Hello fellow birders,
Hot off the trails of our 1.0 release, here’s 1.1! As promised, we’ve included several features and bug fixes you’ve all been requesting. Without further ado, here are the hot details:
- Lock-screen widget
- Now runs on Honeycomb-based devices
- Widget stability and responsiveness fixes
- Remember position in list when using back key
- Better bluetooth headset disconnection support as well as bluetooth car audio support
- Usability tweaks when receiving and making calls
- Notifications should now be audible even when playing music
- Playlist reordering styling improvements
Phew! That’s a hefty list. We’re already hard at work on the next release. We’ll be posting a list of features that will be included in the next couple of weeks. Spoiler alert — it will include landscape support.
As always, your feedback is greatly appreciated. We couldn’t have shaped this release without you. Many thanks 
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[...] media player for Android, Songbird, just got updated to version 1.1, bringing with it both bug fixes and new features. Top of the list is Android 3.0 Honeycomb support, so now you can get Songbird on your Honeycomb [...]
[...] media player for Android, Songbird, just got updated to version 1.1, bringing with it both bug fixes and new features. Top of the list is Android 3.0 Honeycomb support, so now you can get Songbird on your Honeycomb [...]
[...] media player for Android, Songbird, just got updated to version 1.1, bringing with it both bug fixes and new features. Top of the list is Android 3.0 Honeycomb support, so now you can get Songbird on your Honeycomb [...]
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43 Comments
SubscribeExcellent release! I was waiting on lock screen controls; Songbird will now become my default Android player! Thanks SB team!
A great feature would be to add the option to mark certain folders (and all subfolders under it) as audiobook and podcast folders. The you could also develop special audiobook features such as remembering at which point in time in your book you were listening to the last time, quick switching betwen audiobook library and regular library etc.
The default android player supports some of this through the podcast folder.
Hello from Paris
II have a question: When I close Songbird, in the “settings” of my phone (curent app), I can see SB still runing. Can you explain me why ?
Sorry for my bad english
The one thing still missing from all of the major PMP software for Android that stops me from using them on a daily basis is the handling of compilation albums in the Library. Support for the Album Artist tag set to “Various Artists” is all that’s missing.
If you add something like “Now Dance 45″ to your Android device and see Albums in Songbird (or Winamp for Android), all tracks are listed as separate albums simply because they are not the same artist with the same album name. I don’t have 32 albums on my device, I have 1 by “Various Artists”.
Any hope of this being added to the next version?
Thanks!
Still no locales support ? Common ! Many strings are on translate.songbirdnest.com !
Love Songbird on the PC and on my phone, but would like to see “Move to SD card” support.
Any chance of being able to mark certain folders as not included in the library? I don’t want my voice recordings of me and my son playing, popping up alongside my music. Or marking a folder (/sdcard/MP3) as the default library location, the way the desktop client does it?
I downloaded the latest update for Songbird in the Android market. I have to say it’s an improvement and I’m finally glad I can change the song from the locked screen. HOWEVER, to get back to your phone you have to unlock the phone twice. Once to slide Songbird out of the way, twice to unlock the phone.
Please just place the widget on the locked screen right above Android unlock slider. This way we can change our song or unlock our phone on the same screen! This makes much more sense. Or at least give us this option.
I will be uninstall Songbird again from my Android and using my stock player since it has this feature. I keep Songbird on my Windows 7 PC though! Best piece of software I have used yet to sync my Android with my music. Keep up the good work. Look forward to the next release, and hopefully the widget placement will be fixed.
One more thing I noticed. When I have the phone unlocked and I send Songbird to the background and then eventually lock the phone, Songbird is the first thing I see immeidatley when I unlock the phone. Shouldn’t it be staying up in the notification bar since that’s where I stuck it before I locked the phone?
