By stevel 
Nov 20, 2009 11:47 am
Many of you have been wondering what’s up with the state of the release lately… observant birdwatchers might have noticed Kanye has wrapped-up and most of the development team has moved onto the video work slated for Led Zeppelin and Madonna.
As we wrapped up Kanye, we found a few bugs regarding library management. While we polished these up, we decided to slip in a couple of features, namely support for playlists on MSC devices, broader support for the popular community-tested MSC devices, and a new Feather. If you’ve been following along in Bugzilla and on the Wiki, you might have noticed a new K release, KoЯn which is where this work is landing. Tentatively versioned at 1.4.1, KoЯn is currently slated to release sometime in December. (I have some side comments on the whole minor release thing in a recent blog comment here if you care for more detail on that point).
As I mentioned in that comment, as we tackle larger-scope features such as MSC support, CD Rip, Video playback, it’ll be more likely that we’ll have to tackle these things in phased approaches where you may not see stable releases for every development release (e.g. Jackson 5, Kanye, and possibly the in-progress Led Zeppelin). It would be irresponsible of us to update every Songbird user to a potentially unstable build, so as we wrap up each release – we have to assess whether this release is one we can ship out. If not, we then take a look at whether or not it’s worth the time to do a follow-up minor release (as we’re doing with KoЯn now, and as we did with Gwar in the past). Rest assured, the development nightly builds continue to be spun out every night for those of you who don’t mind living on the edge.
We realise y’all are eager to see a new release of the bird, and we promise that it’s on its way real soon. We’ll try to be more transparent and communicative about the release schedule in the future. In the meantime, we’d love to share with you a screenshot of the currently-in-development Purple Rain Feather we’re aiming to deliver with KoЯn:
By redfive 
Nov 16, 2009 6:12 pm
As part of the video work currently in progress we’re going to be abstracting a bunch of strings away from “Music” or “Track” to things like “Item” or “Media”. It’s going to be scores of strings most likely (we’re still figuring it out over in bug 18105) and will have an impact on translators. Specifically many translated strings will need to be checked and adjusted to make sense in the new world of audio and video.
One of the hard parts about doing translations for Songbird is that if we change a source string there isn’t a way to know about it in the translate site. One of the requests we got from translators when stevel and mook went to EU Mozcamp 2009 was to change key names when we change source strings so they know when to update their translations. This is one approach to fix the problem but means we would have multiple entries in our database for effectively the same text (arguably most changes to source strings would be minor and not change the overarching message).
To avoid needless duplication of strings in the database we’re opting to not change the key names. However, we heard the request from the community and we’re going to address the real need. Namely, we’re going to add functionality to the translate site that allows a translator to filter to just the strings that have been modified since the last translation was made (see bug 18795). It will lag a little behind the landing of the modified strings but once landed should be backward compatible to any old changes that need addressing.
This change won’t affect the percentage of ‘untranslated’ strings, and therefore won’t affect a language’s inclusion into the language bundle that gets served up during firstrun or in the File menu.
By Laura 
Nov 5, 2009 11:15 pm
By Laura
Oct 29, 2009 9:18 pm
Consider this a sponge bath because, well, I’ve been on vacation and I’m out of the loop so it’s going to be short and sweet.
I wanted to remind you that tomorrow, October 30th, is the last day to submit your video for our Songbird Demo Video Contest. A few more submissions have rolled in so head here to cast your fan favorite votes.
Also, I see some of you have been busy pitching in on the device testing front, so thanks!
Other than that, how about you guys tell me what’s up for a change? 
By Laura
Oct 27, 2009 1:53 pm
Does your device work with our latest Windows build?
We’ve got $50 for the first person who completes a set of test cases for a top device and sends their results to us at devices@songbirdnest.com.
Even if you’re not first, we still want to know if your device will take flight and we’ve got a Songbird T-shirt we’ll send your way if you complete the tests.
You’ll find the top 25 devices we’re interested in learning about via Community Tested Devices. If your device isn’t on the list, just ping us in the comments field of this post and we’ll let you know if we need it tested.
As the test case feedback flys back in, we’ll populate the results in our updated Community Tested Devices wiki page.
