Hello fellow birders,
It’s time for another Songbird for Android release! New in this release is support for Podcasts.
Podcasts will now show up in their own view. Also, when listening to Podcasts, we’ll automatically bookmark the last position and restore it when you start listening to it again later.
As always there’s a slew of bug fixes and improvements for you to enjoy. 
Here’s where you can find the Podcasts view in the app home screen.
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Songbird pour Android en version 1.4…
L’équipe de développement de Songbird viens de publier la version 1.4 de leur application mobile. Cette nouvelle version permet désormais de lire les Podcasts. Ils s’afficheront dans leur propre catégorie. Lors de l’écoute d’un …
[...] Planet Mozilla No Comments July 23, 2011 By Giovanni Panasiti in Planet Mozilla Tags: 'Aus', Android, available, Ghislain, Lacroix, Songbird, v1.4 « hacks.mozilla.org: Ask MDN: Our experts are ready to answer your questions [...]
[...] 1.3 est sortie Songbird Android v 1.4, les podcast à l’écranBonjour les fans de Songbird,Songbird pour Android arrive avec une nouvelle mouture! La nouveauté de cette version est le soutien pour les [...]
40 Comments
SubscribeHow podcasts are detected ?
First of all, thank you for removing the animation when flip your phone to and from landscape. It was really slow and painfull to watch on my htc desire.
Second, i would like to have the option to turn off landscape mode, and also to choose the players language, because my phones standard language, Danish, dosnt play nice with the player.
Oh, and a very weird bug… i dont know if its app’s fault, or the songbird on pc, but it will not show some tracks added to my playlists, even though they are synced and found if i look under artists og songs.
hey, am i mistaken in thinking that podcasts don’t work in songbird for PC?
how come?!?
or is it coming soon? (i _really_ hate itunes, hope to abandon it!)
@MikkerBabz
Download the app “Auto-Rotate Status Bar”. I use it CONSTANTLY. It might help out, at least until/if SB devs implement more menu options.
Also, why is this update not showing up on my Nookcolor? I am running CM7.1.0 RC1. Even when I navigate to the update in the browser-based market, I am told that this version “is not compatible with my device”.
Sweet! Now if only the desktop songbird would actually download podcasts, let alone finally take advantage of the inbuilt web browser to make subscriptions, this would make SB a really standout player.
Can’t wait to see what’s on the horizon!
Excellent news..
One of the last main missing pieces to SB for Android is here
Thanks
Great app, although I don’t use facebook. Any chance of swapping that out in place of either twitter or google+ ?
Maybe it’s just me but I have no clue how to make the podcast section work. Is the box suppose to search for feeds or am I doing something wrong? Because if I can’t search for podcasts on the app and I can’t subscribe to feeds through my desktop then where are we?
Not bad, surprisingly.
if this uses xulrunner, should give a tip to firefox guys how you get songbird to start so quickly
User Interface Bug:
When in playlist – clicking and holding on the Icon beside TrackInfo( song name etc) you are able to drag songs and move them around, but when you release the song does not change position.
It would be nice if we can rearrange songs in the playlist, as you are able to drag them around.
Also, dragging a song to the top/bottom and keeping moving, leads to a blank screen – user interface bug. User forced to go back and return to playlist to be able to see the songs again.
Another annoyance is the flickr and facebook Forced inclusion!
Why can’t it be like the Lockscreen screen widget and Last.fm where the user can select if they want it or not?
@LarryWalters
Re-ordering playlists should work. It works great for us on all the phones we have tested. It can happen though if the playlist is auto-generated or created by a different media player application. Try creating a new playlist, add tracks to it, and re-arrange.
If that still doesn’t work, can you tell us what phone you are using and version of Android?
Good, good.
Suggestions/feature requests recap:
- Do not show “Podcasts” item anywhere if I don’t subscribe to any. (Not sure how those work, though.)
- List of recently added songs.
- This: http://obrazku.cz/obr740243_songbird.png (maybe even with search icon permanently on the right)
- Fix the graphics at the ends of progress bar: http://obrazku.cz/obr740248_sb2.png
- Ability to auto-fill/manually set ID3tag, album art. Option to undo in case of incorrect song recognition – otherwise it’s pain in the ass to fix those. (Ability to search/browse for right data in some sort of last.fm-ish db so one does not have to type in everything manually when autofill fails would also be very cool, but dunno if anything like that exists.)
- Lyrics/Karaoke thingie.
- Google+, Twitter, etc. support along with facebook, flickr. Option to choose which of those buttons should be shown in the player.
- Equalizer.