Thanks again,
Richard
@Kristofer Palmestål
We do have plans to support better playback of podcasts and audiobooks with the use of audio bookmarks. However, how we detect which are podcasts will be different than what you suggested
@Lewis
We have seen this happen on a device running 2.3.3 and after removing the SD card, backing up all the music, formatting it, then restoring the music the problem was solved. This causes the entire mediastore database to be regenerated. This causes the entire database to be reset. I don’t suggest you do this but if you are really desperate you could try it. There’s probably a more straightforward way to do this but we haven’t had a chance to investigate further.
@Antoine Turmel
Supporting other locales has nothing to do with the strings being available or not. I’m well aware that a lot strings are on translate already, I do work here after all :p We have localization slated for a release. Rest assured that when this release happens, we’ll mention that other locales are supported.
@Craig
Yes, we have something like that planned already.
@Richard Beck
There are technical limitations for security reasons. An application can not overlay a window on top of the lock-screen if it does not occupy the entire visual space. There’s nothing that can be done about that. The reason why the stock player can do it is that it’s widget is built-into the lock-screen that comes with the phone.
The only way to get what you’re asking for would be to use the Songbird Lock-screen widget as the actual lock-screen. You would never see your phones default lock-screen. Is that something that would work for you?
We’re concerned about providing this because we could be breaking how the user expects to be able to unlock their phone. However, we could provide this as an option.
@bob
Android applications don’t necessarily exit or finish the process once you have dismissed them. Our application doesn’t because we believe you’ll be using in every now and again fairly frequently and you want access to it fast. When it’s not in use it remains in a ‘suspended’ mode. This means it’s not using up CPU time.
@Ron
Thanks for pointing out this reply was directed at the wrong person
Just checking in with my favorite bug – Using Motorola Milestone 2, Android 2.2 the songs list is empty, but I can navigate my music with the other views just fine. This is really unfortunate for me, as I like to set all my library on shuffle and this prevents me from doing so.
On another note, I’d like to echo @Richard Beck, having an option for song bird to replace the lock screen would be much better than having to unlock the phone twice. Also it isn’t clear why after unlocking the phone Songbird is front and center and not in the background as it’s supposed to be.
Keep the great work!
I agree that it would be nice to have the option to replace the standard lock-screen with the Songbird controls when Songbird is running. It is pretty inconvenient to require two lock screens.
Thank you aus, about 30 2011 12:39pm
Your answer was for me, I think, not for Ron
One thing that would be really great, and, as far as I know is not currently built into any other media players, is to have the headset button have different effects on different numbers of clicks (1 press = play/pause, double click = next track, etc.). I know there are some standalone apps that try to due this but all have some problems integrating with players in my experience. A built-in function in Songbird would be great!
Nice app, I really like it. However, as already mentioned by Ice2097, I also would appreciate some more options for using a wired headset with one button, e.g. by using double / triple click. I tried Headset Button Control, but it does not perfectly work with Songbird.
@Drag0nR3b0rn
Yes. My friend has an Atrix and is seeing the same problem. I’m hoping to fix this issue with his help on Friday. I’ll let you know the outcome
@Ice2097, Oliver
Thanks for letting us know you’d like to see more options there. We’ve noted them in our list of future features. Not sure when we will get to them at this time though.
Hello there,
I tried out the new version, and it’s really good! However, the bug that makes me not want to use this app is related to the headphone controls. I have an HTC Desire, and when I use the Back button on my headphones the song does skip backwards, but not all the way to the beginning. It usually skips back to a few seconds after the beginning of the song, which I find to be rather annoying! The Forward button does work properly though!
It should be noted that when using the buttons on the display this doesn’t happen!
Good update. I am a fan of winamp but loving this for my phone better. Just a few things I like to note, seems a lot of music apps do the same thing when in lock screen and go to unlock phone it brings you to stock unlock screen this is really annoying to unlock twice. Add coverflow or gesture to swipe to next track on now playing screen. On the now playing screen make the playlist, shuffle, repeat , flicker, and Facebook button hide able. This will allow bigger album art and seeker button. Tapping on the album art will show or hide these buttons. A little bigger Home screen widget would be nice, at least a 4×2.
