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!

The march towards our first public beta has begun! We’ve been sifting through comments from the community and using user feedback as one of our guides to help make Songbird better. We hope you enjoy our latest update.

What’s New in 0.6

In this release you’ll notice significant performance improvements and many new features:

Performance Enhancements

Larger Library Support
Songbird can now easily handle libraries with 10,000+ tracks.

Smoother Scrolling
Once the metadata scanner is done, scrolling in a large library is smooth and responsive.

Faster Filtering
Filtering by genre, artist, album, and year is almost instantaneous.

Speedier Search
No long lags or locked up UI when searching your Library.

Improved Memory Management
On Windows and Linux we implemented jemalloc as our memory allocator for XULRunner and have noticed approximately 15-20% memory reduction in common user tasks.

New Features

Metadata Writing
We have a new Metadata Editor that allows you to edit your media and write the changes back to your file(s). You can read a bit more about it here.

Sync Support for MTP Devices
On Windows, MTP Devices now support Sync functionality!

Improved iPod Support
The iPod add-on has been rewritten and a number of bugs have been squashed. We have also started maintaining a new wiki page that details what iPod models we support.

The Edit Menu Works!
Copy, paste, select all, undo, redo, delete and find text to your heart’s content.

Find Text on Webpages
A number of users asked for a way to easily search for text within a webpage, now you can!

Filter/Sort by Bitrate and Sample Rate
Now you can easily sort and filter your library by sound quality.

Simpler View Menu
It’s easier to switch feathers and show/hide display panes than ever before.

SHOUTcast Radio
Easily discover and stream music using the new integrated SHOUTcast Radio directory.

For Developers

We’ve created a simple guide for updating 0.5 Feathers to be 0.6 compatible.

Early Feedback on 0.6 is Positive

“I’m happy to report that for the first time Songbird was actually able to scan and index all 140 GB worth of my music without issue” – Scott Gilbertson – WIRED

“I’ve been testing [Songbird] out at each point release, and have been blown away by the improvements in speed and stability in 0.6rc4. I have a library of almost 30,000 songs and this release of songbird handles it like a charm. The last release was unusable for a library of this size. Well Done and keep it up!” – chasingtheflow – Songbird user

What’s Next for Songbird?

We’ve already started working on the next release! Our goal is to focus on user experience optimizations and performance improvements. Here’s a preview of some of what we’re currently exploring: new look and feel for Songbird (layout and feather changes), new first-run experience, more intuitive drag & drop interactions, smart playlist functionality, watch folders, continued performance improvements, and much more. Stay tuned to the blog to keep up to date on our progress or check out one of our nightly builds and see for yourself! We’re always interested in hearing your feedback so please comment on our blog and file bugs and/or feature requests in bugzilla. Our next stop is a more public beta, hope to see you there!

• We’ve already started working on increasing speed and response times for large libraries. We’ve heard this request loud and clear and we’ve made it a priority to improve things in 0.6.
• The MTP add-on for Windows will be extended to include sync functionality so you can more easily manage media on your portable devices.
• The iPod add-on will be migrated to our new device API. This will fix a bunch of bugs and allow us to maintain all of our device support in a single code base. It will also give us an opportunity to test the extensibility of the 0.5 device API and allow iPod support to benefit from features and UI improvements we roll into MTP support (and vice versa).
• Songbird will be adding the ability to write metadata changes back to your media files. This will include a new UI and will be our first time managing your data. We’re planning on adding Album artwork write back in a future release.

We’ll also be:

• Adding contextual menus and find functionality in the browser component of Songbird based on your requests.
• Cleaning up the View menu (so that switching Feathers, Views, and Display Panes is clearer).
• Continuing work on UI bugs to polish and improve the overall user experience.

While the goal is to land our MTP and iPod add-ons with the 0.6 release it is worth noting that due to the complexities and dependencies in these projects we might end up releasing them shortly after 0.6 launches. Everything else is scheduled to go out with the release. The current plan is to ship 0.6 final in the late May/early June timeframe. Until then, please continue to send us your feedback and file bugs as you find them.