Announcing the release of… another 1.10 beta?!

By ali ali Oct 12, 2011 4:33 pm Permalink
Filed under Development

You guys, we have a super-funny story. It’s about a nasty bug that turned up just when we thought we were done with our 1.10 release.

We were feeling so good about being done with the release that we had the actual final build done and were probably headed towards the beer fridge. “Good times,” we said to one another, “Let’s congratulate ourselves for doing such awesome work to finish this release, which is definitely completely done. Phew! It feels great to finish things!” We then collectively failed to knock on wood, despite having an abundance of it in our office, and here we are today.

“Yo, um, that’s not a very funny story,” you say. Upon rereading it, we concede that it actually is not at all funny.

You may be asking yourself, “What on earth could have possibly happened that would take so long to fix?” Well, we basically had to rewrite how the entire application looks for and reads files off the filesystem. Our existing methods for reading files were not playing nicely with our new device synchronization behavior in one certain instance on Mac which ended up being very important. Nerds, you may want to check out bug 24478 and its friend bugs for the gross details, patches, reviews, hand-wringing, soggy kleenexes, and broken dreams that this bug caused.

So. Here we are. We have a build for you. We’re calling it a beta because we had to make so many invasive changes, but we hope that it ends up being our final 1.10 build. We were so completely sure we were done with 1.10.0 that we had to bump our version numbers up to 1.10.1, so don’t freak out that you missed a 1.10.0 release. There wasn’t one! *sob*

The beta downloads are available on our nightly downloads page for Windows, Mac, and yes, Linux. We will be pushing Mac and Windows updates for those of you who have the 1.10.0b3 version installed on your machines. If you find something grody, please log a bug!

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17 Comments

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  1. SquareWheel Oct 12, 2011 4:54 pm Permalink

    “The beta downloads are available on our nightly downloads page for Windows, Mac, and yes, Linux.”

    *pokes head around corner*

  2. BWGIA Oct 12, 2011 6:22 pm Permalink

    Hi,
    Glad to hear something. Downloaded the latest via autoupdate, and seems to be working fine on win XP, seems a bit snappier when it starts playing a song than the last beta. Just for fun, since you changed the whole file reading system, I deleted a song off my hard drive. SB still can’t deal with ghost tracks. I know this isn’t something you said was fixed, but it raises some questions.

    1. Has the rather new addition of android songbird changed your conception of the desktop client? Following the evolution of this program has been really interesting, it was clearly a itunes alternative at first, but since Apple didn’t play nice, it seemed emphasis moved more to being a player, with things like playlists and lyric support. But are you seeing the desktop SB now becoming more of a file manager to support the android version? (It COULD be a good bundle to go with an android device for syncing with a PC or Mac)

    which leads to

    2. What PC file management capabilities will you add? For instance, the ability to delete a file directly in songbird, or is there some philosophy for why you don’t allow that to happen? Are we looking a desktop client 90% of the way to finished, or 10% or what??

    3. Will there be anything the desktop client can do that the Android version won’t do? I guess I’d expect the Android version to be as full featured as any desktop client, but then again, any android device is (likely) going to be portable, and mainly used for playback, while a desktop client is going to be used much more for library management and web surfing. Any plans to split functionality between the programs?

    Overall, I guess what I’m after is a massively updated road-map for the desktop client. Lately it seems there been some rumbling in the forums about what is happening with the desktop, and while I get you are extremely busy, it would probably be worth 1000 bug fixes to let the community know what direction you are working towards and why. Basically I started using SB (and advocating it to friends) on the promise of what it might become, and while I have no real plans to change, I really can’t say at this point it feels “finished” but I’m no longer sure just what it is supposed to be.

    Don’t want to end on a negative sounding note, so thanks for all your hard work and a free player that works just fine for me. I’m just hoping there is lots more goodness in the near future.

    Cheers
    BWGIA

  3. Jigar Shah Oct 12, 2011 10:08 pm Permalink

    Thanks for update. I still monitor timeline http://timeline.songbirdnest.com/client/….It seems silent since last few months…Please release your roadmap you used to publish…A real open source project way…Excited to see android product too. All the best. Songbird for desktop has plenty of things for future….Loved sound cloud addon…It rocks. Official MusicBrainz integration will too rock.