- Maybe this is fixed in 1.4 – I did not have the opporturnity to find out yet: When music playback is interrupted by incoming call, it is not resumed afterwards. It is supposed to resume, right? At least I’d expect it to >_>
Huh.. um… that would be it for now
I did create the playlist.
I guess it is the other one.
OS 2.1
Sony x10 Mini Pro
Does the Gui Bug occur in other versions?
I guess it is an OS Bug – where the limits are not detected leading to infinite scroll down/up.
Any word on disabling the flickr/facebook “integration”?
Bruno Mars? You definitely have gotten quite a bit less cool, since I last checked.
@MikkerBabz
What do you mean by “Danish doesn’t play nice with the player”?
We’ll consider adding an option to lock orientation in Portrait or Landscape mode in the future.
Unfortunately, playlists can only contain items that are in pieces of storage in /sdcard. This is a limitation of the Android platform. I’m guessing this is the problem you are running into.
@katana346
Hmm. No idea why that would happen. The version we uploaded is compatible with all devices running Android 2.1 or greater. There’s no reason for it to be unavailable as far as I know.
@Gareth
We’re planning to add integration with Google+ as well as Twitter in the near future.
@eric hunter
Sync your podcasts to your phone (and put them in a ‘Podcasts’ folder). Then they will show up under ‘Podcasts’.
@zob
Songbird for Android is a native Android application. It doesn’t use XULRunner.
@LarryWalters
It does sound like an OS level bug. On 2.2 and greater it seems to work great. Is it possible to update your phone to run 2.2?
Is there already a plan for when FLAC is going to be supported for playback?
Bruno Mars? You definitely have gotten quite a bit less cool, since I last checked.
I would like to use Songbird on my Cowan D3 player, but that has access to the Android Market disabled for some strange reason.
Is there a direct link to the APK file?
First of all let me say I love your app.
BUT:
Version 1.4 cannot handle large music collections. Since I put 1300 songs (7 GB) on my phone, Songbird 1.4 behaved dog slow and buggy, e.g. it would take > 10 secs to switch between playlists and would display info of another song, not the one being played.
Downgrading to Songbird 1.2 solved the problem. Please fix, I love the simple interface and the formerly low memory and CPU footprint.
Thanks
Huh, choosing a specific song from active playlist seems to disable the shuffle option.
New version available on the market: 1.4.2
“We’re planning to add integration with Google+ as well as Twitter in the near future.”
wut?
Any plans to add support for replay gain?
Is there a changelog?
And is there any user guide or FAQ?
What are the criteria to include/exclude music tracks?
What are the criteria to include/exclude podcasts tracks?
Thanks and keep on the good work
So have you guys completely abandoned the PC/Mac version of Songbird?
It’s been almost a year since you updated the timeline.
@klint
Sync your podcasts to your phone (and put them in a ‘Podcasts’ folder). Then they will show up under ‘Podcasts’. Everything else is considered to be Music at this time. We’ll refine this in the future.
@Farrol
We’ve been able to reproduce this issue and are working on a fix.
@phdr_vrba
We haven’t seen the issue you’ve reported with the graphics being stretched at the end of the progress / seek bar. What phone are you using?
The music is not supposed to resume after a phone call, you’re supposed to hit play to continue. We did this because many people unplug their headphones when they take a call (in fact, I would say it’s probably the majority that do). It’s kind of annoying to have your music start blasting out when you’ve just hung up a phone call. We do have plans to be smarter about this in the future though and offer more options.
Your other requests are all things that we have in our list of future feature work.
@Sam
Yes, we plan on supporting replay gain data embedded in the file and calculating it on the fly.
@radyn
Far from it, we’re still busy working on the PC/Mac versions.
@Andrew
Unfortunately we do not post the APK elsewhere for people to download at this time. We’ll try and change this in the near future (possibly even for the next release).
Thanks @Aus, that is great news and my eardrums thank you.
Last I checked, Songbird for the PC did not sync the Playlists to Android. Songbird for Android (and Songbird for PC) is pretty useless to me without the ability to sync playlists.
BTW: The other essential features that are missing in Songbird for PC:
- Does NOT create folders and file names based on song and album names (AKA “Manage Music Folder)
- Does NOT rip CDs to mp3 (there is not even an add-on for this)
- Does NOT burn to CD
I don’t listen to music at my PC. My two use cases are:
1. I rip CDs to mp3 and then create custom audio CDs from my Playlists and then play them on my living-room stereo and in my car.
2. I sync songs and playlists to my Android phone to listen to while walking.
These would seem to me to be THE typical usage cases. I can do #1 with iTunes. I’m screwed with #2. I can do neither with Songbird. Please focus on that.