@Rob
We would definitely like to add a coverflow style view in the near future. Also in the near future are more widgets (4×2 and 4×4). Our designer is always into making the album art bigger so I’m sure he’ll come up with a nice interaction to hide / show those buttons or put them in a better spot
As for gestures for previous and next, it’s definitely something we’re considering but we’d like to get further in development of key features before implementing those. We don’t want to use a gesture for something key like that and then have to change it later on because some other feature needs that kind of gesture as users will get really annoyed at us.
Total run-off sentence, apologies.
Im enjoying the last update so much, you are really doing a great work.
However, it would be really cool if you could implement some kind of sleep timer, its nice to let the music play for 15/30/60 or 90 minutes while you try to fall asleep.
Other than that a EQ would be alse a nice adition, but i hope to see it in a few more updates.
Keep up the nice work!
So, I have a question and I’m very serious… Why are Songbird and Winamp so similar?
I’ll just say: Keep up the good work. This is really welcome. And +1 to better audiobook and podcast support.
@Aus – Thanks for replying, it’s very refreshing. I should have mentioned that I’m running Songbird on an HTC Desire with Froyo (2.2).
As you mention, reformatting the SD card isn’t convenient so it’s difficult to rule this out as a potential fix – I suppose another option would be to use another card? With the existing card I can reload the media but, unsurprisingly, nothing changes within Songbird when I do. Would be great if you could look in to it!
Thanks
@Aus – I’ve done a bit of my own investigating and it seems the issue relates to how Android’s media library indexes the content on the SD card as well as how it has been copied to/created on the SD card. It uses more than just the ID3 tags to decide whether something is an Album to be grouped. Namely, the folder location in disk.
Unfortunately this problem originates from the software used to copy the music to the device. If the software doing the copying is restructuring the files/folders on the device as “\Artist\Album” then you end up with a messed up Media library in Android. Obviously this problem, in addition to Google’s choice to use the SD card location in its indexing logic so that SD card location has higher priority over the Album tag effectively renders the Album Artist tag useless.
As far as I’m concerned, it should make no difference where the data is on the SD card, the media library should merely index the ID3 tags like it’s supposed to and offer up the SD card location as another sort option so that developers like yourselves can provide a button/sort option for that if people need it.
The solution seems to be to ensure that your MP3 files are copied to your device in the following structure:
Album Artist\Album\
This way, a two CD mix/compilation album titled “Markus Schulz – Miami ’05″ using the “Various Artists” Album Artist tag will end up in:
\Various Artists\Miami ’05
but, you would get a properly indexed media library that works well with Songbird and Winamp for Android.
In short, Google’s media indexing for Android assumes that if two files with the same Album ID3 tag are not in the same folder as each other, they are different albums. Perhaps a better solution is to look at the Album Artist first and then consider the file’s location.
Just thoughts that I’m sure nobody at Google will hear…
To put this to bed, the problem I originally described is not a problem with Songbird. Apologies for wasting your time.
When is .flac support on honeycomb going to be available?
While I’m glad that you have an Android app, how about some progress updates on the main Songbird application? The impression that I am getting is that it has been sidelined at the moment. Hope that isn’t true.
Hi Aus!
Thanks for the new update! Songbird is a great audio player!
I only miss something that I pointed in the first beta: the album art of ogg files (incrusted with the PC version of Songbird) do not show in the Android version, which makes me very sad…
Are you working on it? If yes, is it planned for next version?
Thanks for keeping the good work!
@Lewis
That is indeed exactly what is happening and we absolutely agree that the approach Google is taking there is wrong. Metadata should be respected. If no metadata is present then it would make sense to me to use the structure to try and determine artists and albums.
@Bob F
Oh dear, no, it’s not been sidelined at all. The desktop client team is hard at work to get to feature completion for the next release.
We’ll try and get a post up soon which will outline what’s in that release soon.
