First Place and the Fan Favorite Award both go to schwadegan

Second place, and hot on schwadegan’s tail for the fan favorite vote goes to grone1985

Third place goes to RockBagFullOfCrap

An honorable mention goes to mpurses. Sadly this video was submitted late, so it was technically disqualified, but if you want a quick overview of popular Songbird add-ons it’s worth a watch.

We really appreciate everyone who participated in the contest, and we think you’re all winners! If you submitted a video (even if it did not win) please email me at laura@songbirdnest.com with your YouTube user name, your real name and your mailing address and I’ll get your prize mailed out to you right away.

Farewell my fine feathered friends

In other news, I am so sad to announce that this will be my final Birdbath as I’ve joined another flock. I know this community will be in excellent hands with Songbird employees and our super duper champions and trust you’ll all pull together to help new birds find their wings. It’s been such a pleasure to fly with you all and I can’t wait to see where this bird is going next!

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?

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.

Last week I introduced you to Alfred Peng. Another developer new to our flock needs no introduction, assuming you run Firefox. Chances are you have already downloaded Adblock Plus, one of the most useful extensions for Firefox, developed by our own Wladimir Palant. Wlad has been kicking a$$ and taking names on performance related bugs, making Songbird’s speed and stability his number one focus. One of his biggest fans created a wiki page devoted to watching the performance related bugs Wlad has been knocking out, so if you’ve noticed your bird has been gaining some speed, you know who to thank.

Our Frenchbirds attended the JDLL conference last week and spread the bird word. They gave Songbird demonstrations on Windows and Linux and got feedback from users about what types of extensions they’d like to see going forward. France isn’t the only place where Songbird needs a little more shine. Another contributor plans to spread the bird word in Serbia. We’ll take all the help we can get!

A fancy–pants AJAX/JSON driven web interface for Songbird

We have another community plea for some dev love to build an add-on that would enable APE support. As Mike explained, we worked hard to insure that it was easy to write add-ons that would enable support for additional formats knowing that we wouldn’t be able to focus our development time on all the various formats we don’t currently support. If you need some help getting going, the Developer Center is the place to start.

Speaking of developers, meet Alfred Peng. Alfred joined our team about a month ago by way of OpenSolaris where he worked with SteveL. He wasted no time hopping into Get Satisfaction threads and knocking out bugs so a lot of you probably already noticed he’s a rock star. I asked him what excited him about the project and what he was looking forward to working on. I think you’ll enjoy what he had to say!

As a contributor to the Mozilla community, I’m also a big fan of Mozilla-related products. That’s the initial motivation for the Songbird porting job I did at the first stage. From my perspective, Songbird’s open source strategy, its potential to provide a media player solution to the public, the contribution to the open music movement, lots of positive feedback from the community, and the great team here make me really excited about our future.

I’d really like to see improved performance (tune with DTrace?), improved device support, improved integration with the web service and a smaller memory footprint. The upcoming CD Rip and video (probably in the next release) are also wonderful features. Apart from that, improved add-on availability on Linux/OpenSolaris platform (device support for example) and improved integration on Linux/OpenSolaris (work with Mozilla community to upstream the patches we have) would also be awesome to have.

I do notice some other cool ideas from the community as well, for example, the design for the next generation of MediaFlow, the Songbird awesome bar etc. Those are the things that could help Songbird achieve better success I believe. So thanks for the work! –Alfred Peng

The Development and QA teams have been burning the midnight and weekend oil to bake these builds and bust these bugs and all they’re getting out of it is a never ending supply of Indian and Thai food. That and your undying gratitude of course. Think happy thoughts of them while you ride your bike or head to a movie this weekend as they’ll all be living vicariously through you until this release goes live.

Several of you reported a virus warning you received via Bugzilla, Twitter and Get Satisfaction yesterday. Mozilla reported that AVG confirmed it is a false positive that will be removed in the next Definitions update, so there’s no cause for alarm and you can fly your bird without worry. Thanks for all the looking out!

It seems like all we’ve been talking about lately is Blessed Build this, and Beta that when the real news is that we’ve migrated to a new nest! We’ve been pretty nomadic as far as birds go this past year, but this place will give us plenty of room to grow our flock, so hopefully we can rest our wings and stay for a while.