  4. Sessions and kimball Oct 13, 2011 10:57 pm Permalink

    Thans for the great update i also searching about the addons for the music player and i found the different type of addon from your site which sre very helpful for me i thanks alot the admin who provide us such useful information.

    Regards

    Sessions and kimball

  5. Alex Oct 14, 2011 1:02 am Permalink

    awesome ! Many thanks :-)

    I just have some minor display bugs on linux with the menus (top and right-click) that I’ll try to find or report in bugzilla. (items replaced by blank space with text appearing only when hovering with the mouse, accidental transparency causing overlap with tracks’ texts, …)

  6. katana346 Oct 14, 2011 3:22 pm Permalink

    Seems faster with searches and overall performance feels much smoother. Aero-snap still does not work though. Any plans for adding this functionality?

    Also, glad to hear that the desktop team is still alive at least.

  7. Samuel Oct 14, 2011 10:37 pm Permalink

    When I add a media from Song bird menu, some of my album folder are not add in Songbird artist or album list… Any idea ?

  8. Sam Oct 14, 2011 11:25 pm Permalink

    Regarding the ghost track comment @BWGIA, I just deleted some tracks and they were removed from my library … It seems to work for me now.

  9. seba Oct 15, 2011 2:22 pm Permalink

    A bit late, but still, great to hear something is going on!

    @BWGIA:

    1) I’m not a songbird employee, so I don’t know if what I say here is accurate but afaik Songbird had the intention to become a full featured open source alternative to iTunes / Winamp / ….

    However business plan was quite bad and in 2009 the ceo left the company and Songbird had a hard time to survive. Then they hooked up with philips to be bundled with their mp3 players, which was kind of a rescue. So they probably had to let some people go and shift their focus to the things Philips want to have done. (Which is mainly good synchronisation with their portable devices I guess).

    2) When is a software xx% done? It’s always in development, so they will be keep adding features, the only question is when.

  10. Gryphon Oct 17, 2011 12:05 pm Permalink

    Oh, owie! My condolences, to all! I know how that feels, all too well.

    I’d like to chime in on @BWGIA’s query – I’d like to be able to delete files directly from Songbird again, which seems very related to the whole file system thing.

    And, as always… thanks for continuing to provide Linux builds. :)

  11. Tier777 Oct 19, 2011 8:00 am Permalink

    Hey! Question about the “Manage Music Folder”: where is the option to change it?

    There used to be an option to let Songbird manage my music library files into folders according to artists, albums, etc. Where is it now? I used to drag and drop files into the songbird window and it automatically sorted the files into my “Songbird Music” folder.

    Is this functionality gone?

  12. Gryphon Oct 19, 2011 12:12 pm Permalink

    @Tier777 – Yep, unfortunately that functionality is gone, at least for now.

    While it was tremendously useful, it also was causing a lot of problems for some people, including loss of files. So, for now at least, it’s been removed. No word yet on any plans for bringing it back… Ali, whatcha got? :)

  13. Xolm Oct 19, 2011 4:52 pm Permalink

    Никак не пойму как добавить папку для воспроизведения. Странно.

  14. Tier777 Oct 24, 2011 5:07 am Permalink

    So, is it coming back in the full 1.10 release, or is it gone for good? Because easy File Management is the reason I stuck with Songbird through all this time…

  15. Gryphon Oct 26, 2011 7:20 am Permalink

    One upgrade I’m really hoping to see in 1.10 is an improvement in the handling of missing files. When it tries to play a missing file, I’d like a dialog with three choices:

    o Skip (ignore the error for now)
    o Delete (remove this song from the music library)
    o Find (bring up a file browser, letting the user update the library with the correct location & name)

  16. ~zeus~ Oct 30, 2011 4:27 pm Permalink

    Would love to see more updates just to know where we are at or to be more precise; where you are at. Just until you put out the 1.1 ;o)

  17. Simon Oct 30, 2011 5:04 pm Permalink

    What’s your idea of the future for desktop Songbird?

    Any chance of a new road map?