@Pepso
Yes, we’re definitely working on that. We think it’s an annoying problem too! I can’t guarantee that it will be in the next release though, sorry
it looks great so far, and it just keeps getting better, but there’s one major flaw that keeps me from actually using it regularly: I can’t set watch folders in it the way I can with the desktop songbird or other android music players like poweramp. As a result, it treats any audio file it can see as a song – ringtones, pronunciation clips from dictionary apps, audio files from tape recorder apps, etc, and it makes it just about unusable at times to have all that clutter while I’m trying to find the song I want to listen to.
@Aus
I still can’t manage to let Facebook allow Songbird to authenticate. On HTC Wildfire, Android 2.1.
The screen seems so be too small to display the buttons, you can scroll down, but you can’t click the buttons because once you release the screen after scrolling the screen is set back up to the top of the auth dialog. It seems that @r.ricco in the post http://blog.songbirdnest.com/2011/02/10/new-beta-of-songbird-for-android-available-on-market/ also had this problem.
Is there some kind of workaround to eg. show the dialog in the Browser or something like that?
@Aus
Great. Glad to hear that things are still progressing on the desktop client. I’ll look forward to the update post. Keep up the good work!
We want linux support Back!
Please :S
Why!
Android and Linux like each other!
We all love songbird!
1) When enabling lock screen I would like that the built-in lock screen should not pop up after disabling the songbird one.
2) When using lock screen I would like that the last active application started with focus rather than songbird. Typical use is that I use a map app while running and use songbird for playing music.
Lock screen is also a tad late in activating.
HTC Desire.
But I like that you have worked on the lock screen. It’s a welcomed function. I love how where this is going
@EspenA
We agree with both of your points. These have already been fixed and will be part of the next release.
@txgecko
Yep, we hear you loud and clear. We really want to add support for picking which folders music that is listed in Songbird comes from.
@Geraldo
Most of the similarities you see between Songbird and Winamp are serendipitous. However, great minds think alike apparently
@OmegaOuter
I’ve added an ‘alarm clock’ feature to our general set of features we’d like to see in the future. This would support both a sleep timer and an alarm for waking up. I’m not sure when these will be slated to be implemented though at this time.
As for the EQ, we have that on our roadmap as well but it will be for devices running Android 2.3 or greater as there is no good way to implement EQ functionality in prior versions.
Is there a plan to add a landscape layout? Supporting Honeycomb is a good first step, but it would be much nicer on a tablet if it was in landscape rather than portrait.
Of course, there’s probably a lot of great UI possibilities for Songbird on Honeycomb if you take advantage of Fragments, so I wouldn’t blame you guys if it takes a little while because you’re re-working the UI for something like that.
@EE
Totally. We are planning to do this in two phases. First, we’ll provide landscape support. Second, we’ll provide a custom UI for tablets which makes use of Fragments. The latter will take more time to massage because we really want to make the tablet experience great and truly make use of the extra space.
Landscape will be in v1.2. We’re not exactly sure when the tablet UI will be implemented but we’ll let you guys know when we have decided.
Problem with the Facebook authentication on Wildfire (everything up-to-date)
Auth-window pops up and the buttons are visible then disapear. Able to scroll down but the same thing happens – visible, then disappearing – even when I was trying to be as fast as possible to catch the button, I wasn’t able to authenticate with FB.
Perhaps it is covered by the “Logged on as XY (aksbgdkas?)” message on the bottom of the window.
All in all Songbird ist nice!
– seems to work better than winamp with the smaller cores like on the HTC Wildfire.
I love this app!
@aus: you should really think about renaming the “product” menu into “desktop” and add a new “app” (or “android”) menu here on the website to give new users more info!
#comment-75325 exactly describes my problem… even in 1.1.1 there’s no fix for this…
I agree with those who claim a better podcast management.
Great app. Keep it up!!!
Excelent App!! i would like to have some sort of “account management” to manage Facebook connectivity. Since my last password change I can’t update songbird to use this FB “likes”.
Is there some twitter connector?
Thank you! It was a good thing seeing songbird in Android market
Sorry now I can update my pass. Underestimate later comment
Really nice app!!