Not only do we have more room…

But there’s fancy stuff like rooms for us to meet in and a place for us all to eat lunch together. Even our bikes have more room.

The best part just may be the view from the top…

That or being closer to all our fave lunch spots again, which is good since our all-hands and company lunch got canceled today in the interest of unpacking and staying focused on getting Kanye shipped out.

Tag this

Tagger, by Horazant is a powerful tool to generate, modify and save metadata and tags into Songbird. By utilizing this add-on you can make your library do all sorts of tricks it couldn’t do before. Klint is a Tagger power user and potentially its biggest fan. If you take a moment to look through his profile you’ll see a lot of tips and tricks to get the most out of this awesome extension. I doubt I’m alone in hoping Tagger is an add-on featured in our Video Demo Contest so we can learn more about all it is capable of.

Frenchbirds hit the road

Frenchbirds, our European ambassadors, will be representing Songbird in Lyon at the JDLL Software Freedom Day October 16th and 17th, 2009. If you find yourself in their neck of the woods, pop in for a demo and some schwag. Check out their blog for more information.

Thanks for all the feedback on our Blessed Build. With your help we’re moving in the right direction! You don’t need iTunes installed to test this Beta but a little voodoo magic is still in order if you don’t have iTunes installed. You will need to execute the installer from the Windows command line (cmd.exe).

Songbird_1.4.0b2-1284_windows-i686-msvc8.exe /CDRIP

Songbird now lets you rip to FLAC, the highest quality open-source format available. FLAC stands out as the fastest and most widely supported lossless audio codec, and is the only one that is non-proprietary, unencumbered by patents, and has an open-source reference implementation. If you want to stay open-source but need to keep your files smaller you can rip to Ogg. We also now support ripping to WMA.

Not only do we support the highest quality rips on the web, we have also integrated with Gracenote to tag your collection with the right artist, album, album art, and track information.

We’re delivering the CD Rip feature to Windows first.  We generally develop for the largest platform first, and wanted to get that capability out without delay.  Mac & Linux are coming!

The release notes contain additional details about this build including a list of known issues.

As always, please file any issues, bugs, or crashes you find in Bugzilla. Thanks.

Cue the wanky music: you’ll need to be on Windows, and you’ll need to have iTunes installed to check out CD Rip  for this blessed build. This is due to an installer issue that we’re working through.  In short, Songbird and iTunes use the same underlying library to rip CDs (Gear Works). This blessed build will piggyback off the drivers that iTunes installed because we’re not quite ready to install the drivers ourselves. (Well, actually, we’re really good at installing the drivers but totally overzealous when uninstalling them.) Our own installer will be a well-behaved citizen of the registry in a few days, and once it is, we’ll put out another build that you non iTunes-y people can also use.

</end wanky music>

Our CD Rip feature includes:

- Ability for user to select all (default) or chose individual tracks for rip
- Ability for user to set/modify Rip CD Setting via a preference pane
- Ability for user to edit their metadata prior to and after rip
- Ability for user to select a CD record to rip should one or more similar records be found for the inserted CD.
- Integration for lookup of CD data information directly from the Gracenote database.

If you think you found a bug, super, you’re a helper! Before you log it in Bugzilla like the awesome tester you are, please make sure you check the release notes to make sure it’s not one of the bugs that we fixed while spinning this build. We’re fast, we know.

Last week we asked for some add-on dev love and Simon answered the call. Check out his Audio Bookmarks add-on and leave him a review or some feedback in the comments field. Simon gave me the inside scoop that he’s working on some big add-on ideas of his own but he likes taking breaks to build stuff the community is hungry for. What a swell guy!

Another video was submitted for the demo contest this week. There’s still plenty of time to submit your entry, but even if you don’t create your own you should come join the group and vote for your favorites as they roll in. There’s only two submissions so far (don’t forget there are three prizes!) and it’s been so fun to see what has been getting highlighted.

Lunch was an Italian feast of pesto ravioli, meat lasgana, veggie pasta, meatball and sausage subs, and a spinach salad tossed in for good measure. It also happens to have been our last company lunch in this office. Once again we’re migrating to new digs and the birds are all aflutter about it! More on the new aviary next week.