Step 1: Quit the Songbird application.

Step 2: Navigate to your OLD Profile directory. Your profile location depends on your OS, so here’s a platform-specific breakdown of profile locations:

• Windows XP:
  C:\Documents and Settings\<your-username>\Application Data\Songbird1\Profiles\<gobbledygook>.default\
• Windows Vista:
  C:\Users\<your-username>\AppData\Songbird1\Profiles\<gobbledygook>.default\
• Linux:
  ~/.songbird1/Profiles/<gobbledygook>.default/
• Mac OS X:
  ~/Library/Application Support/Songbird1/Profiles/<gobbledygook>.default/

(The gobbledygook is different on every computer. It’s just a jumble of letters and numbers.)

Step 3: Make a copy of the file named service-pane.rdf.

Step 4: Navigate to your NEW Songbird profile. It’s in the exact same location as the old profile, but the directory is named “songbird2″ (instead of “songbird1″).

Step 5: There is a file in here named service-pane.rdf. Rename it to ORIG-service-pane.rdf.

Step 6: Move the copy of your old service-pane.rdf file into your new profile directory.

Step 7: Start Songbird. At this point, your old bookmarks should be restored!

Note: This process will only restore your bookmarks (not the rest of your user data from previous Songbird versions.) We moved the profile directory in 0.6 because we made some major changes from 0.5 — it just works out that the bookmarks file is safe to copy!

Download Songbird 0.5 (release notes)

New in 0.5

0.5 Final has entered the station with hundreds of bug-fixes and several new features:

MTP Device support
Windows users have a shiny new MTP Add-on that introduces MTP Device Support! Most portable media players and cell phones integrate the MTP spec so try plugging in your device and share your findings on the MTP Device Compatibility Wiki Page. The extension requires Windows XP-SP2 or Vista, as well as WMP v11.

Media Views
Tired of music players that look like spreadsheets? Media Views provide new ways of displaying, manipulating, exploring, and contextualizing your media library. Songbird ships with two default views: a traditional playlist view, and a second playlist view with three filter panes. Developers can create new Media Views and upload them to the Add-ons site. This example media page replaces the standard playlist filters with tag clouds. To experience your music web 2.0 style, load your library, then select Tag Cloud from the View menu. Click the tags to toggle the filtering on and off.

Improved Filter Picker
Genre, Artist, and Album aren’t the only useful ways to filter your music collection. We’ve streamlined the filter picker list and fixed a few bugs that make it easier than ever to navigate your collection.

New List Background
After several requests from our community we’ve made our Library and Playlist backgrounds easier on your eyes. Keep sending us your ideas, suggestions, and requests, your feedback helps us improve the ‘bird!

Improved Rating UI
We’ve clarified the rating widget display by showing circles for unrated items and improved usability by allowing you to more easily change or un-rate a track.

Hot Keys on the Mac
Mac users, you can now use common hot-keys to quit, hide, or open Songbird preferences just like the rest of your applications. We also fixed the issue which allowed the application to be dragged under the menu bar, yay!

Always on Top
Never lose your Rubberducky Mini Player under a stack of windows! Now you can set it to always be on top. Any Feather developer can expose this feature in their feather.

Developer Resources

New Webpage API Events and Listeners
The Webpage API features new events you can observe. The events, and examples on how you can observe them, are detailed here.

Media Views Guide
We’ve created a Media Views guide to help you get started.

Always on Top
It’s now a simple install.rdf change for Feathers developers to flag their Feathers as capable of supporting Always-on-Top.

Feather Updater Guide
We’ve also added a guide on updating 0.4 Feathers to be 0.5 compatible.

Release Notes

We’re in the early stages of migrating our iPod Device Support Add-on to Songbird’s new device API so you’ll notice it’s missing from the 0.5 Add-ons bundle. Note that while you can still manually add the iPod extension to 0.5 it is known to exhibit issues. Fret not, the update will be released either in 0.6 or shortly after the launch (which should land in late May/early June.) Stay tuned, additional details on what’s planned for 0.6 coming soon!

Download 0.5rc2 (release notes)

The oh5 train is getting ready for its final stop. In the meantime, we’re making another local stop!

In this update we’ve made a number of fixes to our MTP support on Windows so be sure to plug in your MTP device and give it a try! And, please share your findings on our MTP Device Compatibility Wiki Page.

We don’t want to bore the regular passengers so if you’re not sure what’s new in 0.5 you can read our 0.5rc1 summary (which also contains additional requirements and developer resouces).

As always, please file any issues, bugs, or crashes you find in Bugzilla so that we can address them before 0.5 final!

All aboard!!

Download Songbird 0.5rc1 (release notes)

For all the Windows users out there, we have a shiny new treat, MTP Device Support! Most portable media players and cell phones integrate the MTP spec so try plugging in your device and share your findings on the MTP Device Compatibility Wiki Page. FYI – the extension requires Windows XP-SP2 or Vista, as well as WMP v11.

Songbird 0.5 includes a new Device API that allows developers to easily add device support to Songbird. Our new MTP support is built on it, and we are in the process of porting our iPod Device Support extension to it. In the interim you may notice some issues with iPod support.

This release also introduces the ability for developers to create alternate graphical presentations for Libraries and playlists, called Media Views. Mig created an example Media View called the Artist Detail List which can be installed from the Add-on Site.

Add-on developers – Now would be a good time to make sure that your add-on is compatible with 0.5.

As always, please file any issues, bugs, or crashes you find in Bugzilla so that we can address them before 0.5 final makes it out the door.

Here are some additional resources for developers:

• API Changes Since 0.4
• Getting started with Media Pages
• How to update 0.4 Feathers to 0.5
• Full list of bugs fixed (200+)

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.