Hello? Does anybody here care about making Songbird awesome?
@Peter
* The latest version of Songbird should sync playlist files to Android.
* The latest version should also create folders when syncing music.
* Ripping CDs to MP3 unfortunately requires licensing an MP3 encoder which is not something we can afford for all our users. Android phones support Ogg Vorbis though which is a format Songbird can rip to.
* Indeed, no burning of CDs. I don’t know that we will ever offer that unfortunately.
* Yes, we care.
Le jour ou android generera en moi un peu de respect ne viendra pas tant que les regles du 1-0 bit/octet ne seront pas mises en avant
Android et les technologies et les fournisseurs de cet TI sont trops axés sur $$$$$pour que ça marche avant le Passage a la dimension 12-12. Sic? 44 le chemin de la vierge Marie qui par androida fera sauter aroid car le monde 12811. N’est pas pour android lire nexus13 vous comprendrez. Bit octet 0+1=1=2 =44 pendant que je moeurs pour son passage en 13=44 android ne sera plus et enfin je je vous parlerai de notre TI as ITAÉ ÉTAI THAI HAITI AS THE UNIVERSIT ITAE AS HAIT AS THE LAST LORD
And as thai (thailande) it is the 12e last twelve element as 121212 = 8 as it has been told and written since the beginning Mais bon…………
Message pour peter: take it easy you seem busy just remember as september 8th bible tell you answer is so true it is the last third FOI
@ Aus
I’m using Songbird 1.10.0b3, Build 2091 (20110620030445). That is THE latest version (unless you are talking about nightly builds?).
I manually deleted all files & folders under the \Music folder on my Android (Samsung Nexus S, Android 2.3.4 – THE Android phone). In Songbird: Sync selected Playlists (no “import music from device”).
In Songbird on my Android I get NO Playlists!
I just downloaded a mp3 song from Amazon into my “\Music\Amazon MP3″ folder. I them manually moved the file to my “\Music\Automatically added to Songbird” folder. That is the folder Songbird is set to “automatically watch”. When I launch Songbird, it ads the song to my Music Library.
The file is NOT moved or copied to my “Music\Songbird Music” folder.
Songbird did NOT create any folders (it didn’t even move the files out of the “Automatically added to Songbird” folder.
While it is understandable that you cannot afford the licensing for all users (although Apple and others somehow can), it is ESSENTIAL that you find a solution to this problem (unless you want Songbird to forever be a geek-only product). Amazon and many other sources deal exclusively in mp3 (or proprietary) files. Users would have to convert all their mp3 files into Ogg Vorbis, and thus create duplicates of all their music, and with that a huge confusing mess. I see no UI in Songbird to do this, even if users were foolish and knowledgeable enough to even want to do this extra work. I guarantee you, no matter how “cool” geeks think Ogg Vorbis is, it is highly unlikely that it will achieve ANY relevant level of market penetration in the foreseeable future. You are stuck with either Songbird remaining forever irrelevant or finding a solution to the mp3 requirement for market relevance.
Possible solutions:
1. Provide an Add-on that users must pay for. The cost is the mp3 license fee for one user. The add-on author (you guys) forwards the payment to the Frauenhofer Institut (or whoever gets the cash) (Look into if that is possible. I suggest you do this before you do ANYTHING else today – I hope you don’t have to go to the bathroom right now
).
2. Create a for-pay version of Songbird that includes mp3 support (that is identical in every other way to the regular Songbird).
3. Add mp3 support and watch Songbird usage increase in orders of magnitude – thus increasing your revenue from 7digital and others so that you can easily afford the mp3 license fees (just like Apple and the others). Do a spreadsheet. Estimate your break even requirement. Estimate the chances of achieving (and exceeding) that break even point.
It must be doable. There are so many free and open source CD burner programs. It can’t be too hard to take the code and incorporate it into Songbird (~1-2 weeks effort?). It’s worth it! I suggest you do this right after implementing mp3 support and before ANYTHING else.
There’s not much evidence of that (No Playlists to Android. No ripping to mp3. No CD burning.). Caring is nice. But results are what count. You can do it. So do.
If you build it, they will come…
@Aus thx for info, it’s Samsung Galaxy S 2.
@Aus
The Danish language just dosn’t look good on the player. There isn’t even enough room for the danish translations in the top buttons.
I found out that it is because your desktop version of Songbird can’t (or is it limitation of m3u files?) write øæå in the playlist files. It ends up as weird signs, and the player is looking for the wrong songs.
øæå is letters from the danish alphabet.
Do you have a changelog?