1.4 Updates Flying the Coop

By Preed Preed Jan 8, 2010 5:29 pm
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As promised, we’ve just started pushing updates from 1.2.0 to the new 1.4.3 release!

If you’re impatient, or raring to grab the update, go to Help > Check for Updates in the Songbird menus to trigger an update; this will download 1.4.3 in all its purple glory!

We know some of you prefer the Gonzo Feather. Thankfully, we have an awesome community developer and Songbird Champ: boosh. He went ahead and made a Gonzo 2.0 Feather using all the UI enhancements we made in Purple Rain, but with the visual style of Gonzo.

So for those among our flock who find purple distracting, you can still have your Korn cake with Gonzo, too!

Enjoy!

(1.4.1 and 1.4.2 users will also get an update prompt to 1.4.3.)

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Philips & Songbird

By stevel stevel Jan 8, 2010 4:53 pm
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By now you’ve seen the news about our partnership with Philips. Big chunks of the team have been cranking pretty hard on this partner release and we’re super excited to ship some things we’ve been working on for a while, and to get Songbird into the hands of even more users. The feedback has already been tremendous; thanks to everyone for your support!

As you know we’re big believers in openness and as such we try to share our development plans and progress with you as regularly and freely as we can. This isn’t as straightforward when other companies are involved — especially large, global, public companies like Philips. So we apologise for not being able to talk openly, sooner, about this new relationship but we hope, even as a bit of a surprise, you can appreciate why this is a good thing for the company, the products, the platform, and all of our users. As always we’ll strive to give you an early heads up whenever we can.

While there’s obviously some special work we’ll do for Philips, we don’t think about this as one-off work. Much of what we do for them, is work we’ve been planning to do for all Songbird consumers. For Philips, there’s certainly a custom feather and the add-ons that are important to them and their customers. We’re working to make sure that all of what we build is valueable for you and for partners … with as few exceptions as possible.

Our partnership with Philips is a great step for us — it drives distribution, revenue, and an even tighter connection to the CE side of the world. Of course the partnership means more features to consider and tradeoffs to balance – but in this case, that’s a great problem to have. There is lots of overlap in desired features from both sides, so this probably means you’ll see some things accelerated, which is good news for all Songbird consumers. We know that users around the globe using the software and sending us their ideas ultimately results in a better experience for everyone. So keep your suggestions coming.

There’s no resting on this week’s milestone achievement, we’re working fast and furiously on the next release, which will hit early this year. Stay tuned for more as we move continue evolving plans and working through development.

Thanks again for all of your support!

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the post-release post

By stevel stevel Jan 4, 2010 10:46 am
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welcome to my post-1.4.1 1.4.2 1.4.3 post… where i talk about things you talked about after we talked about launching 1.4.3 (after our couple of respins) last week.

we’ve been following the blog comments, reading the bug reports, and getting the feedback from GetSatisfaction bubbled up to us via our intrepid Songbird Champs.  there have been a few recurring issues worth mentioning/recapping, so here we go in no particular order:

  1. Windows 7 Support
    • Yes, we throw a warning message up when you’re installing Songbird regarding it being unsupported on Windows 7.  This is mostly a “caveat emptor” warning, we haven’t done full and proper QA test runs to ensure things work on Windows 7.  That being said, we have plenty of users who run it just fine on Windows 7.  If you do continue to install and run it on Windows 7, you may experience bugs.  We’re working on full and proper Windows 7 support for the next release if you want to wait.
  2. iPod Support
    • As mentioned previously, we are no longer maintaining the iPod Extension.  Continually playing an unsupported game of catchup with Apple sucked, and we’ve opted to go with iTunes Import/Export Syncing as our supported way of having users sync their music libraries with Songbird.  As mentioned in that blog post, we’ve open sourced the iPod Extension (which is built on libgpod), and would happily welcome any community patches to it.
  3. Splash Screen
    • Yeah, we get it.  Some of you don’t like the splash screen.  Unfortunately it does, believe it or not, serve a purpose.  Not everyone has the super-latest-OMFG-ITS-1BILLION-TERAHERTZ machine… and especially on some platforms (Windows XP for instance), there was no feedback as to when the application was starting.  If you really really really hate the splash screen that much, then go grab Simon’s splish splosh extension to easily change or disable the splash screen.
  4. Bookmarks
    • Over the next few releases you’ll see us phase out some of the more web browser specific features.  This is a conscious design decision to differentiate Songbird as more of a media player than a web browser.  Let’s face it, we’ll never be a better web browser than Firefox, Safari, or Chrome.  We’ve never intended for Songbird to replace your daily web browser.  Don’t take this to mean we’re removing the web browser component entirely… we can’t, and we won’t since we use this for rendering things like the Last.fm Radio Directory, the 7Digital Music Store, the Concerts Listings page, etc.  It just means we’d prefer for add-ons to take a more integrated approach along the lines of the 7Digital, Concerts, SHOUTcast, & Last.fm add-ons where servicepane nodes are displayed that link to custom chrome (or heck even to webpages tailored specifically for Songbird, such as the 7Digital store).
    • That being said, if you really really really want your bookmarks back, I’ve made a Songbird Bookmarks extension that re-enables the bookmarks servicepane node so you can get your old bookmarks back.
  5. Automatic Album Art Fetching
    • One of the new features in Songbird 1.4.3 is automatic album art fetching.  Depending on what mode you have album art in (either “Now Playing” or “Now Selected”), album art will be automatically fetched for the currently playing or selected track.  If you’re on a slow or high latency connection (and this can vary depending on your album art fetcher add-ons and priorities, set via the Album Art preferences), you may experience a lag when selecting or playing tracks as Songbird goes to fetch the album art.  We’ll work on improving the performance of this in the future, but for now – I’ve made an extension to allow you disable or enable this automatic fetching behaviour.

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Songbird 1.4.2 is posted

By ali ali Dec 22, 2009 1:00 am
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We’ve fixed the snag mentioned in our previous post. It wasn’t anything serious — just a UI glitch exposed during updates in which some remnants of the old Gonzo feather were showing up in the new Purple Rain feather, which made mashTape and LyricMaster hard to use.  If you’re interested in the full details, head on over to bugzilla.songbirdnest.com and read up on bug 19334.

Just want to download it?  http://getsongbird.com is for you.  Waiting for your automatic updates?  We’ll post ‘em later today (Tuesday in the US). See the 12/23 update below.

(Kanyebird is gonna let you finish, but he thinks the Gonzo feather was the best feather of all time.)

kanyebird

Update (12/23/09): The Gonzo feather really, really did not want to go away; we fixed yet another Gonzo-related bug (number 19365, if you really want to know) and released Songbird 1.4.3.  Automatic updates will come out early next week.

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Songbird 1.4.1 released

By stevel stevel Dec 21, 2009 2:06 pm
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We’ve run into a little snag with the 1.4.1 release. We’re actively working on a fix that will be available in a few hours. For users that have already run into the issue where the display panes vanish and the new feather only loads partially there is a simple fix — switch to the Purple Rain feather from the View menu.
Songbird 1.4.1 is ready for download!

Songbird 1.4.1’s main focus has been on adding new device support, CD rip support, and a new Feather/skin. We’ve included more format/codec support out of the box, improved the media management user experience, and continue to work on performance, footprint, and stability. We continue to listen to your feedback on Get Satisfaction, Bugzilla, and of course right here on our blog. Please let us know what’s important to you.

New Features

MSC Device SupportMSC Device Support
Songbird now supports MSC (Mass Storage Class) devices. Sync tracks (and playlists on compatible devices) to phones and other MP3 players with MSC mode. Tracks in incompatible formats can be transcoded on the fly to ensure your music is always with you. (Windows only, requires the MSC add-on)

CD Rip SupportCD Rip Support
Songbird can now rip CDs! Automatically lookup your metadata on Gracenote (or other third party services via additional add-ons), and rip CDs to FLAC/OGG (or WMA on Windows). (Windows only, requires the CD Rip add-on… Mac support is coming in the next release)

Purple Rain FeatherPurple Rain Feather
OMG! New Feather! We’ve designed a whole new Feather for a whole new unique look. Dedicated toggle buttons for the most frequently used Media Views, simplified and more obvious Display Pane management, and a unique look all to our own.

For more info on the release, please see our release notes.

What’s Next

Our next release will introduce video management and playback, Windows 7 support, continued UI work, and more performance/stability work. Stay tuned to the blog to keep up to date, or if you like to live dangerously check out one of our nightly builds and see the progress for yourself!

We’re always interested in hearing your feedback so please comment below and file bugs and/or feature requests in Bugzilla.

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