On the other hand, it’s also hard to express just how sorry we are that such a thing happened. I definitely hope that the way in which we engaged the community in the past few days sent a clear message that we were nothing short of completely dedicated to solving this issue as rapidly as possible while ensuring that this problem is gone for good.

At this time, the updated iPod Add-On should already be available on the Add-On site and disabled version of the Add-On should also auto-update to the version with the fix.

The problem itself stemmed from a code change that was made to the methods used to collate (i.e. order) properties that are numbers. It turns out that the collator was a little too smart for its own good. This, combined with the way the persistent IDs are generated in iTunes and stored on the iPod, led the Add-On to believe it was operating on Track A when, really, it was operating on Track B. With this confusion, it was possible for the iPod Add-On to erase certain tracks because it was essentially attempting to de-duplicate the contents of the iPod when mounting and synchronizing. It may have also simply removed references to these tracks from the iPod. This would leave the content on the iPod but the content would no longer be associated with the iPod Library, which would make it seem like it disappeared from the iPod.

We’d also like to point out a few potential misconceptions about this issue.

• This issue did not affect the iTunes Library.
• There were no ill effects for iPods that were managed using Songbird. Only songs synced through iTunes are affected.
• This issue is akin to losing or having ones iPod break. While it is unfortunate, it should normally be possible to repopulate your iPod using the original source (eg. Your music library on your laptop).
• Users that did not upgrade from 1.0 to 1.1 and ran into this problem will see their collection restored after installing or updating to the new iPod Add-On.

Since then, we’ve crafted test cases to ensure that this problem never happens again.

We hope you’ll come back to us!

It’s been brought to our attention that the iPod Add-On has some really nasty issues which may cause it to delete content from an iPod without asking the user first. Because of this we are pulling this add-on from the list of recommended add-ons.

If you have this add-on currently installed we highly suggest you disable or uninstall it for the time being.

We apologize for any problems you’ve encountered because of this issue and I assure you we’re looking into this with utmost attention. We will post more information about this issue in our bug tracking tool here.

I also managed to record two short mixes that I decided to put together as a mixtape. Where would I be without high speed dubbing?

Here’s Mixtape 1 (Side A) for your enjoyment.

For all of you who really enjoyed Side A, Side B will be released later this week.

One of the big features we’ll be releasing as part of Songbird 0.5 is MTP device support.

MTP, or Media Transfer Protocol, is used by many types of devices these days. It ends up being pretty awesome because it enables device manufacturers to create devices that can all have the same great user experience when interacting with the contents and managing it from Songbird! Sweet.

Initial support for MTP devices includes manually managing the contents of your device, managing playlists and transferring media files to/from your device.

So far we’ve gotten Sansa, Creative, Nokia and HTC devices to work within Songbird. Awesome.

I’d also like to mention the names of all of the engineers that worked on this feature, without their dedication, none of this would’ve been possible. So, without further adieu, here is your MTP device team: Aus, David, Erik, Keisuke, Mark and Steven!

Tell us what you think! You can try it out by getting the latest nightly and add-on here.

Aus

P.S. If you are a device manufacturer and you would like Songbird to support your MTP device, do get in touch with us.

You can download it here.

If you want to be hip like all us birders, you can also fire up your 0.2 version of Songbird and let it auto-magically update.

I’d also recommend spinach salad as a possible cure for your turkey overdose. You can even put cranberry sauce on it if you just can’t go without it.

Before we all started to eat too much and end up in food enduced coma’s, we’d thought we’d put up another nightly to test some more fixes for 0.2.1. Updated VLC to version 0.8.6-test2a, a few fixes here and there.

Head over to the nightly builds page, to pick it up and, do please remember the cranberry sauce this time? I mean, I know you don’t like it, but some people (who shall remain nameless, yes, you know who you are) like their slice of sauce from a can.

There’s sadly no update for Mac Intel yet, problems building the mighty VLC. Enjoy!

Update: [Matt] The Mac Intel nightly is now available. Apparently Automake got confused somewhere between 0.8.6-test1 and 0.8.6-test2.

It seems like we forgot to apply a slew of patches to our mozilla mac power pc sdk which definitely makes the ppc build less than pleasant to work with.

We’ve already fixed this issue and there’s a new installer for Songbird 0.2 RC1 Mac OS X ppc. However, if you downloaded RC1 shortly after it’s release, you might want to download it again.

Here’s how to determine if you should download it again:

• Go to Help -> About Songbird
• Look at the Build ID.

• Original RC1 Build ID – 20060926201339
• Revised RC1 (RC1.1) Build ID – 20060927174319

Woo! MacOS X Songbird doing the chirpy dance.

The current build of it now plays back thanks to the VLC 0.8.5 plugin on both ppc and intel mac’s. I’ve been trying to hack the QuickTime plugin in there, but, there seems to be a bug preventing me from finishing this right now. It’s unclear as to if it’s just the QuickTime plugins weird re-initialization on SetURL that’s causing issues or that html:embed in a XUL document doesn’t work quite like it’s supposed to. More on this soon…

It still needs a few CSS fixes here and there and we still have quite a few bugs to close before 0.2 but, this playback on Mac thing is a great step in the right direction

Aus – Flight 01 Departing For…

I see you shakin’ that ass, already

We are all hopelessly addicted to auditive and visual candy, and you probably wouldn’t be here if you weren’t at least an avid appreciator of such candy varieties as well

Ok, so what about the content?

Here it is, 66m02s of uninterrupted content for Songbird. Yum. It’s a mix of progressive house, trance, indie rock remixes, punk remixes, techno and hard house, recorded live on March 2nd 2006. Track selection, arrangement and mixing provided by the vinyl junky in me.

The office crowd seems to like it, I hope you do too.

Aus – Flight 01 Departing For … (a right click ’save as’ is suggested)

P.S. If you have a subwoofer, do please turn it on