, as well (which the default Android player doesn’t do, leaving cruft around).
Agree bookmarking tracks would be really, really nice for audio books and other longer content…
Thanks!
@ScottE / @Aus
Yeah, I’ve set it as my default player, and told the other apps to ignore headset clicks.
One click of the wired headset button does play/pause, but it would be nice for double-click to advance tracks and triple-click to go back, like a lot of the other players do…
@Aus
Nice program, it was the default on my PC, and now it is on the phone.
The only thing I’m missing badly, is an equalizer, cause the default settings on my phone are more painful than amusing.
Is there any chance that you will implement this feature in the near future?
Thanks,
R
For some reason b3 freezes a lot more often on my Milestone 2. Also Songbird shows only a single song in the songs view (the other songs are accessible through the albums & artists view).
To finish with a request – support for embedded lyrics (ID3) would be great (and I believe it was mentioned already).
Keep the great work.
Will there be WiFi syncing in the near future?
@Aus Sorry, I didn’t read your response, yet.
[Headset button starts voice command app]: I have a Motorola Defy and this voice command app is a system app (otherwise I would remove it).
[Search is slow]: I have about 12GB of music on my sd card. So this would explain it, I think
forza song bird ulaaan!!